Pictorian is a really interesting and efficient way to store and manage photos or images on your iPhone. The default photos app on iOS 7 is a little too basic and lacks some much needed management tools. Pictorian offers a really simple UI and some nifty features that make it a great app to store images.
Although the developer touts Pictorian as a ‘photo storage’ app, I think of it as more of a box that holds random images. You can dump all the GIFs, funny memes, interesting photos and pretty much anything from various sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. Pictorian lets you import images by copying an image or its URL to the clipboard. When you launch Pictorian, it detects that there’s either an image or its URL sitting on your Clipboard and instantly shows you a preview of the image, along with an Import or Cancel button. Tap Import and the image is added to your library in the app. It’s that simple. This method works out great for images that you come across in your Twitter timeline.
Pictorian makes use of an innovative radial menu. You can tap, drag and release to choose which action you want to perform. You can tap and hold anywhere on the screen and the menu will pop from there. The app has been designed for iOS 7 and makes really good use of physics and animations which end up looking quite beautiful and make the experience really enjoyable.
Pictorian lays out all the contents in your library as a single continuous stream of images. There are no folders or tags to manage here. You can tap on an image once to view it in the image viewer and tap again to go back. You can “describe” an image in the app with words that you think best relate to the app. These are useful when you want to search through the continuous stream. And it works out really great. For example, if you’ve described your favorite gif as “pink motorcycle selfie ocelot duck”, just typing “cycle” in the search field will fetch the gif for you.
Pictorian offers a really simple interface that, along with some unique and nifty features in it, make the overall experience of using the app really wonderful. The app is still at v1.0 and has a long way to go, but even with its current feature-set, it’s a pretty solid app. Pictorian is available for $1.99 on the App Store.