[danielbigham]

Hi all,

I've been working on a BB10 photo app. It came to mind today that I should reach out to the CrackBerry community for feedback on what people would like to see in their ultimate photo app. Note that my app is not currently geared to taking photos, but rather viewing them, editing them, deleting them, sharing them, etc, after they have been taken.

To grease the wheels, here is a long list of possible features and feature areas for consideration. Feel free to add your own or to comment on one of these areas with specific thoughts.

- Sharing
    - Facebook
    - Twitter
    - Email Addresses / Email Groups
    - Multi-share: Efficiently being able to share to multiple places at once.
    - Others important to you?
- Uploading
    - Picasa
    - Flickr
    - Dropbox
    - To your PC
    - Others important to you?
- Easily deleting junk photos
- Rating photos
- Tagging photos (ex. Kids, Home, Cottage, Vacation, etc.)
- Automatic tagging of photos based on facial recognition
- Organizing photos into albums
- Creating rules to automate certain things
   ex. Upload any 4 or 5 star photo to Picasa/Flickr/Dropbox
   ex. Delete any 1 star photo
   ex. Send grandparents and aunts/uncles an email for any 5 star photos with the tag "Kids"
- Searching photos (by rating, by tags, by date/time, by location, etc)
    - Being able to search your photos via voice and natural language
      ex. "show me 4 and 5 star photos we've taken on vacation in the last 2 years"
      (where in this example "vacation" would be a tag you had been applying to photos)
      ex. "the best cottage photos we've taken this year"
- Touching up photos
    - Adjusting brightness/contrast/warmth
    - Cropping
    - Rotating
- Applying filters to photos
- Being able to upload and/or then display the current photo on your PC
- Sync'ing photos with PC
- Aggregating comments that have been made on a photo from multiple services (Facebook, Twitter, etc)
- Embedding social media photo comments into the photo's metadata for safe keeping

Another question would be which photo apps you currently use (if any), and what your favorite features are, or what things you think are missing, or could be improved.

Yet another question is whether you find your BB10 device to be one you like taking photos with.

Thanks!
Daniel

[tjseaman]

Love Photo studio pro, however, unlike the OS7 version, they still haven't added the ability to add text. They do have a current amount of great add ons but am still disappointed that you can't add text.

Edit: and yes I love taking pictures with my Z10!!!! For a phone, it's a great little camera.

Posted via CB10 - Z10 'Powered by BlackBerry'

[bb10_fan]

My advice would be concentrate on photo bookkeeping part of the app, this is what we really miss at this point. There are quite a few of Photo editors out there (Effetica Pro is my choice, has more tools and editing functionality than any other native photo app I know on BlackBerry). The best would be if instead of replicating the same functionality you could collaborate with some developers and call their apps when editing needs to be done. This will free your time for Pictures replacement app with much richer functionality you already listed. And of course I like to take pics with my Z10 and Q10 devices

[danielbigham]

Love Photo studio pro, however, unlike the OS7 version, they still haven't added the ability to add text. They do have a current amount of great add ons but am still disappointed that you can't add text.

Edit: and yes I love taking pictures with my Z10!!!! For a phone, it's a great little camera.

Adding text. Interesting. I hadn't even thought of that -- probably because I've rarely if ever done that to a photo. I'm curious when/why you find yourself wanting to add text to photos...

Glad to hear you love the Z10 camera!

[danielbigham]

My advice would be concentrate on photo bookkeeping part of the app, this is what we really miss at this point. There are quite a few of Photo editors out there (Effetica Pro is my choice, has more tools and editing functionality than any other native photo app I know on BlackBerry). The best would be if instead of replicating the same functionality you could collaborate with some developers and call their apps when editing needs to be done. This will free your time for Pictures replacement app with much richer functionality you already listed. And of course I like to take pics with my Z10 and Q10 devices

Good thoughts, thanks. I think your suggestion to concentrate on photo bookkeeping is wise. Thanks too for the mention of "Effetica" in your signature (?). I hadn't seen it before and I was really impressed with its breadth in terms of filters, etc.

[bb10_fan]

I know question wasn't addressed to me, but I have few use cases when you would use text on image. First - business reasons. Instead of describing certain changes of design/construction in long text description, one could add text notes to image. The other use case is in documents when you can highlight part of text and make a text note (would be great to have free form drawing also to do notes or highlights, but at least in Effetica you can select area and change its look or blur/darken outside). More trendy reason - memes.

