One of my biggest soapboxes throughout the years here on Life In LoFi has been to raise awareness of low-res apps and how most of the time these apps do not do iPhoneographers a favor. Over the years, I’ve softened my position as there are many mobile photographers who only share to Facebook and Instagram and they really don’t want or need higher resolution photos.
I’m not one of them and still prefer full res, native res, and high res photo apps. I’ve preached about it here before from the perspective of an angry user. Here’s a great post by John Balestrieri from a developer’s standpoint about why some photo apps do and some apps don’t support high-res output. >>>
John Balestrieri is the developer of the popular Percolator and Popsicolor apps. This is a pretty straightforward and thorough look at the problems some app developers face and that some choose to ignore.
John writes:
As a user of photo apps, I think native resolution is great to have but full resolution support is even better.
As an photo app developer, I know that it’s sometimes hard to support even native resolution, so we pick a resolution we think is reasonable based on “how we think people will want to use the image” and support that. Then the App Store reviews start rolling in…
It’s a great, extensive read that covers camera hardware limitations, device memory, and even developer experience and ignorance.
This post first appeared as a forum post on The iPhoneography Blog and Life In LoFi’s iPhoneographers.net. He’s also shared a copy on his own site, tinrocket.com for periodic updating. Click here to read the updated entire post, “Why doesn’t every iOS photo app support high-resolution output?“ by John Balestrieri on Tinrocket.com.
••••
Life In LoFi keeps a list of iPhone photo apps and their resolutions. Check our “iPhone Photo App Compatibility“ page before you buy a new photo app.
~~~~
