You have a lot of photos on your smartphone, but not all of them are great. Sorting through them is usually a pain. But you can simplify the process with apps that show you a preview of each photo, and let you swipe in either direction to keep it or delete it.
For iPhone or iPad users, there's Flic ($0.99), arguably the better of the two apps. Android users will have to use SlidePick [Broken URL Removed] beta (free), which doesn't cost a thing but isn't so smooth.
Why Swipe?
I don't know about you, but those "this app will automatically select the best photo out of similar ones" never work perfectly for me. I prefer to sort my images manually, but it's a painful process, whether on iOS or Android. Thankfully, there's a better way, inspired by Tinder.
The dating app asks you to swipe a photo right or left, to indicate whether you are interested in the person you see or not. So some smart developers applied the same idea to your photo gallery. Swipe right to indicate you want to keep the photo you see, swipe left to indicate you want to delete it.
Use it for a few minutes and you'll wonder where this has been all your life. Swiping is perhaps the most intuitive way to go through your photo gallery and pick what you want to keep. With proper application, there's a lot you can do with your photo stream.
What If I Accidentally Delete a Photo I Want to Keep?
Relax, neither app is so prone to simple mistakes. Both of them have an Undo button for the last image, in case of errors. But apart from that, there are other failsafes.
In Flic, swiping left transfers photos to a temporary trash can. When you are done going through a month's worth of photos, you can choose whether to keep those images or not. Plus, Flic shows how many megabytes you are saving if you choose to delete.
SlidePick does not want to delete photos from your memory. Its main job is to help you make albums from your favourite photos. Swiping left discards a photo from an album you're making, swiping right keeps it. However, there is a trash can option for any photo too, so instead of swiping, you can use the "unlike", "delete" and "like" buttons to make your decisions.
I found SlidePick a little unintuitive though, so my suggestion is to make albums, share them on Facebook or social platform of choice, and then get rid of all your images. Your photos are backed up on Facebook and you save memory too.
The Problems With Flic and SlidePick
Flic has a unique issue: it only goes back chronologically, taking you month by month. So if you want to sort through photos from May 2013, you'll have to go through October 2014-June 2013 to get there. It can be annoying.
SlidePick's big issue for me is that there's no option to change the "swipe left" action to "Delete". That would change how I use the app, for the better. Apart from that, I was irked by the bugs. The swiping works perfectly, but interacting with your album after you make it is a hit-or-miss affair. Sometimes, the previews don't show up; once, it wouldn't let me select any photo.
That said, the app is in beta, so I won't be too harsh. These are easy-to-fix bugs, and the usefulness or both apps can't be denied.
Do You Need These Apps?
If you don't sort through your photos every time you take a few new ones, then these apps are fantastic. It's the simple, repetitive mechanism that makes them brilliant: see a photo -> choose an action -> see next photo…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo_YAcPStRY
Of course, not everyone wants to sort through photos on their phone itself. If you prefer to handle your images on your computer, then Picasa is still the best photo manager around. It's also worth remembering that the best way of reducing the number of photos you need to delete is by taking better photos in the first place.
What do you want to see from apps like Flic and SlidePick?
Image Credits: Smart Phone Via Shutterstock