1. Focus
Focus is a seriously complete package, with a great interface that lets you sift through your photos in all kinds of views, tag them with names and elegant colour-coding. As you may have guessed, Focus is big on the tagging, and makes it easy to quickly jump into and out of various tag categories that you’ve created. For those concerned about people swiping too far in photo albums and going where you don’t want them to, there’s also a feature to lock the screen on specific photos. There’s not much on the customization front, but for that you’ll probably want a more dedicated photo editor app anyway.
2. Tool
Tool almost feels more like an elegant front-end for every other app we’re going to mention in this list. It gathers together all your photos from various photo apps (including Focus, QuickPic and Piktures) and puts them in one convenient place. You can search for photos by categories like geotagging, download photos from your various apps to create local or online albums, and set schedules on which photos to sync from different places.
3. Google Photos
It’s right there on your phone in a lot of cases, and I for one always like to include options that don’t involve third-party downloads – if they’re any good, that is. Luckily, Google Photos is good. So long as your GPS is on when you take photos, it uses geo-tagging to let you view your photos by location (which is pretty much how many of us like our albums sorted anyway). A real biggie here is album sharing with other Google Drive users. You can give others access to your albums, letting them browse through your photos and pick out and download the ones they want. (Don’t worry, they can’t delete or edit your photos!) It’s also pretty nifty at creating GIFs out of a series of photos you take, offering to fix brightness in photos and other little touches.
4. QuickPic
QuickPic is a free photo management app that keeps things simpler than others in this list, but sometimes that’s precisely what you want. You can choose whether to view your photos in lists for quick and easy management or in a grid for a more visual overview. It sorts your photos by name or location, links up with all the big cloud services of the day, and supports all the most common video and image formats you’re likely to use. It hasn’t been updated in a while, however, and there are a few murmurs that the small development team isn’t as focused on it as it once was. But given it’s free and not even ad-supported, that’s understandable.
5. Piktures
Piktures is all about intuition and feels in some ways like a successor to the outgoing QuickPic. It’s not quite as good when it comes to connectivity with all your online services (though you get Instagram, Google Drive, Facebook and Dropbox), but does a great job of managing your pictures locally. You can browse pics by their geo-location or even the clever Calendar view – a calendar with each day represented by a thumbnail of a picture you took that day. You can also create album covers, set different albums to sort photos in their own ways and pick whether you want your picture lists to be organized in columns of three, four or five.
Conclusion
These are our faves, each with their own neat traits and each worth considering. Do you have a photo management app, or does the default app on your phone do the job? Let us know!
