Thursday, 23 October 2014
Everyone knows that there are better alternatives to stock iOS apps. It’s one of the reasons the App Store exists. But App Store apps always feel like second class citizens. They don’t get access to system level functionality like stock apps do. While this is changing in iOS 8 withextensions, widgets, and custom keyboards, we still have a long way to go.
Photos is one of those stock apps that could use work. With the removal of Camera Roll, which shifted focus to the confusing Moments feature in iOS 8, things only got worse.
Thankfully third party apps are here to help us out in both regards.
Get The Camera Roll Back With Camera Roll +
The removal of Camera Roll from the Photos app caused an uproar on the internet. And for good reason. Camera Roll was the best way to get to your most recent photos from your device. Now that the Camera Roll has been replaced with the Moments tab you can see photos from all your Apple devices broken down by days.
Luckily for us, Camera Roll has shown up in iOS 8.1 beta and the public might see its triumphant return in the coming weeks or months. But till then, we have the Camera Roll + app to rely on.
Camera Roll + will list your most recent photos top down (which is the opposite of the old Camera Roll). You can tap on any photo for a preview, slide right for the next photo, and more. It has the Share menu that you’re familiar with and a Favorite button as well.
You can also select and delete multiple images at once. But as this is not a system utility, you need to confirm before deleting.
Replace the Photos App With My Roll
Camera Roll + is a companion app to My Roll. And My Roll aims to replace your entire Photos app (that is, if you don’t use PhotoStream heavily).
My Roll is “heavily inspired” by the Photos app, just like Camera Roll + is derived from Camera Roll.
The app takes iOS 8’s default functionality and makes it better. Photos apps’ frankly confusing zoom-in views for day, month, or year are gone and replaced with big beautiful thumbnails based on events (still called Moments for some reason).
Tapping a Moment brings you a vertical scrolling screen with all the images sorted in grids. You can tap each image for more options.
Pinch Moments to combine: Place two fingers on two different Moments and pinch in to combine them.
The Gallery view gives you a grid layout similar to Camera Roll + but with more features.
How Do You Manage Photos On iOS?
How do you make sense of the thousands of photos on your iPhone/iPad? Let us know in the comments below.
