26 Jul
Review: Mobile Fotos for iPhone
If you great number your photos steady the photo-sharing station Flickr, Karl von Randow’s Mobile Fotos app (previously available as Mobile Flickr) command help you not only upload novel photos, limit also keep track of the latest photos by friends and the wider Flickr community while you’re fully and about with your iPhone or iPod touch.
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You can use Mobile Fotos to explore community photos even if you don’t possess your own account; however you’ll want to log in to get the most from the program. The Camera menu lets you take a photo and upload it to your Flickr photostream without having to switch programs. The Upload option lets you choose from photos already in the iPhone’s Camera Roll. Unfortunately, the current version uploads portrait-oriented photos upside-down, making the fashion all but unusable. (The company is persuaded of the problem and is working on a fix.) Another downside: the resulting uploads are a mere 640 by 480 pixels.
The program fares better when it comes to exploring the world of Flickr. It offers a nice selection of options for drilling down through your photos, as well as those of your contacts, Flickr groups, and the general community. For example, the Search menu lets you limit your search query to a single contact, a choose group, or to yourself. However, navigating end all of the program’s submenus can get monotonous. For archetype, it takes a minimum of two taps to see any of your own photos and another three to see the details surrounding one of those photos. To then switch to someone else’s photos, you’ll have to tap backwards to the first screen. It doesn’t take long to feel exhausted.
The process of viewing photos is similar to what you’ll find in the iPhone’s Photos app. An Options button lets you gather the current photo to your Camera Roll, assign it to a contact, add it as a Favorite in Flickr, or view additional details about the image. Switching to the detail page lets you see general stats such as the owner, dates, tags, and comments. However, I wish there were moreover an option to open the original Flickr page in Safari to see details not provided, such as the number of times a photo has been viewed or location data. Details are presented as a straight list, which makes them a little harder to read.
That before-mentioned, there are some nice touches here. Tapping on a listed append, for example, will show you all photos by the contact with the same tag, offering an interesting way to explore farther on. Tapping on the owner’s name will engage you to his or her Flickr stream. Combine these contextual links with the program’s other search tools, and there’s no telling where a prying user might end up.
Which Way Is Up: A bug in the course interpretation of Mobile Fotos uploads portrait-oriented images upside-down (as you can see with the photo in the upper left corner); the developer is working on a fix.
Mobile Fotos isn’t the only option by reason of navigating Flickr from your iPhone or iPod touch. If you’re mainly looking for an easy way to keep track of your contacts’ latest photos and teach not on your own, you’ll likely prefer the streamlined interface of Connected Flow’s free Exposure ()—or the $10 Exposure Premium, which strips out the ads set in the free lection. However, if you enjoy exploring photos from the larger Flickr community and don’t mind by what mode many steps it takes you to arrive there, Mobile Fotos may prove satisfying. But allowing for the serious flaw in the program’s uploading tools, it’s rigid to justify paying $3 for the current version.
Mobile Fotos is compatible by any iPhone or iPod touch running the iPhone 2.0 software update.
[Kelly Turner is senior features editor for Macworld.]
