Photo Stats Review

The camera built into all current iPod Touches and iPhones is incredibly handy—carrying a camera requires effort, but most people will always have their phones in their pocket or purse. As a result, many of us have built up sizable Camera Rolls. But these photos aren't simply photos; the iPhone also encodes a wealth of information when it saves a new photo, such as when, where, and how the photo was taken. Photo Stats is an app that takes the iPhone's Camera Roll, processes that information, and spits out a series of shiny infographics that provide the user with potentially interesting data about their photos.

Really, this is a simple app, and one unlikely to warrant more than a few uses. Literally all that Photo Stats does is produce these shiny, descriptive infographics. The infographics can be interesting, and include information such as where, at what time of day, on what days, using which app, and with what settings you took the most pictures. (Really, I recommend looking at the images in this post.) From there, Photo Stats can export said infographics via email, Facebook, or Twitter; saving the infographics to the iPhone itself is also an option.

But however interesting that information is, Photo Stats is still a one-trick pony. True, more photos mean different statistics, so theoretically over time Photo Stats could display different trends. However, there's no option to restrict the data to a certain time period. As a result it's hard to imagine opening Photo Stats more than a few times.

Data junkies and infographic lovers may find something to appreciate here, and the infographics themselves are lovely and provide an interesting glimpse at oft-ignored photograph metadata. There's nothing wrong with Photo Stats itself. However, it's clearly not a "useful" app—it's just a novelty, meant for a handful of uses. Given that fact, Photo Stats delivers on its promises, but those promises just weren't so big to begin with.