Summary

Are you looking for a photo gallery app for your Android phone that can integrate your Facebook albums? And on top of that, you want to use the app to up and download photos to/from Facebook? Yup, doesn’t sound too bad at all. When we found an app that promises to do all of the above we simply had to take a closer look.

PiQture is an alternative media gallery for your Android phone. The twist is that PiQture allows you to access your Facebook account and thus gives you the option to access your friends’ photos albums. In theory you can upload your own photos as well as download your friends’ photos. However, there were a few issues regarding this specific function during the testing phase.

PiQture does offer a lot of options in regards to uploading images: you can upload single photos, entire folders, select already existing folders, or create new folders. This being said, I was only able to upload a grand total of two pictures and one existing folder. I was able to create new folders but I couldn’t add any pictures to them. As I said, uploading new images to already existing folders worked two times, and I made about 20 attempts. So, there’s definitely still room for improvements.

I do think that it’s worth keeping an eye on this app, though—if all the functions worked as they should it would certainly deserve a five star rating.

Looking at pictures on the device itself as well as in online albums works really well, though there isn’t yet an option to make comments on your friends’ albums.

The app deserves three stars as it’s very useful if you simply want to look at photos.

 

After starting PiQture you will see the image gallery. All the alums located on your phone are shown in the form of little icons. You can click on one of these items in order to see a list – in the form of thumbnails – of all the images within the folder. Click on one of these thumbnails in order to open the photo.

There’s a tab (located at the top of the screen) that allows you to access the Facebook gallery. Enter your account details; you will then be able to see all of your contacts in the form of thumbnails. By clicking on one of your friends you will be able to see the available albums; clicking a second time will show you a lost of the photos within the album.

You navigate either by sliding your finger across the screen or by using the arrows located to the left and right of each photo. You can see all of the photos contained within one album as thumbnails in the bar at the bottom of the screen. Again, you can slide through this thumbnail-view and click on images that you want to see enlarged. You can zoom in by double clicking. This takes a short while to get used to, as you literally zoom right into the picture. The image is shown in its entirety in small at the top of the screen, the part that you’ve zoomed into is shown within a frame. You can move around the image by holding your finger pressed down and sliding around, and zoom in and out using the plus and minus icons. Nothing to complain about here: works really well.

Pressing the menu button shows you the following options:

• Edit
• Details
• Set as
• Share
• Delete

Use Edit to rotate and cut the image.

Details lets you add descriptions for individual photos, as well as details that will be displayed above the image.

Use Set as if you want to have a photo as a screen saver or profile picture.

Share lets you use email, SMS, possibly also Bluetooth to let others see your photo. There’s also the QpicX Facebook option that lets you upload to Facebook albums, but as previously mentioned, the success rate for this option wasn’t exactly staggering.

When you’ve opened an album you will find the follwoing options when you press the menu button:

• Slideshow
• Reload
• Upload ( "Download" for Facebook galleries)
• Sort mode (not available for Facebook galleries)
• Delete (not available for Facebook galleries)
• More (Help & About)

Photos within an album can be displayed as a slide show. You can also choose in what order images are shown within a list (according to date, name, size).
Upload provides a lot of options if you’re looking to upload to Facebook (you can choose several images, select folders, create folders), but at the moment this function isn’t working very well (yet?).Theoretically, you can also download images from Facebook albums, but, again, this only sometimes did what it was supposed to do.

Bottom line:
Controls are excellent and work really well, and it certainly offers a lot of options for simply looking at photo galleries and Facebook albums. That’s why it’s such a shame that the upload function isn’t up to par yet, otherwise PiQture would have gotten a stellar rating.

 

PiQture performance on the Milestone and G1 is satisfactory. There were several force closes on both devices, but they didn’t cause the app to crash.

PiQture is available for free form the Android Market.