My favorite lesser known photography apps for the iPhone

These are my favorite apps in the Photography folder on my phone. I wanted to share the ones that aren’t too popular and took me ages of searching and testing to find. Some of these are paid apps, but they’re worth every penny.

TwinCollage is something that took me forever to find. An app that puts two photos side by side (or stacked on top) without cropping at all. I use this constantly to show off screenshots and app flow for both jokes and work. I use it for tweets like the one below (click through to see the full image on the left) to stack up photos that tell a story. It’s a simple single feature I use often and it does it well.

Pro HDR X is the best HDR app I’ve used after trying dozens out. I use it almost exclusively to take landscape shots and I know HDR photography is much maligned (and rightly so) for producing unrealistic effects, but this app doesn’t go over the top and images closely match my memories and how things look to me, rather than the drab, grayed-out photos taken with the default iPhone camera.

Giffer Pro is a fantastic animated GIF maker and editor that rivals the precise frame-by-frame tweaks I normally do in Photoshop on a desktop.

You Gotta See This is the stupidest name for the coolest app. It does David Hockney-style photo collages, letting you shoot 30–40 photos of an entire room or scene and stitches them together in interesting ways. Not something I use more than once every few months, but it does the job well.

Single-task apps Rotate Video and deGeo and Mirror Me do exactly what they say on the tin. One lets you rotate video and re-save in the proper aspect ratio on times your camera flipped out and recorded something thinking it was tilted 90º. If you ever wanted to remove location EXIF data before sharing a photo, deGeo has got you. Mirror Me simply mirrors a photo if you happen to take one in a mirror and want the text on your shirt to be readable.

Adobe has decided to split their plethora of features in desktop apps into a pile of apps on the App Store. Strangely, I avoid their attempts at replicating Photoshop in an app and instead go to their other apps that do one thing from desktop Photoshop well. Mostly I just use Photoshop Fix for tweaking images and drawing on them, Photoshop Mix for robust masking and compositing of images together, and Spark Post for overlaying text on an image. I kind of wish the functions were all in one app but I understand it’d likely be confusingly complex.

Finally, I’ll mention an app so obscure you can’t even get it right now (but will soon). I once attended a local code demo where a developer showed off Spriteville. It’s a fun app that takes a photo from your roll, then lets you paint fire, water, snow, and then overlay text, which you can move around the screen (and there’s physics and “weight” to it all). In the end you can make some very silly GIFs and I love this app to death. The developer says he’s working on a new version out soon and I’d suggest everyone periodically check @spriteville for the new launch.