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The venerable Photoshop-like, iPhone image editing workhorse Photogene for iPhone has just been updated to version 2.6. It now supports all of the cool iOS 4 features, EXIF data, and even FTP uploads. But this new update also has a very annoying feature which will frustrate anyone who prefers to keep their location data private.

Right away I noticed that Photogene got a new icon and a new splash screen. Gone is the teal highlight which has been replaced with a more neutral gray.

The new 2.6 update supports the spiffy iOS 4 features fast app switching, background operation, and the iPhone 4 retina display. Photogene now preserves the EXIF data in your photos. There are some cool new sharing features — upload to Flickr or individual Facebook albums from within the app — really cool integration with Facebook.  You can even upload directly to an FTP site from within the app — an excellent on-the-go feature for webmasters. Photogene now also allows custom sizes when downsampling and saving images.

This new update is also iOS 4 only. iPhone OS 3 is not supported in the update. Owners of older iPhones or those who have chosen not to update to iOS 4 are out of luck and won’t be able to run this update. I suspect you’ve now reached the end of the line with this app.

If you are not a fan of Location Services or prefer to keep it turned off because of privacy concerns or battery drain, you won’t be able to use load images from your camera roll in Photogene. The app locks you out of opening images from your camera roll with a screen that demands your turn on Location Services. This is an extremely annoying feature for those who don’t use location data for our photos or who don’t really care about EXIF data. I understand that this is to preserve EXIF data within the images, but I would prefer to be given the choice to use location data instead of it being a requirement. I hope this “feature” is made optional quickly. Photogene will work, however, in airplane mode when all of the iPhone’s radios have been switched off. Go figure.

Photogene 2.6 is a needed update with some cool features and good iOS 4 support, but this update will hack off some users. For those with older iPhones, it’s just a matter of time before even more developers drop support for the end-of-lifed OS in order to better support the features of the newer versions of iOS.

The update is free and will run on any iPhone or iPod Touch that runs iOS 4.

App Store link: Photogene

=M=

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UPDATED: Actually, when I first wrote this, I was “seriously annoyed.”