Over for iOS review: Adding text to your photos is fun with Over

Over for iOS lets you jazz up your Instagram photos with beautifully rendered typography to make them more than just photos with filters.

8.1

Over for iOS

The Good

<b>Over</b> lets you add great-looking typography to your photos to create unique-looking projects you can share across most popular social networks.

The Bad

The interface can get a little confusing, with convoluted processes for seemingly easy actions. Switching orientation makes you lose your formatting.

The Bottom Line

If you want to add good-looking text to your photos, Over is a great tool for the job. The interface is confusing initially, but once you get the hang of it, the ability to add typography to your photos is worth the work.

This is not a complete photo-editing app. Instead, with Over, you're adding great-looking fonts to your images to tell more of the story, make a meme, or simply to add a label. You start by picking an image from your iPhone photo library. A wheel-like interface on the right gets you to the apps main functions where you can choose your fonts, edit what you have on screen, save to your camera roll, or share to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, or via e-mail. You also have the option to turn your work into a postcard and send it via snail mail for a fee.

Swipe through several fonts to make cool photo projects (pictures)

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The app's strength is in the available fonts. It's clear that the developers went to great lengths to get nice-looking typography, with 28 included fonts to choose from, all of which look great. You also have the option to spend an additional 99 cents to increase your selection of fonts to over 200. The app lets you pinch to resize text, and it has a layer system for creating multiple separate text entries on one photo. What becomes clear quickly, is that with a little imagination, you can create some really neat-looking photos with text, using combinations of fonts to give them a more distinctive feel.

Over is not without problems. There are some convoluted processes for certain things such as deleting unwanted text. What would seem to be the easiest way -- like a tap-and-delete type of setup -- instead requires that you enter the layer manager, find the text in question, then select delete. It's not a big deal, but it will probably take people a couple of tries to figure out how it works. The app also loses its formatting if you have words on the screen and change the orientation of your phone. The words are still there, but you'll need to put them back in the location you want.

Over is mostly a one-trick pony, but for the fonts you get and the creative projects you can make, it will be worth it for anyone interested in adding a little more to their smartphone photography.