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Flayvr for iOS brings organization to your Camera Roll

This free app divides your snapshots into nifty tiled albums for easier viewing and sharing.

Rick Broida Senior Editor
Rick Broida is the author of numerous books and thousands of reviews, features and blog posts. He writes CNET's popular Cheapskate blog and co-hosts Protocol 1: A Travelers Podcast (about the TV show Travelers). He lives in Michigan, where he previously owned two escape rooms (chronicled in the ebook "I Was a Middle-Aged Zombie").
Rick Broida
2 min read
Flayvr for iOS organizes photos into slick-looking albums.
Flayvr for iOS organizes photos into slick-looking albums. Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET

Note to Apple: Nice job with the cameras and all, but Camera Roll? Not so great.

See, browsing photos on an iDevice kind of sucks. You're stuck either swiping through tiny, disorganized thumbnails or paging through endless full-screen snapshots to find what you're after.

Flayvr for iOS turns your Camera Roll into nicely organized albums, offering a much cooler way to view and share your snapshots.

When you run the app, it automatically groups your photos by date and presents them in a scrolling list. Each dated group (or "flayvr") consists of a title and four tiny thumbnails, one of which flips to a different picture every few seconds.

When you tap a group, it expands to fill the screen, again with four (larger) animated thumbnails. Here you can tap to edit the title or location of the flayvr, or tap a photo to enlarge it (though not quite to full-screen size unless you double-tap), then swipe through the other photos in the group.

There's also a Share button that lets you direct your flayvr to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, SMS, or e-mail. Anyone who clicks or taps the resulting link lands at the Flayvr Web site for a similarly animated "tile show."

So, yeah, neat stuff. However, Flayvr could definitely use a few tweaks. For starters, you can't move photos among groups, nor can you delete them from your Camera Roll. Also, it would seem logical to offer some kind of slideshow option, but Flayvr goes completely static once you enlarge any photo.

Still, I like this app a lot, if for no other reason than it offers simple grouping and album features that should be present in Camera Roll. Plus, it's free.

Have you found a better way to organize and review your snapshots? Talk it up in the comments!