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Share photos and accompanying audio with PhotoBlab

This free iPhone app lets you create and share mini slideshows, complete with audio.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
2 min read

If Instagram and Vine had a baby, they'd name it PhotoBlab. This free iPhone app lets you create and share short photo slideshows with audio.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

After launching the app and signing up for an account with an e-mail address, the app will ask you to add a profile picture or you can choose to do this later via settings. At the bottom of the app are four buttons: Create Blab, Blab Feed, Popular Blabs, and Settings.

You can get some PhotoBlabbing ideas by browsing the Popular feed, while the Blab Feed lets you view so-called Blabs you've sent and received. In settings, you can search for followers and see who might be following you.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

On the Create Blab tab, you can add up to five photos by either snapping shots with the app or choosing from your library. A tiny thumbnail gets placed in the row along the bottom as you add each photo so you can keep track of those you have selected. Tap the Manage button to the right of the tiny thumbnails to rearrange the order of your photos. Tap the green Done button to see a swipeable array of your photos. Below the photos is a button to add a recording. You can record up to 10 seconds of audio; a 99-cent upgrade gets you up to two minutes. You can also choose a recording from your library, but this selection showed only previous clips recorded with PhotoBlab despite the fact that I have a handful of voice memos on my iPhone, some of which are less than 10 seconds. After recording, you can use a slider to trim the start and end points.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

After getting your photos and recording set, you can tap the Filters and Options tabs at the bottom of the screen to tweak the look of your Blab. There are five filters from which to choose, though they aren't all that compelling. You can choose a different filter for each photo (swipe to go to the next photo), but there is no button to apply the same filter to all photos with a single tap.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

When you have your Blab just as you want it, tap the Next button. Here, you can preview the Blab, set it as public or private, enter a caption, add your location, and share on PhotoBlab as well as via e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter.

(Via evolver.fm)