Thanks too for the mention of "Effetica" in your signature (?). I hadn't seen it before and I was really impressed with its breadth in terms of filters, etc.

I'm trying to advertise it, since they don't do it themselves Just like BlackBerry, community doing their marketing department job.

[danielbigham]

I know question wasn't addressed to me, but I have few use cases when you would use text on image. First - business reasons. Instead of describing certain changes of design/construction in long text description, one could add text notes to image. The other use case is in documents when you can highlight part of text and make a text note (would be great to have free form drawing also to do notes or highlights, but at least in Effetica you can select area and change its look or blur/darken outside). More trendy reason - memes.

Thanks for those use cases. That's one of the real challenges of being a developer -- some use cases are obvious, others are anything but obvious. Getting into the heads of users is very valuable.

I'm trying to advertise it, since they don't do it themselves Just like BlackBerry, community doing their marketing department job.

As a developer, reading something like that warms my heart. Good for you, that's inspiring.

[Omnitech]

I also think there are a bunch of similiar "photo editors" that all have typical features: frames, filters, rudimentary image controls, etc.

What I want is some far better image manipulation tools, including better color control tools with a better UI, high-quality resampling resize feature, "painting" features like good 'ol MS Paint (brushes, drawing, text, something that will show me ie JPEG metadata, something that will work with animated GIF files, something that will work in either landscape or portrait orientation, something that does not force me to save always in the same folder forcing me to constantly move and rename files every time I edit something, etc.

I'm sure there are others but that's what comes to the top of my skull at the moment.

[bb10_fan]

What I want is some far better image manipulation tools, including better color control tools with a better UI, high-quality resampling resize feature, "painting" features like good 'ol MS Paint (brushes, drawing, text, something that will show me ie JPEG metadata, something that will work with animated GIF files, something that will work in either landscape or portrait orientation, something that does not force me to save always in the same folder forcing me to constantly move and rename files every time I edit something, etc.

I'm sure there are others but that's what comes to the top of my skull at the moment.

Well, I hope you understand that any advanced features come with some price Do you expect 4-5 dollar app to behave like a $1000 Photoshop on latest hardware? High quality resizing is a rather expensive operation, better colour control involves higher precision image manipulation (much more RAM is needed), etc. Would you pay 100$ for a mobile photo editor? I doubt that I would The reason I advertise Effetica (even if developer has never asked me about this) is it gives one of the best price/quality ratios among native photo editors on BlackBerry 10. Except support for GIF and painting it supports all features you listed Painting, if I remember well, is planned for addition in future versions

[bb10_fan]

As a developer, reading something like that warms my heart. Good for you, that's inspiring.

CrackBerry community always welcomes good developers who support the platform Hope to see your apps in Top paid/grossing categories

[Omnitech]

Well, I hope you understand that any advanced features come with some price Do you expect 4-5 dollar app to behave like a $1000 Photoshop on latest hardware?

Just to be clear, I wasn't asking for Photoshop - far from it. Even on desktop I think Photoshop is massively overcomplicated for what I normally do. 90% of the simple (Non-"Paint") image manipulation I do is with something more like IrfanView, tbh.

So your response comes across as sort-of reactionary, really.

High quality resizing is a rather expensive operation, better colour control involves higher precision image manipulation (much more RAM is needed), etc. Would you pay 100$ for a mobile photo editor? I doubt that I would The reason I advertise Effetica (even if developer has never asked me about this) is it gives one of the best price/quality ratios among native photo editors on BlackBerry 10. Except support for GIF and painting it supports all features you listed Painting, if I remember well, is planned for addition in future versions

I use Effetica among other things and if I thought it was everything I wanted I would not have posted here. And a huge percentage of what it does (silly filters and frames) hold no interest for me at all.

[bb10_fan]

Just to be clear, I wasn't asking for Photoshop - far from it. Even on desktop I think Photoshop is massively overcomplicated for what I normally do. 90% of the simple (Non-"Paint") image manipulation I do is with something more like IrfanView, tbh.
So your response comes across as sort-of reactionary, really.

Oh, sorry, didn't mean to be offensive

I use Effetica among other things and if I thought it was everything I wanted I would not have posted here.

