This is a sponsored post
Yes, you read that right. An PicJoy is an app that organizes all of your photos for you right on your phone. If the clouds just parted and the sun streamed down as you heard a chorus of hallelujah, you heard exactly what I did because digital photo organization is one of my pain points. As much as I want to be the mom who has fabulous photo albums chronicling all of my kids’ various milestones as they’ve grown up, I’m not.
Photos tend to live on my computer with memories as events rather than organized in a chronological fashion by child according to date. While I have tons of great photos in my phone’s Photo Stream, I’ve never taken the time to organize them either. The endless scrolling through my Camera Roll or My Photo Stream to find what I need on my phone when someone wants to see the latest photo of my kids is maddening. Do you identify with this video? I do!
$5 if you show me from PicJoy on Vimeo.
Without a search function for photos on iPhone, finding photos quickly has been nearly impossible until I was introduced to PicJoy. PicJoy is an easy to use free iPhone app that serves as an intelligent photo library that automatically organizes all of my photos to help me find them instantly.
How PicJoy Works
PicJoy automatically imports your iPhone photos into their app to keep life’s memories organized to make it easier to document and find every photo you’ve ever taken in just 6 easy steps:
1. Download the free PicJoy app
2. Create an account
3. Let PicJoy access your iPhone’s Camera Roll and it will automatically pull in every single photo that you take on your phone.
4. Snap a photo
5. Tag it
Just as you’d tag a photo in Instagram or notes in Evernote, you can tag photos to find them more easily. I’ve started tagging photos my according to my kids’ names, season, year, activity (soccer, baseball, dive, etc.), and during the school year, I’ll add a grade level tag too.
6. Select photos to create Stories to remember those special moments
About PicJoy Stories
A picture may be worth 1000 words but I absolutely LOVE PicJoy’s Stories feature. With a tap of a button I can select a photo from PicJoy and add some text about why that particular moment was so special. It takes me just a minute to add a title and sentence and a few extra seconds to add additional tags to create a chronological timeline of the most important family moments that I can pull up on my phone to share with others.
It’s a handy feature for new parents who want an easy way to remember important moments from each day of their child’s life or if you’re the parent of older kids like me who failed at doing such things during babyhood- the Stories feature makes it easy enough to start now. After all, I suppose it is never too late to start!
Stories is one of three icons on the bottom of the app’s easy to navigate screen. It’s right in the middle of Photos and Settings and hard to miss!
What I Love About PicJoy
Besides being free and easy to use, PicJoy organizes my photos for me by adding tags and sorting them into events according to when they were taken. There’s still a lot of scrolling to find what you want when you use Photos as-is but the beauty of the app is in the search feature that finds photos according to tags.
Introducing Picjoy from PicJoy on Vimeo.
The Stories feature is a wonderful way to showcase your best photos and family moments especially when you’re asked by friends and relatives to share the most recent photos of your children. The ability to add a brief sentence as part of the narrative to each picture in Stories serves as a running journal for busy parents.
What I’d Love to See PicJoy Do Next
PicJoy is only two weeks old and already the company is looking to add additional functionality such as the ability to import photos from Dropbox, Google Drive, and Amazon Photos. While the app is pretty easy to use, I’d love the ability to add multiple tags to multiple photos at a time to streamline tagging by being able to batch process photos from a single event even faster.
While the Stories feature is helpful, I want the ability to create multiple stories. Ideally, I’d have a story for each child and be able to tap on a thumbnail image of their face to bring up their chronological story full of photos curated from my phone’s library. I’d also love for PicJoy to partner with a printing company like Blurb so I could have the photos and text that are part of my Stories printed into a beautiful book. I envision a mini book (6” x 6” perhaps!) where each page is one of the photos from my Stories with the text below.
Summary
PicJoy launched just two weeks ago and since I started using it, I see great value in the free app for easy photo organization and family storytelling around important moments. Plus anything that helps me be more organized without much effort is something that I absolutely love!
How to get PicJoy: Download PicJoy from the App Store for free.
PicJoy compensated me for my time in trying out their app and sharing my thoughts through this post but all opinions are my own and based on personal experience. All photos property of Leticia Barr, TechSavvyMama.com
