The Best Apps to share photos with friends & family
Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Phone 7 users take snap a lot of pictures. Here are the best photo sharing apps for your mobile phone.
First there was the long process of taking photos and waiting for film to develop. Then came Polaroid instant photos, and eventually we uploaded digital camera photos to Facebook. Today, the ways people share photos with family and friends is easier than ever. The classic names in personal photography – Canon, Kodak, Sony – have competition from the people who make our phones – Apple, HTC, and Samsung.
Mobile phone cameras have advanced quite a bit in recent years, and so have the many camera apps that can edit or share photos online. Below is a list of some of the best photo apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7. These apps make it easy to take a picture and send it to your loved ones or colleagues moments later.
What app turns new photos into retro photos? If you’ve ever asked that question based on images that you’ve seen online, there’s a good chance that the answer is Instagram. This insanely popular iPhone app adds filters and effects that add the Lomo, X-Pro, cross processing, light leak, and toy cam effects that remind users of classic style photography. There’s also a great social element that lets users follow friends, see popular images, and cross-post photos to share with Facebook, flickr, or Twitter.
Picplz
Instagram has been rumoured to come to Android for several months, but many Android users have already adopted this photo-sharing alternative (also available on iPhone). Picplz also provides retro photography fun and the ability to share with other picplz users, but it provides ultimate connectivity. The original image taken can be automatically uploaded to Dropbox for safe keeping, and photos can be set to post to Facebook, flickr, Foursquare, Posterous, tumblr, and Twitter.
Liveshare by Cooliris
Android, iPhone, Windows Phone 7
The photos that someone wishes to share may not always be relevant or appropriate for everyone. In those instances, Liveshare by Cooliris is the way to go. Liveshare creates photo pools, so a group of friends attending a wedding can all upload their photos into one area. Pooling photos together is the most organized and exciting way to recap the previous day’s events, especially since users can make pools private or public, and make their photos viewable online.
Pixtrix
Pixtrix is another option for people looking to stylize their photos, but it’s more than just applying retro filters. PixTrix actually adjusts brightness, contrast, and saturation to help enhance photos that may not have been taken in ideal conditions. The app improves and saves photos on your BlackBerry, but it can also be linked to a Facebook account to share with friends.
Bubblegum
Neither Instagram nor Picplz have given any sign of arriving for Windows Phone 7, but Bubblegum is keeping WP7 users occupied in the meantime. Bubblegum provides a community for users to share their mobile photos, or users can post the hosted photos on Facebook, Foursquare, or Twitter. The app highlights interesting photos, finds friends with whom you can connect, and provides several filters to make your pictures eye-catching.
Lightbox
While other apps try to focus on more on capturing images and sharing them, Lightbox aims to be a more complete photo taker and viewer. Android phones and tablets use the “Connected camera” to take a picture and have it immediately saved to the cloud. It also imports photos from Facebook and Twitter friends, and lets users comment or retweet directly from the Lightbox app. Lightbox has only a few filtering options compared to other apps, but it looks beautiful and has a very simple process to share with others.
Photobucket
Photobucket became a popular photo sharing app back when people still used MySpace. It has managed to survive MySpace’s decline by being an online locker for storing photos, and then making it shareable to other networks. Download the Photobucket app and you get quick storage of your photos, apply tags for organization, and export to Facebook or Twitter.
flickr
flickr is viewed primarily as a place for people to share photos from high-quality digital cameras, but it is very popular as a storage place for mobile phone photos as well. That’s thanks in part to excellent iPhone and WP7 apps that upload to sets and geo-tags images. Users can also browse their flickr streams to see other member photos, browse by tags, mark images as favourites, and leave comments on photos.
Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Phone 7
Facebook is actually where most photos are shared, so why not go straight to the source? The Facebook app is available for all of the major smartphone platforms and connects you with your friends, family, and colleagues. It can take existing photos or new pictures using the camera, add a caption, or insert it into an existing album.
Path
Path is designed to be a private photo-sharing because it limits the number of people able to see photos. That’s rather disappointing, but the aim is to make your photos viewable only by those people you actually know and are in your contacts list. On the occasion that you wish to expand beyond that enclosed network, there is an option to post the photo to Facebook. Path supports captions and tagging photos with people, places, and things. It also shows when a friend has seen the image and provides an option to chat about a photo.
Note: A BlackBerry version is in development. Request to be part of the beta program here.
Google+
The Google+ network is yet open to everyone, but it includes a great feature called Instant Upload (Android only). As the name implies, it instantly uploads camera photos to a private album in Picasa. The only way others will be able to see those photos is for you to manually click the share button to make those photos public. iPhone users can still use Google+ to upload their photos to the website and share with only a select group of people known as Circles.