Mobile Fotos App for the iPhone

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been utilizing my iPhone a bit more lately for scouting, idea capture and in general, just another way to boost my creativity a bit. One of the challenges that I’ve faced with the iPhone, however, is how to get my photos off the phone and onto my computer in a reasonable fashion. The problem lies in the fact that I sync my iPhone to my home computer (a Mac) and spend most of my day working on a PC at work. I don’t want to connect my phone to my work computer, so this means that if I snap a photo on my iPhone during the day, I can’t really access it to post on my blog or on Flickr unless I email it to myself, wait for my email sever to hiccup a few times, and finally get it through.

So I’ve been looking for an app that will easily and reliably allow me to upload photos from my iPhone to Flickr. Surprisingly, Yahoo doesn’t have a native app for this. You would think that they would at this point, but they don’t. So after some research through forums and the iTunes store, I narrowed my decision to two apps: AirMe and Mobile Fotos. Both allow you to take photos on your iPhone and post them to Flickr directly from the app.

I tried out AirMe first because it is a free application and I’d read good things about it. Almost immediately I came across some obvious problems. First, with AirMe you can only post photos that you take using the AirMe camera interface, which is poorly designed and covers way more of the screen (in this case, your viewfinder) which makes composing more difficult. You can’t post photos from your camera roll, only from the AirMe camera interface.

The first time I tried to upload the photos, it worked great, and I was prepared to deal with the other problems, because the price was right. After my third upload, however, the app started to crash. I’d take the photo, would choose “Use Photo” and then watch as the app cranked for a minute, then crashed. This resulted in losing the photo. On one particular occasion I was really excited about a shot I’d pulled off, only to lose it seconds later when AirMe crashed. It ended up being a waste of time and effort.

So I ponied up the $1.99 for Mobile Fotos and so far everything has been golden. I can upload directly to Flickr, I can add title, description, tags, create or add to existing sets, and set privacy levels for my images, and best of all I can use the regular iPhone camera and pull images from my Camera Roll. So far I’ve uploaded images without trouble using the Edge network as well as when connected to WiFi. Mobile Fotos also has a great interface for browsing your photostream on Flickr which caches thumbnails to make subsequent viewings go faster.

I’ve only been using Mobile Fotos for a day or so, but so far it’s been a great compliment to my iPhone.