IOS 7 looks fantastic, and the good news is that photographers haven’t been left out of the updates. There’s new stuff in both the Camera app as well as Photos: a neat combination of flashy new features and great little fixes that will make both apps what they probably should have been to begin with.
Camera
The Camera app, like all of iOS 7, looks way, way nicer. Instead of the Windows 95-era gray chrome, you get full-screen pictures with translucent UI elements. Apple’s keynote today said there are now four camera modes, but there are really still just two: stills and video, with stills including panoramas and the new Instagram-busting square mode. To move between them you just swipe the navigation bar at the bottom and you’re there, which makes them all feel part of a whole and not separate silos like before.
Probably the biggest new camera feature is filters.
But probably the biggest new feature (until I get a look at the actual sharing and editing bits) is filters. You can use them live or on already-taken pictures, and you get the usual range of old timey filmy effects, including three nice-looking B&W filters (maybe one will be like Instagram’s lost Gotham filter?).
Right now I’m not certain whether these filters also apply to video. That really would be something.
Photos
The Photos app was in dire need of some fixing up, and fix it up is what Apple has done. Starting with a new Snapseed-esque icon, the whole app has been revamped.
First up is Moments. These are a new organizational feature which groups your pictures by place and date, making it a lot easier to find them when scrolling through your camera roll. In fact, it’ll obviate a lot of what I use albums for, which is to group together pictures taken on a vacation: a vacation is almost by definition bounded by time and place.
You can also zoom out on these moments into a year view, in which all your pictures are rendered at teeny tiny thumbnails. Thanks to the iPhone’s Retina display, these miniature images are actually detailed enough to make out the picture you’re looking for, if you already know it – kind of like you can spot an app icon inside a home screen folder. You can also tap and scrub the mosaic to see bigger versions pop up. This will probably be very useful indeed.
Sharing
Sharing has also been gussied up. Now you can send your pictures to nearby folks using the new AirDrop feature which is built into the sharing sheet. This uses peer-to-peer Wi-Fi to beam photos to people just by tapping on their user icon. Shared images will pop up on the receiver’s screen as big thumbnails and then be opened tight in the Photos app. AirDrop works for anyone in your contacts list, too, sending via the regular internet if they’re not physically nearby.
Shared Photo Streams are now two-way.
Shared Photo Streams are now two-way. Once a shared stream has been created (it’s now called iCloud Photo Sharing), any invited members of the stream can add photos. This would have been invaluable for the Cult of Mac team at CES this year, but it also means you can have a private group just for your family photos, or even set up a stream so everyone at the same party can share their best photos. My friends could certainly use this, as they never, ever send me their pictures.
And — this is a biggie — videos can also be shared in Photo Stream, and they show up right there with photos. In fact, if you turn your iPhone on its side, the view switches to a full-screen lightbox which lets you scroll through the pictures and videos on a timeline. Maybe I’ll actually shoot some video now…
Other Fixes
Until I get ahold of the beta to try things out, I won’t know if some other big annoyances have been fixed. I’m hoping that iPhoto will play nicer with Photos. At the very least we should be able to share our iPhoto images to our Photo Streams via the new standard sharing sheet, but I wonder if two-way communication between the camera roll and other photo apps will be improved, perhaps letting us save edits as lossless “versions” stacked with the originals in the camera roll.
More as I get it. Right now the Apple Developer Portal is D.E.A.D dead.
Source: Apple
