Let’s face it, there are photos scattered all around the net. Some of them are on your iPhone or iPad, others are on Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, or 500px. And don’t get me started about Google image search… Wouldn’t it be great to have an app that would beautifully display photos from various sources in a beautiful, customizable slideshow? Enter UniFrame from ComX USA.
Overview
UniFrame is a customizable photo viewer that allows you to view your photos, and the photos of other users on your iOS device. UniFrame allows you to display the photos from your Photo Gallery, as well as photos from Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, 500px, and Google image search in a beautiful, customizable slideshow.
When you first start the app, it displays a helpful tutorial on how to use taps and gestures to control the app. This was a nice and welcome touch. Too many apps just throw you into the app with no helpful hints, leaving you to search the online or built-in help files, this is a model other developers should follow.
Setup is easy, simply swipe down on the screen to access the control menus. The menu contains three sections, “Photos,” “Frames,” and “Effects.”
“Photos” allows you to select where the app will grab photos for display. Your options include: “Photo Gallery,” “Flickr,” “Instagram,” “500px,” Google Images,” and “Facebook.”
“Frames” lets you set the type of display you want to use to display your photos. Here, you can set the number of photos to show at once on the screen, and how the display is arranged on the screen. You can display from 1 to 8 photos at the same time, in a variety of layouts. If none of the included layouts strike your fancy, an in-app purchase option will allow you to buy an “Extended frames pack” for 99 cents. As well as the layout and number of photos, you can also adjust the color and thickness of the frames around the photos.
“Effects” allows the user to set a delay for how long photos are displayed before the next batch of photos in the queue begins loading, and also how new photos will appear. Photos can slide from a corner, the top of the screen, from the side of the screen, dissolve, or randomly appear using any of the effects.
I used the app on both the iPhone and the iPad, and found that the iPhone, as you would expect, worked better as a convenient way to display my photos on the go, while the iPad worked better as a digital photo frame replacement.
In both versions, tapping on any photo in the multiple photo display will show that photo full screen. In all cases, the transitions were smooth, and showed no signs of stuttering. I did find that occasionally the iPhone version would not allow me to bring photos full screen. Exiting the app and restarting it seemed to fix the problem.
The app did bomb out on me a couple of times on both the iPad and iPhone, usually while I was making a change in a menu. Photo display, however, ran smoothly and with no issues. I did have some issues getting the app to display my Facebook Albums, but that may have been because of settings on my Facebook account.
Verdict
UniFrame makes an excellent stand-in for a digital photo frame, and since it displays photos from so many different sources in addition to just the photos on your iOS device, it makes a great tool for viewing photos from others also.
It would be nice to be able to specify the Instagram and Flickr accounts the photos are drawn from, perhaps that can be added in a future update. Another nice addition would be the ability to view information about the location the photo was loaded from.
UniFrame is a great option to display photos from your own albums and other sources in a clean and attractive manner. The variety of frames and options make the app a nice one to have on hand.
Rating:4/5[rating:4]
Price: $1.99 – Available for the iPhone and iPad in the App Store. [DIRECT LINK]
Pros:
- The app collects photos from various sources, and displays them in one spot, always good.
- Easy to setup, and change options on the fly.
- Smooth animations and effects.
Cons:
- It would be nice to select the online accounts that the photos are drawn from for such services as Flickr and Instagram.
- I had trouble getting my Facebook photos to display, as I said, it may have been a setting on my account preventing the display of the photos.
- The app did bomb out from time to time, usually when I was adjusting something in a menu. It didn’t happen often enough to be a deal breaker though.
*The above review was commissioned by the developer in accordance with our app review policy, and has been written in an objective, unbiased fashion.
