Turn photos into reminders or links with Shoots & Leaves
This iPhone app helps keep your camera roll uncluttered by saving photos to the cloud and providing a link that you can then use for a reminder or in an email or text.
Shoots & Leaves is a clever app with a clever title. Odds are your iPhone's camera roll is littered with photos that are not destined for a scrapbook or worthy of being included in your next iTunes sync. If you are like me, then you snap pictures of book covers in book stores as reminders to to investigate them further for potential purchase. Or you snap a picture of an empty ink cartridge so you know which kind to buy the next time you are in Staples. Or you snap a picture of a particularly good bottle of wine or beer that you want to share with a friend.
For such photographic events, why not bypass the camera roll altogether? With Shoots & Leaves, you can do just that. The app automatically uploads a photo to an image-hosting service and creates a link that you can use in a number of ways, which the app calls actions. And for these actions, you can create custom templates to automate the process further.
When you launch the app for the first time, it offers to take you on a quick tour where you will learn that the lower-left button lets you choose the image-hosting service and the lower-right button lets you choose which action to take with the link it creates to the photo. The default image host is Imgur, but you can also change it to CloudApp or Dropbox. The default action is to create a new entry in the Reminder app, but you can change it to copy the link to the clipboard or open it in an e-mail, text, or Safari.
Tap the "i" icon next to an action to create a template for it. Here, you can choose to add the title, URL, date, and time for the action, and you can provide default text for the title or have the app prompt you to enter a title each time that action is run.
The app opens in camera view, and you need to set up your action before you snap your shot. Photos are uploaded in the background so that you can shoot and -- wait for it -- leave. The app will then notify you when the photo has finished uploading so you can complete any needed steps for your selected action.
Shoots & Leaves makes it easy to get in and out of the app, but there are a few drawbacks. For starters, the app costs $2.99, which feels a bit steep by App Store standards. It supports only three image-hosting services, and I couldn't find a way to choose another list other than the default Reminders list in the Reminder app to which to save new entries. Lastly, the camera does not let you choose a focus point, which makes it challenging in some cases to focus on the object of your shot.