Best Photo Management Alternative for Android
Your phone is probably the centerpiece of your digital photo collection, so you can have a better photo manager as well. With its tagging system, easy-to-browse interface, and user-friendly privacy features, Focus is our top choice.
Focus
Platform: Android Price: Free ($ 3.17 to unlock all features) Download page
Functions
- The tagging system can add multiple tags for each photo for easier organization.
- Create your own tags or choose from ready-made tag collections
- Gesture-based browsing makes it easy to browse multiple albums
- Prevent surveillance by locking the screen on one photo with 4-6 password
- Hide photos in a “vault” protected by a password or fingerprint sensor.
- Automatically detects folders and generates individual tags
- The Recent tag highlights recently taken or opened photos in applications.
- Read more information from photo metadata
- Quick access to the camera app
- Basic crop and rotate tools
- Optional light or dark mode
Where is it best
Focus takes a rather unique approach to managing your photo collections. While other apps tend to sort your photos into folders or try to group them by date, Focus lets you create tags that you can apply to photos based on their subject matter, related locations, or whatever criteria you choose. … You can also apply multiple tags to a single photo, so you don’t have to arbitrarily combine multiple images into one group if they might belong to many.
The main screen of the app has a clever design that allows you to view the tags as well as what’s inside them. Vertically, you can scroll through the list of tags. Below each tag, you will see two lines of thumbnails. You can swipe horizontally to view all photos in that tag. This simple yet user-friendly design makes sorting images easy. You can see this in action in the video above.
For those who care about privacy, Focus can also help you hide sensitive photos or prevent surveillance. When viewing a single photo, you can enter lock mode, which will require the user to enter a 4-6 digit PIN before they can navigate between photos or view other albums. Convenient when you need to transfer your phone to a friend. For extended cover, you can put your photos in Vault, which is password-protected or fingerprint-protected if your phone has a sensor. Keep in mind that Vault cannot yet protect other apps like Google Photos or even the file manager from finding your photos, but it’s a useful deterrent for your main app.
Where it fails
Some of Focus’s best features (like custom tags and dark theme) are pay-locked. The cost of entry is not high ($ 3.17), but given the Focus competes in a crowded market, especially with its own Google Photos app, that could be a limiting factor for some. However, the basic interface is already quite innovative and there are many predefined tags, so even the free version is quite different from the competition.
There aren’t many photo-editing options in focus either, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing . Not every photo management app needs to reinvent the wheel in this regard. With Focus, you can crop to specific aspect ratios or arbitrarily, and you can rotate the image, but that’s about it. If you want to do anything else, you will need another application. The only downside here is that Focus doesn’t let you jump directly to another app’s editor, which is pretty frustrating.
Competition
Our previous pick in this category, QuickPic is still strong and more importantly free! You can organize images into folders, view them in a grid or list format, and exclude specific folders from being displayed. It is not as flexible as the tagging system that Focus has, but it is very attractive because it is completely free.
F-Stop Media Gallery also offers tagging functionality in addition to the usual folder-oriented organization. It can display your photos on a map based on their geotags and open photos for editing in external applications. The interface is not as nice as the Focus, but it does have a lot of features that might be appealing to power users.
It would also be an oversight if we didn’t mention Google Photos . We’ve covered many of the features of the new Photos app , and it’s pretty amazing. It can search by subject using image analysis, auto-enhancement features make editing easier, and you can automatically upload any photos you take to google cloud storage. It also comes with most Android phones by default, so you probably already know it is and we wanted to give other apps a try. However, it’s worth checking out what the photos can do if you haven’t already.