Windows Phone Central App Roundup: Photo Apps
When I sift through all the apps on my Windows Phone, photo apps seem to be the dominant app of choice. Everything from Instagraph to Soviet Kam to Photo360 seems to have found its way onto my phone.
But what about the seldom seen Windows Phone photo apps? For this week's roundup, we went all the way to the last page of the "best rated" photo app listing in the Windows Phone Store. We picked out four of the dozen or so photo apps that were on the back page to highlight.
Most are fairly simple photo editing/enhancement apps but simple isn't necessarily bad.
PhotoEffect (free): PhotoEffect is a fairly simple photo editor that has pages to edit the orientation/crop of your photo, add an assortment of effects filters, and add borders to your photo.
All totaled PhotoEffect has twenty-seven effects filters and eighteen borders that all can be stacked.
PhotoEffect lets you edit existing images from your Pictures Hub or launch the camera app and capture new images to edit. Edited images are saved at their original resolution and can be shared from within PhotoEffect but only to Facebook.
PhotoEffect is a free app for your Windows Phone and you can find it here in the Windows Phone Store.
Photocessor (trial/$.99): Photocessor is a scaled down editor that mainly deals with editing your photo's size, crop and orientation.
The layout of Photocessor allows you to edit existing images from your Pictures Hub or launch the camera to edit new photos. From there you have a series of tiles that allow you to resize, crop, rotate, and flip the image. You can also insert text and pixelate the image. The pixelate feature can come in handy if you need to blur out a face or identifying number (car tag, address, etc.) from a photo.
Photocessor does have some limitations as to the maximum image sizes. 512MB devices have a maximum size of 16MP (4640x3480) and 256MB devices have a maximum of 5MP (2592x194). Images can be sized down to 200x355 or 10%.
There is a free trial version that allows you to edit/save five images. The full version of Photocessor is currently running $.99 and you can find it all here in the Windows Phone Store.
Instafun (free): Instafun is a photo editing app that deals with applying creative effects to existing photos. You can not launch the camera from within Instafun nor can you edit the crop, size, or exposure settings on images.
What you can do is apply art, color-key, pop-art, contrast and basic (grayscale, sepia, inverted) filters to images. You can stack filters but you have to apply a filter and from the three-dot menu, choose "use result as new image" to do so.
Instafun reduces the resolution about 50% when saved and there are no sharing options within the app. To share an image, you'll need to hop over to your Pictures Hub.
Instafun is a free app that you can find here in the Windows Phone Store.
UniquePhoto (free): UniquePhoto is a photo editor powered by Aviary. The editor is more or less what you would find with other Windows Phone apps that use the Aviary editor (Instagraph keeps coming to mind).
You have editing tools to crop, rotate, adjust brightness/contrast, apply effects filters, add stickers, blemish areas and draw/add text to your photos.
Once you're done with all the editing and fine tuning of your photos you can save the completed image to your Pictures Hub, upload it to your Skydrive account or share the image on Facebook or Twitter.
UniquePhoto significantly resizes images to about 25% of original resolution. Which basically reduces your images to email/web images only.
UniquePhoto is a free app for your Windows Phone that you can find here in the Windows Phone Store.
Again, these aren't your feature rich Windows Phone photo apps but do a decent job of things.
Photocessor could come in handy if you need to quickly crop and resize an image on the go. PhotoEffect has some nice features and maintains your original resolution. Instafun is nice but is rather limited on the editing tools and UniquePhoto downsizes your images a little too much.
So do you have a favorite Windows Phone photo app that's off the beaten path? One that we might otherwise overlook? If so, feel free to share your recommendation below in the comments.
