B
Brad Ward
Guest
Non-Nexus Android devices come with a default photo gallery application, but sometimes they aren’t all we want it to be. Many basic photo gallery apps are missing extra features or just look downright terrible. Android is a popular platform and, as a result, there’s a variety of different photo gallery apps available for all.
Some developers have even gone as far as recreating Apple’s iOS photo gallery app under a different name. Whether you want a professional photo gallery app straight from Google or a small-scale photo gallery from an independent developer, Google Play has something for you.
Google Photos
Google Photos has quickly risen to the top as far as photo galleries go. Not only is it a visually pleasing app to view photos in, but it’s also smart in that you can view them by year, the location a photo was taken at, and so on. There’s also the nice added benefit of free cloud storage for all of your photos. Granted, they’re compressed in a smaller, low quality format, but who wouldn’t want all of their photos backed up into the cloud for viewing on any device?
Piktures Gallery
Piktures Gallery claims to be the first gesture-based photo gallery for managing all of your photos and videos. This does everything a photo gallery app would do (it even has a GIF player) and takes quality up a notch. It has a fast and beautiful interface, lets you resize photos before sharing, and everything is very intuitive. It truly is gesture-based, as almost everything can be accessed through swiping and sliding. The user has little interaction with menus, except when selecting different views, categories, and so on.
MyRoll Gallery
MyRoll is a well designed replacement for your Android device’s stock photo gallery. Not only that, but it claims to be the first gallery to be Android Wear-compatible. It’s similar to Google Photos in that it’s an intelligent gallery, allowing you to organize all of your photos in a collage view based around events, data, and even location. There’s also a “Smart Mode,” which lets you highlight the best photos from your gallery and put them at the forefront. Similar to Google Photos, MyRoll will also notify of you of moments from the past, so you can look back and reflect on that trip to Paris or your child’s first birthday party.
Flickr
Flickr from Yahoo is another fun photo gallery app, as it just this year got a big overhaul. Not only can you upload and view all of your photos in the Flickr app, but you can also edit them with Flickr’s online photo editing features. There’s no need to worry about a lack of storage space, as Flickr gives you up to 1000GB of cloud storage for all of your photos and videos. And don’t worry about the interface, that’s one of the many things that was changed in the overhaul, and frankly, it’s very intuitive and user friendly now!
QuickPic Gallery
QuickPic is another gallery used by millions of Android users. It features a colorful theme and modern design (not Material Design, unfortunately) to help you easily find and access photos. Unique to QuickPic is its slideshow feature, which lets you view all of your high quality photos in a slideshow format. You can even exclude certain albums from the slideshow if you want to only go through a few moments with friends or family. It also has a neat file transfer feature, which allows you to share photos with other devices over the Wi-Fi.
A+ Gallery
The A+ Gallery takes the iPhone-style photo gallery and brings it to Android with a Material Design style. There isn’t anything particularly special or unique about this gallery, just that it takes the iPhone-style design and incorporates it to Android with a twist. You can view your moments based on year, collections, and moments. All of your photos can be synced or backed up to other cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive as well as the ability to transfer them over to Facebook.
FOTO Gallery
Last up is a unique gallery called FOTO, which allows you to organize thousands of photos in under a minute. With the simple tap of a button, FOTO can organize all of your photos in varying folders. For example, selfies will go in a selfie folder, and family will go in a “family” folder. The organization isn’t perfect, so some photos might not end up where they belong, but it works for the most part.
FOTO Gallery also has all the basic search and view functions, but in addition to that, it also has Chromecast integration. If you’re not familiar with that, it will essentially let you cast your photos and videos to a TV with a Chromecast device in it. It’s very handy for getting a big-picture view of all of your moments!
Closing
There’s an insurmountable amount of photo gallery apps in the Play Store. That said, there’s way too many for us to include on this list, and we’ve no doubt missed some gems out there.
That said, we’re opening up the comments box to you, the reader! We’d love to hear what your favorite photo gallery/photo editing tools are. Be sure to let us know in the comments section below.
Come comment on this article: Best photo gallery apps [2015]
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