I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you probably don’t spend a lot of time putting handlebar mustaches, Elizabethan ruffs and anime sparkles on pictures of your friends. Once you try Mr. Chiizu, though, you may not be able to stop yourself from giving that picture of your cat a completely different set of cat ears. Mr. Chiizu is an app that lets you do all that and more, or you can do completely different stuff with Mr. Chiizu if you think that other stuff from before is weird. Equal parts fun and bizarre, we’ll take a look at how Mr. Chiizu can spruce up even your most boring photos.
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Say Chiizu!
When you launch Mr. Chiizu and tap Let’s Start, you’ll be prompted to choose a theme to create your new image. If this is your first time out with Mr. Chiizu, you’re only going to have one theme, and that’s going to be filled mostly with apples and eggplants and things like that. You want the ultra cute stuff, though, or you wouldn’t have downloaded an app called Mr. Chiizu.
If you don’t like the default theme, you can download more.
That’s okay, because Mr. Chiizu has plenty of themes to download for free and even more artist themes you can pick up for the cost of an in-app purchase. Choose your photo’s theme carefully, thought because you’re going to be stuck with whichever you select. Mr. Chiizu won’t allow you to switch back and forth between Meowlidays and Monstreween without losing your progress and wiping your photo stickers from your image.
Before you even choose the picture you want to embellish, Mr. Chiizu makes you pick the frame to go around your picture. Keep in mind what picture you’re going to stick in there, because while there are some pretty awesome frames, they won’t work with every snap you take.
Choose a frame and adjust your picture. There are also some filters you can use, too.
On the next screen you’ll finally start adding Mr. Chiizu’s stickers to your picture, and you’ll see why it was so important to select just the right theme. The stickers are the best part, and you can really start to obsess over which stickers to paste where. But if you chose the cooking theme for that picture of your dog answering the phone, well, you might be able to pull it off but you’re probably going to have a hard time of it.
Follow the menu along the bottom to add theme-specific speech and text boxes. Hear that? Even your text is dependent on your theme. You can draw freehand on your image, too, but you’re not going to see an example of that in my app pictures because I’m really bad at it. If freehand iPhone drawing is your jam, though, you’re better than me, and there’s way more pencil-types than you’d expect and a whole pile of colors, so go crazy.
Add stickers or text. Go crazy!
Pass the Chiizu
When you get ready to save or share your image, Mr. Chiizu has you covered. Save it to your iPhone’s photos and just let it sit there if you want, or share it to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. If you want to go beyond those three, there are social networks I’ve never heard of here in languages I can’t read, so Mr. Chiizu will probably have what you’re looking for.
Mr. Chiizu will also print your image, if that’s the sort of thing you have set up with your iPhone. You can even send your image as a real postcard that you can touch to anyone in the world. I know there are lots of apps that can do that, turn your photos into postcards or mugs or what have you, but to have the feature integrated right into my fun little photo decorating app was still unexpected and a little amazing.
My final image looks pretty awesome, and I can share it just about anywhere.
Once you’ve saved your stickered photo and shared it on Instagram and then sent it to your friend in Seoul as a postcard, there is still even more you can do. If you’ve just made the best Mr. Chiizu image you can ever imagine making and can’t dream of ever making such a work of art again, well, you won’t have to. Save it as a template, instead. Next time you open Mr. Chiizu, your template, complete with all of your stickers, your frame and everything, will be there waiting for you, sans picture. You can import whatever picture you’d like or snap the picture right there in Mr. Chiizu and use the template to line up your shot.
Final Thoughts
Mr. Chiizu is absolutely not the only app of its kind out there, and if you like putting cat ears on your friends and surrounding them in sparkles, then by all means, play the field in the App Store. However, there are some features that really set Mr. Chiizu apart, things I could maybe find individually in lots of different apps but it’s nice to have them all together like this. While Mr. Chiizu sure is cute, the large number of sharing options, different ways to save, the ability to send images as postcards and template creation all make it a standout app.
But let’s get back to cute. While it’s limiting to only be able to use one theme per image, and I find myself muttering, “Just let me combine them already,” there are a lot of free themes available and even more for purchase. If you get tired of what you’ve got, you can always support the app by downloading a paid theme. Within those themes, both the free and the paid, there are lots and lots of stickers, frames and text boxes. With so much to offer, Mr. Chiizu will keep you adding bells and whistles to your photos for days.