Taking photos of your little ones can be rewarding yet challenging for parents. They’re usually either far away or sleeping. Occasionally they’ll cooperate long enough to take a lovely portrait, but the resulting image must be more straightforward and better composed.
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On top of all that, parents require photo apps that work fast since you don’t have time to adjust your settings and frame the shot just right when you’re busy chasing your little one around at the park or trying to find a moment when they’ll sit still long enough for you to take their picture.
We’ve compiled a list of our favorite photo app recommendations for parents:
Here are some great photo sharing apps for families:
| App Name | Features | Pricing | Platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| Camera+ | Advanced camera controls, editing tools, filters, effects | $2.99 (one-time purchase) | iOS, Android |
| Moment Garden | Automatic album creation, timeline view, growth tracker | Free (with in-app purchases) | iOS, Android |
| BackThen | Timelines, photo organization, tagging, milestone tracking | Free (with in-app purchases) | iOS, Android |
| Tinybeans | Private photo sharing, baby milestone tracking, calendar view | Free (with in-app purchases) | iOS, Android |
| 23snaps | Private photo sharing, milestone tracking, journaling tools | Free (with in-app purchases) | iOS, Android |
| Flic | Automatic photo backup, organization, smart album creation | Free (with in-app purchases) | iOS, Android |
| Snapseed | Advanced editing tools, filters, effects, selective adjustments | Free | iOS, Android |
1. Best Overall Photo App: Camera+
This app boasts an elegant user interface that allows complete manual control over your shots. It has valuable features like selective focus and exposure lock, enabling you to create perfectly composed photos.
One of the most important things you can do as a parent is documented your child’s life. And no matter how good your camera is, sometimes more is needed. Thankfully for iPhone users, plenty of apps take your photos to the next level.
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The best overall photo app out there is Camera+, from tap tap tap. This app gives you all the adjustments and effects you could want, plus a bunch of unique features like burst mode, live filters (which update in real-time), and other stuff that makes taking photos more accessible and fun.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Capture presets | Camera+ offers a variety of capture presets, including Auto mode for easy-to-use interface, Manual and RAW modes for full control, Slow Shutter for long exposures, Macro for close-up shots, Action for tracking and capturing fast-moving subjects, Magic ML for machine learning automated editing, and UltraRes for intelligent upscaling of images. |
| Shooting assist | Camera+ provides several shooting assist options such as Smile mode, Stabilizer, Burst, and Timer, to help you capture the perfect shot. |
| Editing tools | Camera+ features flexible editing tools to fine-tune the exposure, boost shadows, sharpen your photos, and more. RAW image editing provides maximum flexibility for editing and allows you to save and edit images with precise control. |
| Filters | Camera+ comes with built-in filters that allow you to apply a range of effects to your photos with just one tap. |
| Integration with photo library | Camera+ integrates with your photo library, allowing you to edit photos in place rather than importing and exporting them. |
| Machine learning | Camera+ uses Magic ML, an AI-powered feature that automatically enhances your photos as you shoot, providing quick and easy improvements to your images. |
| UltraRes | UltraRes is the newest capture preset in Camera+, which uses AI to upscale your images intelligently, providing higher resolution and detail to your photos. |
| Flexibility | Camera+ provides maximum flexibility with its capture and editing features, allowing you to adjust and fine-tune your photos to your exact liking. |
| Quality | Camera+ produces high-quality images that are sharp, clear, and vibrant, ensuring that your photos look stunning every time. |
| Ease of use | Camera+ offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface that makes it easy for anyone to capture and edit stunning photos. |
| Integration with cloud services | Camera+ can integrate with various cloud storage services, allowing you to store and access your photos from anywhere, anytime. |
2. Moment Garden: Your Baby Album
Know someone who just had a baby? Want to help them preserve their favorite moments? Moment Garden makes sending snapshots to your friends and family easy, so you can all enjoy the same treasured memories.
Moment Garden is a picture-sharing app that lets you privately share pictures and videos of your child’s special moments with family and friends. Uploading new memories is fast and easy with the free app—take a photo or shoot a video on your phone, then send it to the Moment Garden website. You can select whom to share with and add comments about the moment.
Moment Garden works exceptionally well if you’re far away from family or friends who have an infant. It’s also a great way to encourage new parents to keep up their blog—they can write descriptions of each memory as they upload it or even update it later with more commentary or a video clip (a great gift!). Plus, if you’re in a hurry and need something quick but still want your loved ones to see what’s happening, uploading photos is much faster than sending an email with multiple attachments.
