Many attempts have been made to transform the standard Apple apps into something more in-depth and feature-rich. One included app that could use some sprucing up is the photo application. You can view your photos one-by-one or in a slideshow and… well, that ‘s about it. You cannot pick favorites, rate the pictures, or assign them to different categories. Like many of the other standard apps, it gets the job done, but barely.
This is where Sort Shots comes in. It ‘s a photo organization application that could replace the standard iPhone photos app on your phone. It comes with a plethora of options that make it easier to tag and organize your photos. But do those options work as well as they should? The short answer is no, not really. Sort Shots is an interesting app that will be very useful to a lot of people. You can tell that a lot of work went into this app. It’s also a frustrating app, however – not because of a lack of features, but how the features were implemented.
Adding Photos
When you open up Sort Shots for the first time, you ‘ll be asked to add some photos into the Sort Shots library. A critical thing missing here is an easy way to add a lot of photos to Sort Shots. Rather than being able to add an entire album, or even your entire collection, you have to select each photo individually to add. Once you tap on the photo, the app will pause for a second while the photo is added to the gallery. This is repeated until you are ready to start categorizing your photos. The problem here is that it will take you a very long time to add a bunch of photos. I have close to two thousand on my iPhone, and I don ‘t think I have the patience to individually add them to Sort Shots. Perhaps this can be fixed with a software update?
Categorization
Sort Shots ‘ greatest strength is also its biggest weakness: categorization of your photos. The app comes with a few pre-made categories, but these can be deleted if you ‘d rather create your own. Tap More followed by Categorize. You will now see a screen with all of the photos you added to Sort Shots. Here you can select multiple photos to add to the desired category. Once you have your desired number of photos selected, tap Add To.
You will now see a list of all of the categories you have for your photos. I deleted the ones that came with the app. Doing this takes an extra and unnecessary step. You first have to tap the category to drill into the folder, and then tap the Category button at the top to go back. The category will now be highlighted, and you can delete it by tapping the trash can icon. To create a new category, simply tap the plus icon, and you ‘ll be prompted to type a name for the category. Make sure you are happy with the name, because you won ‘t be able to edit the title at a later date.
So far, so good, right? Well here ‘s where it gets a little tricky. Each category is required to have at least one sub-category. For example, I created a folder titled ‘People. ‘ In this category, I wanted to put photos of all my friends and family. In order to do that, I had to create another folder within the main ‘People ‘ folder. I wasn ‘t able to dump all of my people photos into the folder. Yes, I can work around this by just dumping all of my people photos into the sub-folder (People > All, for example), but it seems like an unnecessary step.
On the flip side, these sub-categories can definitely come in handy. For example, you could have a ‘Vacations ‘ category, and in that folder create sub-folders for each vacation. The ability to create sub-categories is definitely nice and useful. But as a requirement, it just becomes a pain.
Rating Photos
Another nice feature of Sort Shots is the ability to rate photos. Similar to the five-star rating system in iTunes, you can rate your photos on a scale of one-to-five stars. You can also mark photos as favorites. To do this, just tap on a photo. You ‘ll see stars at the top. Simply tap the star number you wish to rate the photo. If you want to mark it as a favorite, tap the heart icon. This is an extremely useful tool for those that have hundreds of photos and want to view the cream of the crop every once in a while.
It would be nice, however, to be able to apply the same rating or favorite designation to multiple photos. Similar to how you can add multiple photos to a category, it would be nice to select a group of photos to add as a favorite or apply a certain rating. Having to scroll through each image and individually rate each one could take a lot of time. Another minor annoyance is that you cannot un-star a photo once you rate it. You can change the rating as often as you want, but you cannot completely remove it so that it reverts back to an unrated photo.
Viewing Photos
So now that you are done categorizing and rating your photos, it ‘s time to actually view them, right? Sort Shots has a few different options that help make this an enjoyable, yet frustrating experience.
Right off the bat, you will notice that you cannot view your photos full screen in the application. There is a ‘Full Screen ‘ icon, but that only makes the photo slightly bigger, not full screen.
Filtering and Searching Photos
One of the best features of this app is the ability to set very specific search criteria. You can set filters based on five different options: Rating, Category, Date, Type (Photos, Videos, or All), and Favorites. Rating, Type, and Favorites are all self-explanatory and work very well. Category and Date, however, come up somewhat short.
The only problem with the Date filter is that it is based on when you add the photo to Sort Shots; not when you actually take the photo. The only workaround here is to add photos into the app as soon as you snap them. This can be a bit tedious, especially if you ‘re adding photos shot with a digital camera.
The Category filter presents an even bigger challenge – one that is similar to what I mentioned above regarding sub-folders. Using the same example, say you have a ‘Vacations ‘ folder. In that folder, you have four sub-folders: ‘Hawaii, ‘ ‘Florida, ‘ ‘Chicago, ‘ and ‘Germany. ‘ Now let ‘s say you want to view all three-starred photos from all of your vacations. Sorry, but this is not possible. Much like the requirement of at least one sub-folder in each category, each filter requires you to be specific to the exact event you want to view. You can ‘t view all of your vacation photos. You have to view each vacation separately.
But not all is lost. If you are fine with this restriction, you will find the filtering option extremely useful and beneficial. You can be as specific or as general with your searches (except for what I mentioned above) using one or all of the five criteria listed above. You can also save each filter as you create it for easy retrieval.
Other Features
Sort Shots includes some other cool features. If you want to view your photos from highest-to-lowest rated, simply shake the phone. Shake it again to view lowest-to-highest. Be careful, however. The shake is very sensitive. I found my photos re-organized by simply setting my phone down on more than one occasion.
You can also view slideshows with your iPod music playing in the background. Just tap More > Settings > Music to add songs, artists, albums, or playlists. I would suggest adding playlists because once the songs you selected are done, you cannot retrieve the list or start it over. Under settings, you can also adjust how long each picture stays on the screen during the slideshow (2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 seconds), choose how each photo transitions to the next (wipe across or down, and choose whether to repeat or shuffle the slide show.
Sort Shots also allows you to upload photos to Facebook or Twitter. The Twitter feature works a bit better. You simply open a photo by tapping it, and then tap the Twitter icon. You ‘ll be asked to enter your username, password, and a comment (optional). It will post to Twitter with Twitpic, but it will also include a Sort Shots message at the end that cannot be removed. With Facebook, I didn ‘t even attempt to upload a picture because it would add a Sort Shots Facebook application to your profile. I am the type of Facebook user that chooses not to add any applications to my profile, so I wasn ‘t able to test this out. I ‘ll just stick with uploading pics through the Facebook application.
Conclusion
If you have multiple photos on your iPhone and would like an application that helps you better categorize and sort them, then Sort Shots may be the app for you. Just make sure you take note that it will take a long time to add all of those photos to the application, and beware that each category requires at least one sub-category. In terms of features and options, however, Sort Shots offers things that the standard iPhone Photos app does not. That alone makes Sort Shots worth a look.
Sort Shots is available now in the App Store for $2.99.
*** Sort Shots provided a promo code to Just Another iPhone Blog for the review of Sort Shots. For more information regarding our site ‘s review policies, please see the ‘About ‘ page. ***
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