2014 Android Photo Editing App Review – The Verdict

More reviews! There has been a lot of them this year, and over the last month, there has been a lot of Android reviews in particular. But after this post, I’ll calm down a little, as least with the Android stuff.

After the 2014 Android Camera App Review – The Verdict post, I decided to go ahead and find a photo editing app for my Android phone. I picked three popular apps from the photography category in the Google Play store and took a deep dive into each one of them (links are to my reviews):

Based solely on the review score, Photo Editor comes out on top. While it’s a great piece of software and without doubt the most feature rich and powerful app pf the three, the learning curve is rather steep. Photo Editor really requires you to spend a lot of time with it to get a good result, so if you’re looking for a quickie, I’d recommend that you got for PhotoDirector or Snapseed instead.

All three apps have their own strong sides and in some ways complement each other. So why not use all three? PhotoDirector is somewhat handicapped by its resolution limit in the free version, and you should consider paying for the full version if you plan to use it often. The free version of Photo Editor only show you an ad without removing any features, but if you are bothered by ads, you can turn them off by upgrading. It’ll cost you roughly half of what you have to spend on the full version of PhotoDirector. Snapseed is totally free, compliments of Google, but on the downside it hasn’t been updated in almost a year.

While you might think that we’ve found the ultimate collection of photo editing apps to cover your every need, we’ve not. All these apps could have been replaced by a single one: Pixlr Express – photo editing (review). It’s feature packed, easy to use and very quick. But for some moronic reason, the creator Autodesk has decided that it’s a great idea to wipe out the original EXIF data when you save a photo edited with the app. It’s not a great idea, it’s a bad idea.

But until Autodesk decides to fix this, the winners are all of the reviewed apps: Photo Editor, PhotoDirector and Snapseed. Happy photo editing!


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