Everyone knows about the GameCenter that comes with the latest versions of the iPhone OS. The usual use of this is to share high scores and play games against others. Now, there is another use… getting achievements by sharing out pictures through your iPhone.
I am putting together a bigger post about the new Photo Social Networks but thought this app should be mentioned outside of that.
There are quite a few iPhone Photo apps to choose from these days. Many are simple apps that make a single or few specialized image tuning. Others, I’ve mentioned a couple I have been using, allow for a lot of fine tuning images. Cropping, rotating, and some filters are nice. The photo solutions that offer a almost endless list of filters can be fun but are generally lacking a UI that encourages using often. I have never been able to put my finger on how to make them better so I have been having to look at every image filter app to see if it is ‘the one’.
A co-worker posted a picture last week, which grabbed my attention. He reported that he used the iPhone app 100 Cameras in 1. It isn’t expensive so I grabbed a copy to give it a try. Right off, the “100 Cameras” is in reference to the long list of picture filters the app provides. I like the ‘list’ view with thumbnails for all of the image filters. Most photo apps on the iPhone either tells you the filter or has a thumbnail of what the image will look like after applying the filter. 100 Cameras provides thumbnails that changes as you apply filters so you know what the final output will be when you choose multiple filters.
It is proving to be fast enough to use (seems to be much faster at applying the filters than other options I have installed) on just about all of my image tuning projects to get an enhanced effect from the snapshot. Even with all of the filter options, there are also sliders to tune each effect. Due to this, you don’t end up with every image trying to look like an old fashion camera picture like many of the other image filter apps do.
With so many filters and being able to quickly see how grouping filters together, I’m using the ‘share’ capability quite a lot. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and… I like to save to the Photo area so I can share out with my Instagram account. I use those options more than the built-in ‘GameCenter’ feature. My coworker that showed me 100 Cameras in the first place is scoring very nicely amongst folks posting pictures through GameCenter. Right now there are a lot of folks like us trapped with the cold weather so there is a growing number of fun pictures to see.