After a brief hiatus from the App Store, the iPhone version of Dropico is back and updated to version 2.0.1. The new update cryptically says only “Bug fixes”. I suspect one or two of those bugs were what caused the app to go away for a while.
Dropico is a social photo app for iOS and Android devices. It connects to just about every social photo network you would use except Instagram. It’s improved a lot since version 1.0, but I still found a few bugs in this version.
Like Instagram, you can choose one of Dropico’s one-click effects before sharing your photos. Don’t like the 26 in the standard set? Now you can download more effects right from the app. While not all the additional effects are great, there are a few interesting ones. Most are decent. It’s a cool feature that allows Dropico to update effects without updating the app. The price is right, too — free! You can also stack filters on filters — a cool feature that Instagram and picplz lack.
Simultaneously upload to up to eleven of the most popular social networks and online services: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, DailyBooth, Posterous, Foursquare, Flickr, Picasa, PhotoBucket, ImageShack — it’ll even upload processed images to your Dropbox. Your social photo logins are stored in the cloud, so if you have to reinstall the app for any reason, you only have to login with your Dropico account and all your other logins are still available. That’s a great feature that saves time and frustration. Dropico still has more social photo sharing options than just about any other photo app.
While Dropico doesn’t have it’s own network, recent updates now allow you to “piggyback” on Facebook and Twitter by sending privately to groups of friends. This isn’t bad, but it still doesn’t allow you to browse and discover new photography like Instagram does. That downstream flow is half the fun of the social photo apps. If iPhone users and Android users could easily discover photography across the network like Instagram or picplz, Dropico would very likely become the app to set the standard.
After updating on my iPhone, the app crashed every time I tried to open the camera. I deleted Dropico and reinstalled it and it works fine now. No matter what the settings are, the app does not save the original image for me. It only saves the cropped and processed version to the iPhone’s camera roll which caused me to lose my original, high-res images — maddening if I wanted to work the photo in another app. Dropico still only saves processed images at 700×700 pixels.
For one-click instant iPhoneography, there’s no other social photo app that can beat the number of networks Dropico talks to. While not perfect, recent updates to the app have improved it a lot. For shooting and sharing, Dropico broadcasts.
Dropico is free and works on any iDevice running iOS 4.1 or newer. There’s also an Android version available.
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