Memento is a photography app for your Windows Phone that lets you apply one of nine film effects to your photographs. Memento has a simple, straight forward interface, some cool filters but does have room for improvement.
The main menu offers options to take a picture to edit, load a picture to edit, view your gallery (images already tweaked) and tap into Memento's settings. Settings are limited to turning on/off the app's Facebook integration.
If you opt to take a picture, the app will launch your Windows Phone camera app and return once you accept the new image. If you choose to apply the effects to an existing photo, just pick the image out from your Pictures Hub and you're in business.
The editing pages cover the film filter/type applied and your sharing options. Applying the film effect is simple. Just swipe up/down to scroll through the various film filters. The film filter applied will be listed in the page header and includes these film types:
- Haze
- Cine
- City of London
- ORWO Cross
- Goldie
- RealCine
- Blackish
- Pleasent
- Flamable (burnt edges)
Each filter seems to tweak contrast and saturation to varying degrees. Blackish converts the image to black and white and Flamable gives the image burnt edges as if a part of the film was exposed to light during processing. Once you choose a film filter, the image can be saved to your Pictures Hub and shared on Facebook. Saved images will appear in the gallery page that sits adjacent to the main menu. If you have shared the image on Facebook, any comments on that picture will be reflected on this page as well.
Overall, if you like the classic film look of images (e.g. Kodachrome) you'll find these filters very appealing.
While Memento does have Facebook integration, it does lack Twitter, Tumblr, Flicker, or SkyDrive (or any cloud storage) support. There is a small quirk with Facebook integration in that when Facebook is turned on, you have to upload the image first to Facebook then you can save the image to your Pictures Hub. This makes things a little cumbersome if you're aren't wanting to share every image you edit.
With regards to image re-sizing, Memento does resize and crop images when saved. Here's a before and after on the cropping.
The crop gives the finished image an Instagram type feel but it would have been nice to have had the option to keep the image at full size.
Now it's our understanding from the developer that an update is in the works that will bring a mapping feature, integration to additional social networks, and possibly finding/messaging others using Memento. Hopefully the option to maintain full image size and the option to save images locally without having to turn off social sharing will be part of a future update.
Overall, we liked Memento. The filters are great and the design looks and flows nicely. There still some room for improvement but as is, Memento is worth a try.
There are two versions currently available over on the Windows Phone Marketplace. Memento is a free version that is limited to three film filters. Memento Pro is currently running $.99 and has the full range of filters.