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When you sign up, you’ll be able to invite others to join your “garden” (a private space where only those you allow can view photos) and set up a profile for your baby that includes their name, gender, birth date, pictures of their face, weight, length, and other essential stats. Then every time you share a memory of your baby via social networks or email (or even by saving it as a photo on your phone), it will automatically sync with Moment Garden so everyone who has access can see it.
3. BackThen Family & Baby Photos
Sharing photos is at the center of what makes the holidays so fun, but hunting for them can be a chore. There are many ways to outsource this task, from printing your photos and sending them in an album to pay sites like Shutterfly to using apps that automatically upload your photos. I’m a big fan of BackThen, which does all of this (and more) for you.
BackThen is basically like having a private family history museum accessible from wherever you are, on any device. Once you’ve installed the app and signed up with your email address, you’re all set up—all you have to do is take photos, and they’ll be automatically uploaded to your account, organized by year and then by month. The app asks for permission to access your camera roll or photo stream to add every picture taken on any device you use. You can choose whether or not it can make copies of those images to its account (We recommend approving this function).
BackThen also allows you to create events: birthdays, baby showers, anniversaries—anything important enough for you to want to collect photos in one place.
4. Tinybeans Family Photo Sharing – Albums, Milestones & Baby Book
There is nothing more precious than spending time with the people you love. Tinybeans helps your whole family make and save precious moments.
- Capture a moment with one tap
- Bring your whole family together. No more lost phones!
- Share to anyone: text, email, Twitter and Facebook.
- Add notes to your pictures: date, location, weather and other details.
- Family calendar: Keep track of everyone’s birthdays and important events for the entire year in one convenient place.
- Shared albums: Share albums with specific family members or friends, and make sure that everyone can upload photos to every event. That way there’s no confusion or uncertainty about who was at what event or what they were doing there.
- Geotagging: Take photos with GPS data embedded, so you’ll always know where they were taken. Have an awesome picture of your camping trip? You can easily tell everyone else exactly where it was!
You can invite close family members or friends to follow your family through private email invitations and then post photos, milestones, and flashback photos for everyone involved to view. Once someone joins your family group, they receive daily email updates about the progress of your child with a photo from that day.
The emails also include milestones such as “baby’s first tooth,” “baby said their first word,” “baby ran for the first time,” etc. so that people who can’t keep up with their own children will still know what is going on in their lives. You can also share your child’s growth by viewing their weekly chart view of the changes they have gone through. To bring back those fond memories, you can look back at old photos in your timeline view of all the snapshots of your baby’s growth over time.
5. 23snaps – Family Album – Private Photo & Video Sharing
23snaps is a free app that lets you privately share photos, videos, measurements, and your children’s stories with loved ones. You always want to take advantage of every moment with your kids, but keeping track of each stage of their lives can be like trying to catch butterflies in a storm. 23snaps is the solution—it lets you privately share photos, videos, measurements, and more from the iPhone or iPad.
23snaps uses geolocation technology to create one big family album that spans all devices—no matter what people do at any given time. This means that friends and family can have a real-time snapshot of what’s going on in your life, no matter where they are. The best part is that everything is private—you control who sees what pictures, videos, or insights about your child.
As a parent, you’ll be able to create a living scrapbook of your child’s firsts, like their first word or step, while preserving all the other moments in between that are unique to you. When you invite others to watch with you as your child grows, they can also add their comments and thoughts to the updates you’re creating. With 23snaps, you can keep an eye on your child from afar, share in the excitement of big and small moments with people who are important to them and create something remarkable for the future.
6. Flic – Delete & Manage Photos
The Flic app is the fastest way to delete photos from your camera roll. Just swipe left to delete or right to keep. No more scrolling down a long list and deleting one at a time. With Flic, you can clean up valuable storage memory on your phone in seconds!
Flic allows you to quickly delete a stack of photos and videos from your camera roll with one swipe. Flic works on both iPhone and Android. It takes advantage of the simple fact that we tend to take more pictures of our kids than anything else.
