PhotoFlip has the beginnings of a great idea, let down by poor implementation. Here’s the idea: The app lets you add notes to the photos you have in your iPhone camera roll, without copying those images. That is, the pictures stay in your regular photo library, and the app just displays them with your text note added underneath.
It’s a great idea right? It uses almost no storage, and doesn’t double up on picture libraries. You can even snap photos from within the app and they’re saved ion the regular camera roll, and everything is synced via iCloud (if you want anyway).
So what’s wrong?
The biggest problem is that there’s no way to know which pictures have notes. Instead of using a picker to choose pictures, PhotoFlip’s interface is your entire photo library. Adding a note is easy – you just tap a picture, then tap the text field underneath and type. Editing is just as simple.
But what about finding your notes? I hope you remember which photos you added them to, because there’s no way to collect them together. Annotated pictures get a little turned-up corner effect, but that’s it.
Once you take a few photos with the app itself, it’ll create a PhotoFlip album for you, but this only shows the images taken on that device. It doesn’t contain images from PhotoFlip on other devices, nor pictures that have had notes added.
Further, you don’t have access to your Photo Stream photos, so you have to manually make sure the pictures are on both devices if you want to sync notes using iCloud. In practice, this means that you are limited to pictures form albums that are synced from iTunes.
And the name? The pictures flip around (slowly) when you edit them.
I remain hopeful, as this is such a good idea, and the app is only a few weeks old. Right now though, ti’s not really useful enough.
Source: iTunes
