Saturday, August 25, 2018

Photo Fun with Android: Filters & Posters & Frames.. Oh My!

*I want to thank Ember Burns up front for generously lending me photos of her to use to illustrate this article. She is an actress and model I first became familiar with in the award winning horror short Beyond Repair. I hope to use more pics of her in the other articles in the series, but you don't have to wait for them to see more of her. You can visit her WebsiteFacebook page and find her on Instagram.

I have not kept it a secret that I do not accept crapware. The majority of Android apps are exactly that; loaded with ads they shove down your throat and many times restricted to the point of being useless. But look around for ad free and fully functional photo apps and the crap gets pretty deep. I'd be willing to say that 99% or better of photo apps for Android are adware and duplicitous crapware, and it has taken some time to dig through that deep stench, literally a few thousand apps, to find a handful of functional apps without ads.

Movie Poster Maker is misnamed because it's actually a frames app. You can select your photo, or take one, and insert it into a photo included in the app. You can also apply effects to your photo, leaving the frame untouched, as well add text. Unfortunately you are limited to a single text field, using as much text as will fit in the frame if you wish. I was attempting to create a creepy movie poster with this in the first picture. Obviously creating a movie poster on a phone is a whole different challenge than when I do it on my laptop. The APK file is 6.4mb and it will work with Android 2.3.2 and up.**





PicSay (removed link because it does contain ads after so many uses) allows me to do on my phone what my friends on Twitter and Facebook likely hoped I would not be able to do; add captions with speech balloons to their photos. There are some limitations to this app, but what this lite version is capable of is a lot, and a lot of fun. You can choose various colors of text balloons as well crop and resize your photos with it too. It includes some editing features and filters including a distort filter. PicSay does also integrate with Android default sharing, so if you are using another app and you need to resize your photo or you don't have an option to save it, you can share it with this app and then do that. The APK file is 1.8mb and it will work with Android 4.0 and up.**



Photo Filters is accurately named. It is simply a collection of 27 filters you can apply to your photos. Even though most are simple filters some do have customizations you can play around with. Choose or take a photo and the app will show a screen with thumbnails of all the filters. Click on a thumbnail to see the effect on your photo. The APK file is 533kb and it will work with Android 2.1 and up.**





Poster Frame Movies is a collection of pre-made thematic parody posters into which you can insert your photo as part of the poster. These are nice looking, full fledged movie posters, but there is no customization outside of moving your photo around and resizing it with pinch and zoom. It is something that can be fun and something you can share on social media. Both the sample below and the header photo for this article were made with it. The APK file is 17mb and it will work with Android 2.3.2 and up.**



**Newer versions of Android can have bugs that cause crashes or prevent older apps from running.

I will follow this up with more articles on ad free photo fun apps and an ad free full fledged photo editor.

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