Instants is a great new iPhone app for browsing your photos. It brings several of iOS7’s organizational ideas to the current iPhone, but does it in a much cleaner and more intuitive way. Plus, it’s free (with an in-app purchase for one extra feature).
The main screen of Instants shows a grid of thumbnails broken up into horizontal slices of time, organized by month (and with a handy image count to tell you how many pictures are in there). Tap a row and you get to see all the pictures in the month, and tap again to see the pictures.
The magic here is that the app performs a lookup on your photos to organize them. So you can browse not just by date but by place (the nearest city seems to be the unit of choice for splitting the pictures into groups), as well as adding your own metadata in the form of stars (adding to a favorites album) plus tags. You can also create new time-based events by specifying a day and giving it a name (all pictures from that day re included). It’ll even search your photos by color.
I keep a close eye on photo apps, as you may have noticed, and recently there have been a lot of apps that attempt to organize your pictures automatically, taming the morass of pixels that otherwise threatens to inundate your iOS device or Mac. They’re variously successful, but I’m still looking for one that will let me browse all my photos ever, reliably recognize people’s faces and generally help me find the picture I’m looking for without scrolling through millions of thumbs. Instants isn’t it, but it’s way better than the current Photos app.
And that in-app purchase? It’s to add “visual tags,” which are icons that you can tap to assign them to photos. This is fine, but it still forces you to tag them yourself, which kind of goes against the flow of the rest of the app. Still, it’s $1 extra so maybe you’d like to try it out.
Otherwise, you should just download the app already. It works great.
Source: Instants App
Thanks: Christian!
Charlie Sorrel writes reviews and how-tos. Follow Charlie on Twitter at @mistercharlie, and at micro.blog on @mistercharlie
