Why You Can Trust CNET QuickPics Photo Manager review: An easy way to find specific photos fast
With intuitive tagging features, QuickPics Photo Manager gives you better ways to find photos instead of just scrolling endlessly through your photo library.
QuickPics Photo Manager aims to make the common task of endlessly scrolling through your iPhone photo library to search for photos, a thing of the past. After playing with it for a few days I think they might be on to something. With this app you can name and tag photos, and you have sorting features that make it much easier to find the right shots.
QuickPics Photo Manager
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
But to make QuickPics work its best, it takes a commitment from you to make sure all your photos are properly tagged. Not everyone will be willing to do this, but if you are it means you'll be able to find specific photos much faster than scrolling around in the photo library.
While Apple doesn't have tagging features, what it does have (which QuickPics lacks) is the ability to show locations and to browse by location. So it's important to note that as a replacement, QuickPics offers great tagging features, but it doesn't have everything.
Getting started
When you first launch the app, it will ask for permission to access your photo library. Once accepted, QuickPics goes about syncing up with the photos you have. The first run takes a few minutes (depending on how many photos you have), but it's important to note it syncs up every time you launch the app. After the first one, subsequent syncs are pretty short, but don't be alarmed it needs to do a quick sync every time to display new photos.
Once the sync is finished, your photos will be displayed by date with your oldest photos showing up first as thumbnails with the date they were taken. You also have the option to sort the list by name, tag, or date in ascending or descending order.
Tagging your photos
In order for QuickPics to work, you have to put in a little work. I dove right in and started tagging photos with names and locations (if I could remember), and spent about 20 minutes before I ran out of steam and decided I would tag more later. You can separate tags with a comma (so each photo can have several tags), and fortunately the app remembers tags you've entered previously. While this speeds up the process somewhat, tagging your images still takes a long time.
Along with tags, you have the ability to name your photos. For me, the named photos seem like something to use more sparingly, such as the "Group Luau photo in Maui" or "25th birthday with the whole gang." With named photos I think you're more likely to remember a special shot or moment so you'll be able to search later by using the name.
When you're finished you'll be able to search for a tag to get all the photos which have that tag. QuickPics has a button in the lower left of your library to display all the tags you've created and give you an alternate way to search your photos.
In the Tag list, you also have the option to select groups of photos with a specific tag so you can share all the ones that have a specific person or surround a specific event.
Location, location, location
As I said above, the thing that QuickPics lacks is the ability to show the location of your photos. Using the iOS photo library, you can browse through Moments and touch the city where a group of photos were taken to bring up a map. From there, you can browse the map for other photos by location.
If QuickPics had the same capability it would be hard to find an argument for not using it as a complete replacement for the iPhone photo library. Without locations, QuickPics is great for searching and sorting photos, but feels like its missing a key feature.
Conclusion
QuickPics is excellent for finding specific photos once you've put in the work. Adding tags and photo names makes it incredibly easy to zero in on the photos you want without scrolling through a seemingly endless list, like with the iOS photo library.
The one thing it's missing is the ability to find the locations of photos, or to sort by location. Adding location would give you yet another way to search for photos and because I'm used to using the feature in the iOS photo library, I find myself missing it in QuickPics.
Still, once I tagged my photos, I couldn't believe how easy it was to find specific shots just by remembering who was in them, or the event where the pictures were taken. If you don't mind a little work to get PhotoPics set up, I think it's an excellent way to manage and search for photos that's better than the search features iOS has to offer.