Daily iPhone App: Collect: Photo a Day lets you remember each day with a photo
As part of my New Year's resolutions, I've decided to take a daily photo of my children to see how they change over the course of a year. I've tried several photo journal apps over the past few days and the one I'm enjoying the most right now is Collect: Photo a Day.
Collect is a solid photography app that focuses on recording and storing your memories. It has an alert system that reminds you at the same time each day to take a photo. It also supports multiple albums so you can store an image for each of your pets, the meals that you cook or anything else you want to track each day.
The app lets you open any album in your collection and either import a photo from your camera roll or take a photo using your iPhone's camera. When you are adding a photo to your album, you can include a caption, tags and a note to record that moment in time. If one photo is not enough, Collect allows you to store multiple photos each day in your album. Once you save your daily photo, Collect returns you to a gorgeous month view that shows your photo thumbnails for each day.
Collect is the latest app from The Lens Lab Pty, and it hit the App Store in late December. Like most launch titles, the app is missing a feature or two. The most noticeable omission I noticed was the lack of a backup solution for your photos and their associated details.
Collect stores all your photos on your iPhone, and there is no way to upload them to a cloud service like Dropbox or export them in bulk. You can select an option to add each photo to your camera roll automatically, but this feature only saves the photo and not the added caption, tags or note.
The saving grace is the ability to export a daily photo from your album and save it to the iOS photo album or share it via email. When you export from your album, the photo is arranged into a card that contains the image and all the detailed information you added in your daily entry. It's tedious to remember to backup manually each day, so hopefully a future version of Collect will include some form of automatic backup.
Collect: Photo a Day is available for free from the iOS App Store.
Update: The app developer contacted me to let me know that a cloud backup solution is in the works.
