App Directory: The Best Photo Management App For Android

App Directory: The Best Photo Management App For Android

The default Android gallery is a nice enough app, but if you want something with a few more features — such as password-protecting certain photos or sorting them however you want — QuickPic is our favourite gallery replacement.

QuickPic

Platform: Android
Price: Free
Download Page

Features

  • View photos and videos stored on your phone in either grid of list view
  • Lightning-fast thumbnail rendering
  • Full-screen browsing with swipe gestures and sensor-based rotation
  • Crop, rotate and resize photos from the gallery
  • Sort photos by name or date
  • Set photos as wallpaper or contact icons, or share with any other app
  • Exclude or include certain folders in your gallery
  • Password-protect photos you don’t want others to see
  • Lots of different view modes and options

Where It Excels

QuickPic is simple, but offers one of the smoothest gallery experiences you’ll get on Android. Thumbnails render faster than almost any other gallery app we tried, and the built-in editing features are pretty handy. Excluding folders (like music folders with album art) is a must-have feature, and being able to hide and password-protect photos is good for more, hmm, sensitive pictures. It’s also completely free with no ads, which is a big plus.

Where It Falls Short

QuickPic has all the extra features a basic user would want, but it’s lacking in the really advanced features of some other apps, like F-Stop’s tagging and sorting features or JustPictures’ cloud service support. It would be nice to see a few more of these in QuickPic, but as long as it provides such a smooth, easy experience, it will be our favourite.

The Competition

JustPictures, our former favourite, is the best gallery if you have a lot of photos stored on Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, 500px and other cloud services. It has a beautiful looking gallery with access to all these services, as well as many of the features of QuickPic (though sadly, no editing features, which is a big downside). It also won’t show your pictures in perfect 1:1 pixel ratio, so they’ll look a little compressed inside the app. Still, if you use a lot of cloud services, it’s hard to beat.

F-Stop Media Gallery is also worth a look, particularly if you want a lot of advanced features for sorting your photos. It has a powerful tagging feature that embeds your tags and ratings right into the JPG files, and then you can browse by tag as well as the more traditional options. If you have a lot of photos on your phone, this might be the best choice.

Fish Bowl is another popular option, and it has a few cool features that make it compelling. While its interface is pretty ugly, your photo grid is laid out in an interesting way, and it has a “delete guard” and undelete feature that’s pretty nice, as well as side-by-side image comparison for the few of you who need that.

Lastly, Flayvr is a popular option, and it’s a bit less traditional than the others. Instead of just showing you a grid of each folder, Flayvr separates your folder by “events”, based on date taken and the appearance of the photos, for easy browsing between important moments. It’s a cool way to view all your photos in a timeline, so if that sounds appealing to you, give Flayvr a try.

There are lots of others we didn’t mention. Let us know your favourite (and why) below!

Lifehacker’s App Directory recommends the best applications and tools across multiple platforms.


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