I didn't say Effetica or any other photo editor on BlackBerry (or any other mobile platform) is perfect

And a huge percentage of what it does (silly filters and frames) hold no interest for me at all.

hmm, do we talk about the same Effetica? Filters are not silly if you know how and when to use them And they definitely not a huge percentage of what Effetica does. It's nice to be a critique especially if you have something constructive to propose...

[drdriphd]

Camera timer would be fun

Posted via CB10

[bb10_fan]

Camera timer would be fun

Posted via CB10

Advanced camera app, have you tried? There are few other apps with timer implemented

[John Vieira]

Facial recognition. And searching by person.

Link it with contacts and keep compatibility with Facebook tags and I will throw my money at you.

Posted via Z69

[bb10_fan]

Facial recognition. And searching by person.

Link it with contacts and keep compatibility with Facebook tags and I will throw my money at you.

Posted via Z69

Great suggestions! For such functionality get my money too

[danielbigham]

I also think there are a bunch of similiar "photo editors" that all have typical features: frames, filters, rudimentary image controls, etc.

What I want is some far better image manipulation tools, including better color control tools with a better UI, high-quality resampling resize feature, "painting" features like good 'ol MS Paint (brushes, drawing, text, something that will show me ie JPEG metadata, something that will work with animated GIF files, something that will work in either landscape or portrait orientation, something that does not force me to save always in the same folder forcing me to constantly move and rename files every time I edit something, etc.

I'm sure there are others but that's what comes to the top of my skull at the moment.

Hey Omnitech,

Thanks for some great feedback. Here are some follow up questions:

- Better color tools with a better UI: Some elaboration might be helpful here. What kind of color controls would you feel would be important?

- High-quality re-sampling resize: Interesting. I know what you're getting at, but I'm not familiar with where this would be an issue for people. I've never noticed poor image resizing quality -- where do you find you notice it?

- Painting features: Interesting. I hadn't really thought of that. For whatever reason, doing MS Paint style stuff on a BB10 device hasn't felt like an obvious "want" for me, but perhaps it is for other people. Can you help me catch the vision a bit here by giving examples of when you'd find this handy?

- JPEG metadata: Good thought, I didn't have that in my list. I'm also interesting in knowing examples of when this would come in handy. What EXIF information would you find useful to be able to look up?

- Animated GIFs. Another interesting thought. I wonder if animated GIFs would warrant a standalone app? Are you interested in creating animated GIFs? I haven't created any animated GIFs in the last 15 years... what sort of contexts are people creating them in these days?

- Portrait and landscape mode: Yup.

- Not forcing you to always save in the same folder: Interesting. I'm not quite following here. So, the problem you face is that you are wanting to save it into a particular folder, and it's annoying to have to go back and move the new image to that folder manually? This is something for me to think about. Currently my app only does image adjustments like brightness/contrast, and when you save it, it saves over the original file. (and makes a backup internally in the app incase you ever want to revert) Obviously that wouldn't be adequate if you were doing more significant edits such as MS Paint style changes, etc. The reason I save over the original image is that I find it annoying after fixing the brightness/contrast of an image to have the old crusty image still hanging around.

Thanks again for so much good feedback!

[danielbigham]

Facial recognition. And searching by person.

Link it with contacts and keep compatibility with Facebook tags and I will throw my money at you.

Posted via Z69

I looked into facial recognition for the first time last night and I was amazed by the number of APIs out there. Hopefully something like "OpenCV" is high enough quality to be compelling. It would be frustrating if the best free APIs out there were only mediocre -- the last thing a person wants is innacurate face tagging!

But yes, being able to do automatic face tagging and then to be able to search by person is a very cool feature.

Fascinating comment about "compatibility with Facebook tags". Let me see if I'm following properly: You can add tags to photos in Facebook (I think), and you're wondering about the ability to keep that in sync with the tags in the app. There would seem to be two possible directions:

1. Adding a tag in Facebook and wanting the app to see that tag and add it to the photo on the device.
2. Adding a tag to the photo on the device and wanting those tags to be propagated to Facebook when the photo is shared.
b. Even more advanced: When adding a tag later on the device to a photo already shared to Facebook, having the app apply that tag to the already-shared Facebook photo.

Is that the kind of thing you were getting at? For the above (1), (2) and (2b), are any one of those "most important"? Or were you wanting them all to work?

As for linking it with contacts -- could you clarify that? What kind of contact integration are you thinking of? (by the way, sadly, unless I'm mistaken, BB10 apps can only read email contacts, they can't read Facebook-derived contacts, etc. -- which in my case, since most of my contacts are from Facebook, is really frustrating)

[John Vieira]

Scenario 2. Tagging photos on device and having it propagate when shared on Facebook.

