iPhone Photo Management via Dropbox? If only….
After a busy Christmas, I’m organising all the photos from various relatives and friends visits. And my iPhone isn’t helping.
To recap (again): this is what I want to do:
- Perform basic edits on my photos on my iPhone (straighten, lighten, crop)
- Rename the files, organise them in folders
- Sync them to Dropbox, Sugarsync, etc.
Difficult? No, impossible, actually. See my previous posts.
My quest has brought another three photo management/sync apps to test, which are worth a few minutes for reviewing.
This looked like exactly what I wanted. Download! Organise. Rename! Share! Sync!
Organisation is great. Creating nested folders is no problem, and neither is loading camera roll photos into them. Editing… well, it doesn’t support that, either natively or through linking to another tool, but that’s OK, I guess.
But syncing is where it falls down. It has an awkward manual sync mode to another user on the same WiFi network to another Photo Manager app (try convincing a friend to go through all that hassle to get a photo off you). It can also turn your iphone into a webserver that a friend can browse to on a PC/iPhone to grab photos off you, which is better… although still not as easy as Dropbox.
How about some kind of seamless sync? Well… it has an FTP server, which you could use with a competent FTP
Bummer.
This is a cool app that has potential. The approach is: “We know you have photos all over the place. Facebook, Twitter, 
Dropbox, Your Phone. So why not view them in one place: here”.
It’s a cool app and good idea… but not for this purpose. It actually has a little bit of photo management/upload functionality (to allow you to upload photos from your phone to those services), which it does very well: you can even two-finger-twirl a photo to rotate it, and it queues uploads. But it doesn’t allow photo editing, or renaming, nor Dropbox folder creation or folder hierarchies. Which is because it’s not a photo management app… so fair enough.
Photo Box has a single purpose: sync with Dropbox. The folder structure is simply whatever is on Dropbox, and you can’t create new folders. All you can do is sync some or all photos. It has a cool little inline graphic that shows the sync of each photo.
As such, it’s handy for this purpose: particularly if you want to fire a few recent photos over to your laptop without digging out a USB cable (as I just did with these screenshots), it’s a little bit quicker and seamless than the official dropbox app. For photo management? No rename, no folder creation.. again, forget it.
And so, my search for a decent Photo Management tool continues.
