Monday, September 24, 2012

Two Favorite Photo Apps (and more Baptism Pictures)

Have you discovered the Walgreens phone app? It lets you upload pictures from your phone and have them developed at the Walgreens of your choice. I absolutely LOVE it! I am now taking ALL of my pictures on my iPhone but I am terrible about connecting it to my laptop to download and eventually print my pictures.

Apparently, the Walgreens app lets you do other cool pharmacy related things, but I have only tried the picture developing. In my world that's WAY more important than medicine! The app can also link up to Facebook to print the pictures you post there and they have this "printworthy" feature that prints your pics WITH all Facebook comments. That could be fun for something like the picture I posted letting everyone know that we were expecting, but I haven't tried it yet.

What I have done a lot of, is upload pictures as events happen. Lydia has a soccer game, I upload the best photos. Joshua is baptized, I upload the best photos. The app only lets you upload 5 pictures at a time, but you can do multiple sets if 5. You also have to print everything that you upload in the same size, so some pictures I upload twice to get them as 4x6 and as 5x6. My biggest issue right now is that I upload in such small batches, I sometimes forget to pick them up right away. So far my local Walgreens hasn't minded holding my photos for a few weeks.

This weekend, the Walgreens app came in particularly helpful as I was REALLY pressed for time but I wanted pictures of Joshua in his christening clothing on display at his party. I only had a few minutes to take pictures of him on Thursday night and then took a few more Saturday morning. I uploaded them while out of town Saturday afternoon and picked them up later that night with just enough time to get them in frames for Sunday.

My only other issue with printing directly from my phone is that some photos really NEED editing. When I was using my camera and laptop, I loved photoshop to brighten or enhance an image. I tried the actual photoshop app on my phone but was disappointed that it lacked many of the features available on the computer. Then I found the photogene app.

Photogene let's me do pretty much everything that photoshop lets me do on the computer. I can do typical stuff like crop a picture, but I can also adjust color saturation, selectively blur, and even clone areas. Above and below, you can see a few before and after pictures from the baptism this weekend.

Finally, here are a few more pictures, taken on my phone, edited with photogene, and printed at Walgreens using their app.

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