Flic lets you swipe left or correct to delete some or all of your pictures at once, and it makes it super fun to do so by showing you how many photos you’re deleting as you go along: “you’re deleting 10 out of 790” is not only helpful but also gratifying.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | Flic |
| Function | Camera Roll Manager |
| Availability | Available on iOS |
| Price | Free with premium features available for purchase |
| Rated | Top rated for 4 years |
| Deletion | Fastest and easiest way to delete camera roll photos |
| Recognition | Named “Best New App” in Apple store and #1 on Product Hunt |
| Featured in | TechCrunch, BBC, Time, Washington Post, Fast Company, The Verge, The Next Web, Gizmodo + 100 other publications/tv outlets |
| Access | Access all photos from your camera roll right from the app |
| Deletion | Swipe left to trash a photo or swipe right to delete it – it’s fun & easy |
| Storage | Free up valuable memory storage space on your phone |
| Monitoring | See how much memory space you save with each picture you delete from your camera roll |
| Reminders | Reminders tell you to clean out old photos each month |
| Premium Features | Navigate to any month and see which you’ve cleaned |
| Premium Features | Access current month photos at any time |
| Premium Features | Add photos to your favorites folder as you Flic |
| Premium Features | Flic unlimited photos |
(Free, iOS)
7. Snapseed
If editing pictures isn’t your forte and you require more forbearance to take a picture that flawlessly captures the moment, you might be better off with a camera app like Snapseed. With just a few taps, you can modify the white balance, adjust colors, or straighten the horizon. All expert-level photo editing tools are made accessible for anyone to use.
Snapseed is great for giving your pics a quick tune-up after taking them on your phone. If you’re trying to get rid of a red-eye effect or ensure everyone’s faces are in focus, this app lets you tweak your pics, so they look their best. It even has an auto-correct element that automatically adjusts any color cast in your photos based on the prevailing colors around it.
If you’re looking to give your pics some creative flair, Snapseed also allows you to add frames and effects in real-time, so you can see how they’ll look before even taking the photo—a feature we love when we want to add a supplementary splash of color or edge to our photographs before we post them online.
| FEATURE | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| Tools and Filters | Snapseed comes with 29 tools and filters, which includes Healing, Brush, Structure, HDR, Perspective, Tune Image, and much more. |
| Supported Formats | Snapseed opens both JPG and RAW files. |
| Personal Looks | Users can save their personal looks and apply them to new photos later. |
| Selective Filter Brush | The Selective filter brush allows users to selectively retouch exposure, saturation, brightness, or warmth. |
| Precise Control | Snapseed allows for fine, precise control over all styles and filters. |
| Tutorial Cards | Snapseed includes tutorial cards that provide tips and tricks on how to use the app and general photography. |
| RAW Develop | With RAW Develop, users can open and tweak native camera files, save non-destructively or export as JPG. |
| Tune Image | The Tune Image tool allows users to adjust exposure and color automatically or manually with fine, precise control. |
| Details | The Details tool magically brings out surface structures in images. |
| Crop | Users can crop their photos to standard sizes or freely. |
| Rotate | Snapseed allows users to rotate their photos by 90°, or straighten a skewed horizon. |
| Perspective | The Perspective tool allows users to fix skewed lines and perfect the geometry of horizons or buildings. |
| White Balance | With White Balance, users can adjust the colors so that the image looks more natural. |
| Selective | Snapseed’s Selective tool uses the renown “Control Point” technology, allowing users to position up to 8 points on the image and assign enhancements. |
| Healing | The Healing tool allows users to remove the uninvited neighbor from a group picture. |
| Vignette | Users can add a soft darkness around the corners like a beautiful, wide-aperture would do with Vignette. |
| Text | With the Text tool, users can add both stylized or plain text (38 predefined styles). |
| Curves | Curves gives users precise control over the brightness levels in their photos. |
| Expand | With Expand, users can increase the size of their canvas and fill up the new space in smart ways with content from their image. |
| Lens Blur | The Lens Blur tool allows users to add a beautiful Bokeh to images, ideal for photographic portraits. |
| Glamour Glow | Glamour Glow adds a fine glow to images, great for fashion or portraits. |
| Tonal Contrast | The Tonal Contrast tool boosts details selectively in the shadows, midtones, and highlights. |
| HDR Scape | HDR Scape brings a stunning look to images by creating the effect of multiple exposures. |
| Drama | With Drama, users can add a hint of doomsday to their images. |
| Grunge | The Grunge tool provides an edgy look with strong styles and texture overlays. |
| Grainy Film | With Grainy Film, users can get modern film looks with realistic grain. |
| Vintage | Vintage provides the style of color film photo from the 50’s, 60’s, or 70’s. |
| Retrolux | Retrolux allows users to go retro with light leaks, scratches, film styles. |
This list will assist you in finding the ideal picture app for you and your kids. Whether for enjoyment or function, these incredible image apps will help keep parenthood’s delightful (and sometimes frustrating) moments in one convenient location. And if you have an app that you find specifically valuable, convey it to us! What photo app do you find most wholesome to share photos with as a parent?