iOS 8: The Photos app wants to be the best in the App Store.
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One of the recurring criticisms of iOS is its strange way of backing up photos. The Streaming Photos option allows us to access a limited number of them from our iOS devices and have full backup copies on our computer (by installing the corresponding iCloud client). Furthermore, this system is not compatible with videos, which are precisely the ones that take up the most space on our mobile devices. Well, it seems that with iOS 8, these problems will finally be solved.
Apple will launch what it calls the iCloud Photo Library (iCloud Photo Library), which will store high-resolution copies of all the photos and videos recorded with our iPhone and iPad. And taking advantage of the best support that they will offer, they have remodeled the Photos app to provide it with better functions:
Search for photos with words
Having access to a collection with thousands of photos involves a major drawback: finding them! Apple has already thought about it and with iOS 8 we will have a bar where we can write to search for photos, something similar to the Spotlight that we already use regularly at the top of the Springboard. The search criteria are varied: date or time of capture, location where it was taken or name of the album where we saved it.
search suggestions
While we search for photos, the same app will make suggestions about what we are looking for. Among them may be the name of a certain photo album, a list of the photos we have taken close to where we are, or exactly one year ago (ideal for remembering last Christmas, for example).
Smart space management
Why have all the photos and videos in full resolution on our iPad and iPhone, with the little space we have to store them. With iOS 8 you will have the original copies of them in iCloud, while lower resolution (and weight) copies will be downloaded to your mobile devices. So you have access to all your photos without spending the scarce memory of your equipment.
smart composition
The new Photos app brings a couple of new features that will help us get the most out of our cameras. The first of these is the automatic composition, thanks to which the app rotates the image to make it horizontal (if it isn’t) and suggests cropping it to achieve the perfect frame. All a help for those of us who are not very handy with this photography.
automatic improvement
Has a photo been dark? In the App Store there are hundreds of apps that allow you to make manual and automatic adjustments to solve the problem. But with iOS 8, the Photos app will be able to do it too. By simply sliding your finger over a button, you can vary the brightness of the photo. The app is in charge of modifying the innards of the photo (brightness, contrast, exposure…) to achieve the desired effect with the perfect balance.
The Photos app opens up to third-party filters
Thanks to the new Extensions feature, any developer can create filters that will be available from the official iOS app. You will no longer have to leave your reel to apply your favorite filters.
New Time-Lapse mode
We all love spectacular Time-Lapse videos, assembled from high-resolution photos taken over several hours at regular intervals. Well, with iOS 8 we can make them ourselves thanks to a new camera mode called, logically, Time-Lapse. We just have to slide to select this mode and leave the iPhone or iPad in the correct position to take the photos and the team takes care of the rest. I’m already looking forward to trying it with my iPhone.
With all these movements, Apple takes another step in improving the quality of its iOS apps. Not only by improving its features, but also by opening it up to third-party enhancements. All this will make many iOS users go back to using native apps that we had half forgotten about, such as Mail or Messages. And it will also make many think a lot if it is worth doing the Jailbreak, because with what iOS 8 already brings by default…
