The iPhone camera is a mid-pack performer, but there are some great tools to improve things like macro performance and shooting wider angle shots. Ztylus has built an entire photography system into their Metal case which can really help you take your mobile photo game up to the next level!
At their developer conference today Google unveiled a new Photos app focused on improving search and organization.
Without having to tag or manually identify faces, the new Photos app will group photos for users automatically based on people in the photos and locations pictures were taken.
Editing tools will be built in to the experience, and users can produce videos out of the content shot from their phones easily.
New sharing features will deliver full resolution pics to anyone regardless if they use Google Photos or Google Plus with no restrictions on who or where you can share those photos.
Most exciting is the support on the back end for these cloud sync services. Starting today Google Photos will enable unlimited storage for free on iOS, Android, and on the web. Pictures are saved at up to 16MP quality and video will be saved at 1080p.
This makes Drive and photo sync on Android a lot more valuable and makes Google Photos more competitive against OneDrive and Flickr photo sync.
You can see Google’s teaser vid, and read their full press release below!
We’ve been playing with more polls, and we started off with a doozy.
Shooting individual comparisons between some of the top smartphone cameras on the market, we put the results up to you our readers and viewers. Galaxy S6, Lumia 930, LG G4. Which phone came out on top? Based on your vote, The LG G4 is currently the best camera available on a smartphone today!
The G4 goes on sale early next month, but we’ve already got the most in-depth review of LG’s newest shooter available online. Hit the video below, and if you want to see the individual comparisons we’ve got them linked underneath.
Instagram continues to ignore some of the best smartphone cameras on the market by letting their BETA app on Windows Phone continue to rot. With no updates for well over a year, we can hope they’re working on a Windows 10 app (at least porting over their iOS app), but in the meantime we have Windows Phone developer extraordinaire Rudy Huyn.
His third party Instagram client for Windows Phones 6Tag has long been the gold standard for sharing higher quality pics on Microsoft’s OS. Now his latest update brings video uploading to the table, alongside a few new photo filters.
6Tag has always been able to shoot video, but it was unable to upload previously shot video. A new video editing menu in 6Tag replicates that functionality from Instagram’s app on iOS and Android.
Adobe has released a killer update for their Lightroom Mobile app for Android.
Not only does the app bring compatibility for tablets and MicroSD card storage, for folks looking to produce the highest quality content possible while on the go, you can now edit RAW photos.
It’s like the difference between editing the raw audio off of a CD or working from a compressed MP3. Most people use JPG files, which are squished for easier sharing. RAW photos retain all of the detail and information from the camera sensor, before software turns them into the visual equivalent of MP3’s.
This update will require the new Google Camera API which allows for RAW capture. This API was released with Lollipop, but of course not all manufacturers are using it. You can test your phone with this Manual Camera Compatibility app to see if RAW capture will work. The Galaxy S6 for example supports manual photo features, but does not support saving RAW images.
It’s been a perplexing division. Uploading photos online to services like Google+, you get a bucket of cloud storage to use. Using a service like Drive, you get a bucket of cloud storage to use. Why have these been separate buckets?
Google is finally addressing and rectifying this division. Announced via the Google Drive Blog, now you can open your Drive app on Android and iOS, or jump into a web browser, where you will now find a new menu option for Photos. This also means you’ll have better tools for organizing your photos in folders.
After relying on services like OneDrive and DropBox, it seemed such a simple solution to organize files online, and now Google is finally joining the club.