This past year, I have been able to experience one of the greatest joys in my life: the opportunity to be a dad. With the many responsibilities of being a father, one of them that I get constantly reminded about is to take pictures and send them to my parents or to other family and friends. I love using my iPhone to take pictures because it is always accessible, and I always try to send them the random Instagram pic whenever I can.
But sometimes, I am taking more than one picture of my amazing little boy and I want to send the pics together because they all tell the story and one won’t do it justice. This is where an app like Nostalgio can come in very handy. It gives you the chance to put your pictures together so you can tell the whole story and not just part of it.
Making It Your Own
The first thing you need to do when you fire up Nostalgio is to pick the type of frame that best suits your needs. You can either indicate how many pictures you plan to use or choose from one of the 19 different frames that are available to you.
Choosing Your Frame
Once you are done settling on a frame, this is where the majority of your creation begins. There are a variety of options to choose from when using this app, but first you need to get some pictures to fill your collage out.
Let’s say you haven’t taken any yet; Nostalgio gives you two options to capture images. You can either tap on an open space in your college and take a picture for that specific space or you can do what is called “Camera In All Frames” where you take consecutive pictures for each frame that you have. Once a picture is taken, it can be edited to a black and white, sepia, or cross process picture as well as rotated if need be.
Taking a picture and editing it
After you select a photo, it can be moved around within the frame so that you get the part of the photo that you want. What I found a little cumbersome was that every frame that I tested out cropped any picture that I used. To some degree, this was okay, but I would have liked to see an option where I could use the whole photo and not just a cropped version of it.
Layout Options
Once you are done choosing and setting your pictures to where you want them in the frame, you can now decide on the layout (square, landscape or portrait). Although a nice feature to have, I really didn’t find this necessary because if I wanted all of my pictures in landscape, I would have picked a frame that would have best suited that. You then have the option to pick a border if you want.
Sharing
Of course, you can’t just spend all this time making your great creation if you have no one to share it with. Nostalgio gives you a variety of options to share your collages with your family and friends with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flicker and even Instagram. All you have to do is type your message and select which social networking sites you want the collage to go to.
Sharing Options
The Good and The Bad
I definitely like the ease of use of this application, and I found that I could whip up a collage in minutes and send it off to my family. Plus, I also like that they have an iPad app, which lets me take advantage of the bigger screen to work with my pictures.
Now to the bad, and the biggest bad of them all is the ads! I absolutely hate ads, and I would rather pay for an application than have them on there. Nostalgio has, for some reason, decided in their latest update to make the application free and put in ads for the other apps that the developer has done. That is all well and good, but at least give the user an option to pay for no ads. Otherwise, it would be nice if I could use more of my pictures and not be limited by the small frame sizes.
Conclusion
Overall, I have to say for what I needed the app for, it did the job pretty well. I think if they can take out the ads and give me the option to pay, then I would be a little more apt to use it more often.
But as far as functionality, the application does what it says it is going to do and gives the user a creative way to tell a story with their pictures. It is free on the App Store at the moment and I am not sure when the price will change so if this app interest you, you may want to go and grab it now while you can.