Scenario 1 and 2b are a really cool idea, but might be a lot tougher, and beyond what I was thinking.

For linking to contacts, I meant the following;

Take picture of X person. Go on photo tagging portion of the app, click tag. (perhaps making a box around that person's head, to help with multiple people in a shot)

Then it asks who to tag it as: either someone in your contacts, so it gets that's person's name (no real need for more than that) or as someone new (just type in a custom name)

Later if you upload that photo to Facebook, it keeps those tags.

If it helps at all, an older phone I had, the NokiaN9 had that as a default built-in function. It indexed people's faces as you tagged them in photos, and actually started predicting them pretty decently.

The N9 source code is open source, so maybe you'll wanna hit those forums and check it out? If I still had mine, I would shoot some video to show you what I am speaking.

Hopefully this helps

Posted via Z69

[tjseaman]

Adding text. Interesting. I hadn't even thought of that -- probably because I've rarely if ever done that to a photo. I'm curious when/why you find yourself wanting to add text to photos...

Glad to hear you love the Z10 camera!

Many times I've wanted to add text. Here is an example. (yes I didn't place it correctly, but I wanted to personalise the neat frame I used) I was able to add the name of my cat to personalise it further. I have other pics but don't really want to post pics of people without their consent or those of my kids. I know many people that would like to have this option.

This is able to be done on photo studio pro on both OS7 and PlayBook bit no option on BB10 yet for some reason.




Posted via CB10 - Z10 'Powered by BlackBerry'

[miguel89to]

Seems suggestions to a replacement Pictures app is good... I hate the app...

So..... ummmmm... is your ham big?? Lol

Posted via CB10 app with my trusty Z10

[danielbigham]

Scenario 2. Tagging photos on device and having it propagate when shared on Facebook.

Scenario 1 and 2b are a really cool idea, but might be a lot tougher, and beyond what I was thinking.

For linking to contacts, I meant the following;

Take picture of X person. Go on photo tagging portion of the app, click tag. (perhaps making a box around that person's head, to help with multiple people in a shot)

Then it asks who to tag it as: either someone in your contacts, so it gets that's person's name (no real need for more than that) or as someone new (just type in a custom name)

Later if you upload that photo to Facebook, it keeps those tags.

If it helps at all, an older phone I had, the NokiaN9 had that as a default built-in function. It indexed people's faces as you tagged them in photos, and actually started predicting them pretty decently.

The N9 source code is open source, so maybe you'll wanna hit those forums and check it out? If I still had mine, I would shoot some video to show you what I am speaking.

Hopefully this helps

Posted via Z69

Ok, got it. That makes perfect sense. Thanks!

[danielbigham]

Seems suggestions to a replacement Pictures app is good... I hate the app...

So..... ummmmm... is your ham big?? Lol

Posted via CB10 app with my trusty Z10

What is it about the native Pictures app that you dislike?

And yes, isn't it great having such a joke worthy last name?

[Omnitech]

Oh, sorry, didn't mean to be offensive

I never claimed what you said was offensive, I wrote that it was reactionary.

hmm, do we talk about the same Effetica? Filters are not silly if you know how and when to use them

So let me get this straight: you're telling me that I have to like a particular way of modifying images, because you have individually and solely determined that they are useful, and must be useful to others. Gotcha.

It's nice to be a critique especially if you have something constructive to propose...

So all my suggestions to the OP were apparently not "constructive" because either my opinions do not count, I don't think Effetica is a glorious gift to the human race, or... some other mysterious expectation.

Yes, that is why I called your original response reactionary.

[Omnitech]

What is it about the native Pictures app that you dislike?

Personally, my most common frustration with it is how it organizes images and makes it hard to drill down into desired folders without a lot of extra work.

For example, it does not show filenames at all in list or viewing mode - kind of an amazing omission. You have to go into "properties" separately on each image to see the filename.

And yes, isn't it great having such a joke worthy last name?

Gah, didn't even see that swipe until you pointed it out.

Better color tools with a better UI: Some elaboration might be helpful here. What kind of color controls would you feel would be important?

