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picplz – The Free All-In-One Photo Taking and Sharing Application!

Posted Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 at 12:34 pm by Jonathan Lonczak 0 Comments

User Rating4.00/5

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picplz: Snap a pic. Apply an effect. Share with friends everywhere and 100% Free! picplz is a fun way to share your life through photos. Features: give your photos that retro camera look. Use picplz to style your photos with effects like vintage 70′s, black & white, toy camera, etc. Similar to Instagram, Hipstamatic, Vignette, plus more! Easy sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous & Foursquare. Instantly save your photos to your Dropbox account.

Price: Free

Tested on: Sony Xperia Play, HTC Droid Incredible 2
Content Rating: Medium Maturity

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• All-in-one camera replacement application!
• Automatic Dropbox uploads after photos are taken!
• Share photos on many of your favorite networks including: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and others!
• Over eighteen photo effects!
• Large online photography community!

Cons

• Not as many effects or quality effects as competitors like Vignette or Camera Zoom FX.
• Google+ provides a better automatic upload solution with integrated photo sharing with only the friends  you want.
• Application interface does not match the artistic feel of the social community.
• Needs a more streamlined setup experience for new users to take advantage of all of its services.

Features:

PicPlz is an excellent application designed to both replace your standard camera application and to allow you to share your photos with your friends, family, and the world. PicPlz features a gigantic online social community where you can share your photos with anyone you wish, integrated Dropbox support with automatic upload, and 18 different photo effects. Best of all PicPlz is free!

PicPlz is designed as a camera replacement application for your Android device. Under the settings menu in the application you are capable of enabling PicPlz to automatically launch whenever the shutter key is pressed on your Android device. The way the application works is that it integrates with your device’s camera and then allows you to add effects after a photo is taken. For example, if I wanted to take a black and white photo of a vase of roses I would press my phone’s camera key, PicPlz would load my phone’s camera application and then snap the photo, and then I would be able to add on the black and white effect after the photo is taken.

There are 18 different effects in PicPlz. These include standard Black and White Effects, Sepia, Little Plastic Lens, Cross Process, High Contrast Monochrome, C-41, Redscale, and others. Each of these effects is available immediately after taking a picture and the effects portion of the application allows you to see a preview of what the photo would look like with each of the selected effects. This makes the effects portion easy to use and prevents you from accidentally choosing the wrong one.

After choosing the effects for your photo you are ready to post it for the rest of the world. One of the awesome things about PicPlz is that it has the capability to automatically upload your photos to your Dropbox account. All you need to do is input your Dropbox information in to PicPlz and to enable the Dropbox sync option for the application and all of your photos will automatically be synced that are taken with the application. If you don’t want to share your photos through Dropbox, but do want to share your photos with others; it has many other sharing options including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, Foursquare, and of course PicPlz!

When you upload your photos to PicPlz you are able to show those photos to others who are following in the community. This allows you to share your photos to the whole world including friends and family. Unfortunately PicPlz is not like Google+. You can not select specific users to share photos with inside of the application; so any photos uploaded to their sharing service is shared with everyone in the world. However, this is a great way to show interesting photos to both friends and strangers alike.

Finally, you can also search for interesting photos from other users. PicPlz has an extremely large community of users and there are many interesting photos to be discovered within the app. If you are looking for some artistic photography to use as your phone’s background PicPlz is a good place to go.

Usefulness:

This is very useful for backing up your photos to Dropbox and to share them with others through PicPlz and other services. It automates the picture sharing process allowing you to easily share your photos with others. It even allows you to add many basic effects to your photos and provides a workable alternative to the phone’s stock camera application.

PicPlz also provides an excellent venue to share your artistic photography with others and to discover new art from other users. The application is designed to allow you to follow users whose photography you enjoy and to discover new photographers to follow.

Ease of Use:

PicPlz is fairly easy to use. However, I would like to see Dropbox integration plus integration with other sharing services built in to the initial set up of the application. This would make features like automatic upload, and using PicPlz as your phone’s primary camera application less confusing and more streamlined for the average user.

Frequently Used:

I use it very infrequently primarily because I use Google+ for all of my photo sharing needs. I find that Google Plus’ automatic photo upload is easier to use and allows me to share photos with others easier than PicPlz allows me to do. While the automatic Dropbox feature was a game changer for me in the past, in the present Google+ provides a much easier to use and streamlined alternative.

I also do not use the app for photo effects, because better applications are out there.; such as Camera Zoom FX, Vignette, FxCamera, and Paper Camera. While PicPlz provides a decent free alternative, many paid and free applications offer more functionality when it comes to creating artistic and goofy photos to share with friends.

Interface:

The interface for PicPlz is relatively easy to use, but also very plain and lacking in a lot of the features that other applications provide. Personally, I would like to see a much more artistic approach to the user interface of this application to match the feel of the PicPlz community. I would also like to see them add in automatic uploads for more social services and a greater variety of photo effects.

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