Even with the recent improvements to iOS 8’s handling of photos you take with your iPhone, it’s still kind of a pain in the butt to sort through and delete the ones you don’t want to keep.
The developers behind Flic, a fantastic new photo app, decided they’d had enough and built a better app. This one works a lot like Tinder, a dating app that uses a swipe to sort potential dates.
If you’ve ever had to sort through a ton of photos on your iPhone, you’re going to love Flic. Getting through all your photos is speedy and efficient.
“I just went on my honeymoon,” developer Brandon Evans told Cult of Mac, “and I think I had 400 pictures to go through. It only took me, like two minutes to go through using Flic.”
The app requires iOS 8, the first iOS that lets third-party apps delete photos directly. When you launch Flic and grant it permission to access your photos, you’ll get a month’s worth of photos set up in a sort of digital stack. Swipe the photo to the left if you want to delete it, swipe right to keep it. It’s that simple.
The genius here is that you’re able to see the photos up close. Using Apple’s built-in Photos app only lets you see photos in tiny thumbnails when editing. With Flic, you can tell right away if a picture is blurry or poorly lit, or whatever.
I was able to slam through my photos from my recent trip to the Penny Arcade Expo from the month of September. There were a ton of photos in there, and each time I deleted one, Flic totaled the amount of disk space I was saving — three to four megabytes per photo adds up when you’re dumping hundreds of them.
Once you’ve gone through an entire month’s worth of photos, you can then make the final call: do you want to delete these for real? Or keep them all and go through them again. It’s a nice fail-safe, though the requirement to go through all of your month’s photos can result in some time you’ll need to spend. There’s no way to trash photos halfway through a month, for example.
Ultimately, Flic is a fantastic, simple app that is so intuitive and easy to use that you’ll wonder if Apple will snatch this idea (or the app itself) for future iOS revisions.
“With the camera roll, there are four clicks involved in deleting photos,” said Evans. “With Flic, you can go super fast through your pictures to get the task done.”
Flic is available in the App Store right now for an affordable $2.99.
