JustPictures!

Summary

I’ve tried out a lot of apps that let you access online photo albums from multiple image hosting sites. However, I never found myself to be totally satisfied with any one of them. JustPictures! promises easy access to all your online photos and tries to distance itself from its competitors. Find out if JustPictures can live up to its promises in today’s test.

JustPictures! allows to access online photo albums of the following image hosting services:
Facebook
Picasa
Flickr
Smugmug
Photobucket
Tumblr

You can display all the pictures from your multiple accounts, including private albums and public albums from friends and buddies. During the test, I noticed that it wasn’t possible to access public Facebook albums with JustPictures without first logging into your Facebook account. If I’m doing something wrong, I am open to comments and suggestions from any AndroidPIT users out there.

Aside from your online albums, you also have access to all of the pictures on your SD card. The pictures are displayed as thumbnails in their respective folders. You can select individual pictures to view them full-screen. Once you’ve opened a picture, you can easily browse through all of the pictures in the folder by sliding your finger across the screen. You can save and send your pictures, view them in slideshow mode, see their exif details, set a picture as your background and add pictures to your favorites. Your favorites are then placed into a separate folder where you can browse through pictures from any of the supported image hosting services.

JustPictures! also has a picture notification system (currently limited to Picasa and Smugmug) that informs you about any new pictures with a status bar message, vibration or ringtone. You can adjust this in your settings. This feature worked really well during our test.

JustPictures allows you to set pictures as your background while your viewing them. I also uncovered another two cool features. Once you’ve installed the app, you’ll find a JustPictures section in your regular Wallpaper menu (menu button->wallpaper). Here you can access the app directly to use on of its pictures as your desktop wallpaper. JustPictures also lets you create a live wallpaper (starting with Android 2.1). This starts up a slideshow of your favorite pictures on your home screen. Pretty amazing, in my opinion.

Bottom Line:
In addition to the main feature, which lets you access multiple albums at once, I also liked the fact that JustPictures also includes a favorites folder. Having access to all of your favorite pictures from all over the Internet in one place is pretty awesome. I also really enjoyed the live wallpaper features. JustPictures is definitely great for all your photo viewing needs.
 

At start-up JustPictures! displays all of your accounts (starting with just your SD card photos at first) in a list. To add online accounts to this list, go to menu button -> add account in order to look at public albums or select “manage logins” to gain access to private albums.

To add public accounts, you have to select the online provider and enter in the username of the account’s owner. Now the album is automatically displayed in your list of photo albums
If you wish to add your own private accounts, you’ll get automatically redirected to the provider’s website, where you will have to log in and give JustPictures permission to access your account information. Again, your private albums will appear with all the others on the start page.
Within any given account, you can adjust the sorting options according to your tastes (menu button-> sort options). Aside from that you also can browse around the app’s general settings.
Once you’ve opened a picture, you can slide from one to the next with your finger, double-click to zoom in and out, or use pinch-to-zoom (if your devices supports it).
All of these picture options can be accessed by pressing the menu button.

In the general settings of JustPictures, you’ll find a couple more useful options. These are divided into:
Display settings
Features settings
Notifications settings
Files and Cache settings
Debug options
About

Here you’ll can, among other things, turn notifications on/off, adjust the thumbnail size, determine where pictures are saved to and much more. The settings are really comprehensive and I can only applaud the developer on a job well done.
 

Bottom Line:
The controls of JustPictures! work really well. Everything looks slick and the app includes a set of interesting options.
 

JustPictures! performs reliably and without any major problems. Depending on your Internet connection and the size of your photo album, it can take a while to preview all your pictures. It’s OK if you’re loading anything under 300 pictures, but it took forever to display all the pictures from my SD card (over 600 total). I don’t think I am going to be using JustPictures for my offline pictures in the future.

JustPictures! can be downloaded for free from the Android Market.