The usual - CMY levels, CMY gamma, brightness/contrast/saturation/hue/black level etc... but done with a UI that makes it easy to change and revert the changes. (Multi-level undo would be fab.) Since to me some of the major challenges are the small screen size and small controls, which often (for me) result in "over shooting" a setting, because the sliders are so hard to control. Or they interact in ways that makes it more time-consuming to get the result you want.

Something which for example popped up a "magnified dial" or something when adjusting a setting, which allowed more fine control than a small slider would be one idea. Having the ability to adjust multiple interrelated parameters in a 2-dimensional control surface might be another. Batch processing would be another great feature. Oftentimes you have non-ideal camera or lighting characteristics that you can effectively correct afterwards but not without a lot of tweaking. But if it takes me 5 minutes to adjust all the controls just right, and I then have 10 more images taken at the same time in the same place with the same correction needs, I'd be inclined to jump off a cliff if I had to spend 5 minutes on each of those 10 images just to try to replicate those same adjustments 10 times.

- High-quality re-sampling resize: Interesting. I know what you're getting at, but I'm not familiar with where this would be an issue for people. I've never noticed poor image resizing quality -- where do you find you notice it?

In the old days, simple image editing programs resized images by clipping or doubling the pixels. Perhaps this is not an issue with modern image editing apps (or zooming on the screen in general nowadays), but you really have to re-sample at the destination pixel density in order for the image quality to look decent. I may be showing my age here.

- Painting features: Interesting. I hadn't really thought of that. For whatever reason, doing MS Paint style stuff on a BB10 device hasn't felt like an obvious "want" for me, but perhaps it is for other people. Can you help me catch the vision a bit here by giving examples of when you'd find this handy?

Handy for making Memes/Lolcats/etc. Maybe even some "serious" things.

There's a freebie app I have tried called "Painter", but it's so rudimentary as to be hardly useful to me. (IE it has 2.. count 'em... 2 tools: simple drawing brush, and eraser. Oh boy! ) Among other things, I could really use a select/copy/paste transparent brush feature, where I can select part of an image and then paste it into another image. (Though this starts to get into territory that one might want to just use a desktop computer. )

Other features: flood fill, different types of brushes (ie "spraycan", "crayon", etc.), text overlay, fine rotation, "stretching" or "perspective stretching", etc.

- JPEG metadata: Good thought, I didn't have that in my list. I'm also interesting in knowing examples of when this would come in handy. What EXIF information would you find useful to be able to look up?

Ideally, all of it. But at the very least things like image creator details, image parameters, geolocation data, camera metadata and so on. Among other things, people need to be able to know what kind of potentially personal/confidential data they are shipping around inside a JPEG whenever they share it somewhere, and be able to strip it out if desired. Or add copyright data, etc.

- Animated GIFs. Another interesting thought. I wonder if animated GIFs would warrant a standalone app? Are you interested in creating animated GIFs? I haven't created any animated GIFs in the last 15 years... what sort of contexts are people creating them in these days?

Animated GIFS are very trendy these days, they are the "poor man's video" and used for things like memes, social network avatars (including in BBM), blog posts, and so on.

I don't know if I'd want to do a lot of creating (though probably some), but I want to be able to at the very least see the animation in an app without having to load it into a browser or something, and look at individual frames if I want to see what is actually there on each frame.

- Not forcing you to always save in the same folder: Interesting. I'm not quite following here. So, the problem you face is that you are wanting to save it into a particular folder, and it's annoying to have to go back and move the new image to that folder manually?

Yes. Effetica for example has a "default save folder" setting, which in reality means "ONLY save folder". If I want the edited image to be somewhere else (yanno, like, for example the folder the original was in???), I have to keep moving edited files out of the "save folder". I'd like the ability to specify the destination folder when I save an image if I want. (Or at LEAST some other options like "save in original folder" or something.) Worse, I cannot control the filename in Effectica so half the time I feel like I'm spending more time renaming and moving files after the fact than I actually spent editing it in Effetica.

This is something for me to think about. Currently my app only does image adjustments like brightness/contrast, and when you save it, it saves over the original file. (and makes a backup internally in the app incase you ever want to revert) Obviously that wouldn't be adequate if you were doing more significant edits such as MS Paint style changes, etc. The reason I save over the original image is that I find it annoying after fixing the brightness/contrast of an image to have the old crusty image still hanging around.

I think that's fine as option. But as your faux stereotypical computer-geek OCD type, I oftentimes like to have personal control over all those things, and love to have options.

Thanks again for so much good feedback!

The pleasure is mine.