Photo Stats Review

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Photo Stats Review

at 11:06 AM

Photo Stats Review

By Bonnie Eisenman on August 16th, 2011
Our Rating:

:: SLEEK AND SIMPLE
iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad

Photo Stats combs through the metadata from your Camera Roll and delivers shiny infographics about your photo-taking habits. When, where, and how do you love to take photos? Photo Stats has the answers. An uncomplicated app, Photo Stats nevertheless delivers on its pledges.

Developer: Dear Future Astronaut AB
Price: $0.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0

iPhone Integration Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
User Interface Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Re-use / Replay Value Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Overall Rating: 3.17 out of 5 stars

The camera built into all current iPod Touches and iPhones is incredibly handy—carrying a camera requires effort, but most people will always have their phones in their pocket or purse. As a result, many of us have built up sizable Camera Rolls. But these photos aren’t simply photos; the iPhone also encodes a wealth of information when it saves a new photo, such as when, where, and how the photo was taken. Photo Stats is an app that takes the iPhone’s Camera Roll, processes that information, and spits out a series of shiny infographics that provide the user with potentially interesting data about their photos.

Really, this is a simple app, and one unlikely to warrant more than a few uses. Literally all that Photo Stats does is produce these shiny, descriptive infographics. The infographics can be interesting, and include information such as where, at what time of day, on what days, using which app, and with what settings you took the most pictures. (Really, I recommend looking at the images in this post.) From there, Photo Stats can export said infographics via email, Facebook, or Twitter; saving the infographics to the iPhone itself is also an option.

But however interesting that information is, Photo Stats is still a one-trick pony. True, more photos mean different statistics, so theoretically over time Photo Stats could display different trends. However, there’s no option to restrict the data to a certain time period. As a result it’s hard to imagine opening Photo Stats more than a few times.

Data junkies and infographic lovers may find something to appreciate here, and the infographics themselves are lovely and provide an interesting glimpse at oft-ignored photograph metadata. There’s nothing wrong with Photo Stats itself. However, it’s clearly not a “useful” app—it’s just a novelty, meant for a handful of uses. Given that fact, Photo Stats delivers on its promises, but those promises just weren’t so big to begin with.