Polymo makes organizing your iPhone photos easy

Polymo is a new camera app for iPhone with some nice twists. It just came out today, but I've been testing it for a while and I can say that at its US$1.99 pricetag, it's a really slick tool to have.

This isn't a fancy photo app with a bunch of filters, grids and other features. It's a gesture-driven tool for both taking and organizing your photos. The main idea is that it lets you enter tags before you start shooting, and then assigns those tags to all of the photos in the current session.

This is great when you head to a party or out for a hike. You can tag the photos in advance and know that you'll be able to find them when you want them again, instead of flipping endlessly through your camera roll.

Of course, Polymo can also add tags in post, and it can import photos from the Camera Roll. Because iOS doesn't really offer any shareable tagging methods, Polymo's tags are currently only valid within the app.

You can search your tags in two ways. First, you can browse a list of all your tags, which is handy because you don't always remember what arcane word you might have used a year ago. Second, of course, you can type part of a tag name into a filter bar. Either way, you can build tag criteria and narrow down your search. If you're in the habit of creating logical tag taxonomies with a defined hierarchy, that should be easy...

I love Polymo's interface because it's minimal without being lazy, and because it makes good use of gestures. I do not like trying to tap small hit targets on my phone, so any time I can just swipe screens aside and flick photos out of the way, I'm happy. You can tap-and-drag to select multiple photos in the browser, too. It even has a one-finger zoom when viewing photos. Just double-tap-and-hold, then swipe up and down to zoom the photo in and out.

Lastly, if you have pictures you want to keep safe from prying eyes (or Facebook, or the NSA...), Polymo has password-protected mode you can enable for certain photos.

It's $1.99 and has some great ideas that are well executed. Check it out in the App Store.