Category: Photo & Video App

Google Photos has become one of the more powerful photo viewing, storing and editing apps available for Android phones and tablets (as well as a really good website).  While there are more powerful editing apps out there, Google Photos will meet the need for the vast majority of users and with the ability to store your photos in your Google Drive, you always have a backup of your photos.

A great feature of Google Photos is the Assistant feature.  This feature automatically creates movies, stories and enhanced photos of those you have uploaded to the service and some of them are really good.  You can chose if you want to keep what the assistant creates or not and it allows you to painlessly add some creativity to your photos.  However, there may be a time where you want to create a movie of your photos yourself.  Google has made it easy to do and in this How To I will show you the steps to take to create a movie in Google Photos.

Google Photos for Android – Free – Download Now  

Google has released an update to the Google Photos app for Android that brings the ability to reorder photos in an album and the ability to view shared albums within the app.  The update comes on the heals of the update to the Google Photos website yesterday which brought the ability to reorder photos to it as well.  This latest update is build 1.2.1.99.143001 for those keeping score at home and is available now in the Google Play Store.

Google Photos for Android – Free – Download Now

The social photo sharing app Xim from Microsoft Research has been updated today with several new features for the Windows Phone app.  If you aren’t familiar with Xim, don’t worry, most aren’t.  It is a photo sharing app that allows you to share photos from a variety of locations – Camera Roll, OneDrive, Facebook, Dropbox, Instagram – with others who are on the Xim app.  Think Snapchat in a way.  The good news is the Xim app is available not only for Windows Phone but also for iOS and Android and you can even share photos with Amazon Fire TV sets.  It’s a pretty cool service and like Snapchat, Xim’s die after a certain amount of time.

The update released today, version 1.5.1.0 for those keeping score at home, brings several key updates to the app as well as a host of bug fixes.

Xim for Windows Phone – Free – Download Now

The popular Windows Phone photo editing app Afterlight is now a universal app and available for your Windows 8.1 PC or Tablet.  Afterlight is a powerful photo editing app that allows you to make quick edit and adjustments to your photos with a load of different filters, textures and frames.  To this point the .99 Cent app has been only available on Windows Phone but the update today, version 1.1.0 for those keeping score at home, is universal.  That means if you have already bought the app for Windows Phone you now have it available for your PC or Tablet.  This includes any in-app purchases you have made as well as the app itself.

Afterlight for Windows Phone – .99 Cents (In-App Purchases) – Download Now

Afterlight for Windows – .99 Cents (In-App Purchases) – Download Now

dTilt Shift photography is not something new to Windows Phone but many of the apps can be complicated to figure out, especially on photos you have already taken.  That is one of the reasons that the new Diorama app for Windows Phone is one try out.  The Diorama app allows you to take a photo with your camera or from your photo library and quickly apply a tilt shift effect to them.  With simple controls and a clean, simply UI, Diorama is a fast way to apply this fun photo filter to your pictures.

For those who are new to smartphone photography, tilt shifting is a photo effect where you make something look miniaturized, or as the case may be, like it is in a diorama.  It certainly isn’t new to digital or smartphone photography or photography in general for that matter.  Smartphones however have made the effect popular because apps like Diorama have made it easy.

Diorama for Windows Phone – Free (In-App Purchases) – Download Now

The Lumia Storyteller app for Windows Phone has received a minor update overnight, bringing expanded stories in your timeline among other small updates.  The new build, version 4.1.0.19 for those keeping score at home, builds on the major 4.0 update that came out in December and is more-or-less a tweaking of some of the features that that releases brought to the exclusively Lumia only app.

Lumia Storyteller – Free (Lumia Devices Only) – Download Now