If Your Photos Are Untidy, There's an App for That

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Image: Flickr, spcummings

By Dani Fankhauser2014-04-14 03:22:42 UTC

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Name: Tidy

One-Liner Pitch: Tidy Photo is a mix between functionality of Mailbox and nostalgia of Timehop.

Why It's Taking Off: Smartphone photo albums are exploding and users need a better way to sort and thus enjoy their photos.

The camera in your smartphone is one of its best features, but the photos are catching up with us. If you have photos by the thousands of everything from last month's vacation to a picture of your home Wi-Fi password, you might appreciate Tidy Photo app, which aims to help you sort the trove.

See also: 12 Most Cliché Photos on Instagram

The app sorts the photos on your smartphone by distance, time or shape (i.e., panorama) — so my pictures from a recent vacation in San Francisco naturally grouped together, along with photos I'd taken at a wedding in the region a year prior. Similarly, all the photos taken near or at work are grouped together, and the group of photos taken near my family's home are all from trips to visit. Once grouped, you can then decide if those photos merit their own album and swipe right to create it, making some order out of the chronological mess. You can also archive photos by swiping left.

It's a step in the right direction for a growing problem. Personally, I use an app called CameraSync to mass upload my iPhone photos to Flickr, which allows me to delete them off my phone, but they're still not sorted. Tidy could make sorting as habitual as snapping photos, which will pay of in the long term.

Your default photo app will not be affected but Tidy plans to eventually sync the now-sorted photos across devices and also allow you to upload full albums to Facebook, Flickr or Google+ or other social sites (right now you can add a group of photos to Facebook or individual photos to Instagram or Twitter, but you'd have to regroup photos into a Facebook album).

Tidy launched in November 2013 for iOS and January 2014 for Android. The app has more than 600,000 users, primarily in China, South Korea (where the company is based) and Thailand but the app is starting to catch on in the US and Europe.

"People now are having joy of instant photo sharing, but don’t have a right way to enjoy thousands photos," says Kwangbae Lee, product manager. "Our goal is giving them the pleasure of enjoying curated photos. I think this explains how we approach to our product and users."

Another photo app that enables better photo sorting is Yoovi, which is targeted towards parents and enables families to create private photo albums and invite family and friends to view via their phone's contact list. Dropbox also recently released a photo app of its own called Carousel.

In the future, Tidy plans to make photo grouping smarter by combining factors like time and place, and will allow users to manage albums on multiple devices and collaborate with other users on albums.

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Topics: apps, Apps and Software, photo album, Startups, Tech, The Launchpad