Bazaart: easy mobile image compositing with a social side

It started as a Pinterest-based fashion catalogue, but Bazaart's users saw a different potential in the app's capabilities and were more likely to be making collages with it, and not-necessarily fashion-related ones either. Like many good entrepreneurs, Bazaart's founders spotted this trend and rolled with it; as a consequence, they started to pivot away from fashion and towards creating a Pinterest collage-maker. Since then, Bazaart has continued its movement away from fashion and away from Pinterest. It's now a fully-fledged photo editor for iOS. Bazaart is now an editing programme designed to compile composite images from those on your mobile device's camera roll, together with a social sharing element. Once you've turned your brother's head into a beer bottle or given your girlfriend a bed of butterflies, you can share your composite with other Bazaart users, diverting it into searchable channels, for example 'funny' or 'art'.

Tap on any photo and it breaks it down into its component images; you can follow people whose work you particularly like; and you can engage with other users. There are other mobile compositing apps out there, but they don't come with the social features of Bazaart, and that's what its founders are aiming for. They want people to think of Bazaart as a social Photoshop for the masses.

Since it completed its pivot to social photography in June last year, Bazaart has enjoyed 250,000 mobile downloads, and has 100,000 monthly active users who have created over 350,000 composite images using more than 2 million photos. It's free to download, but only available for iPhone and iPad running iOS 7, or at least until the end of 2014, when the developers hope to have an Android version up-and-running.

Flickr's new automatic features: upload and straighten

Flickr has taken another step along its path to the epiphany that the future is mobile by introducing an automatic upload feature to its iOS app. You do have to be using iOS 7, though. It'll upload your iPhone images to Flickr and keep them private until you've edited them and are ready to share them with the world. Or you could use it as a private archive of your naughty selfies. Naturally this comes a week after I've made other arrangements for my iPhone image library and deleted approximately 1,000 photos from my camera roll. (Yes, okay, I'm refusing to update to iOS 7 for battery life reasons, but that's by-the-by.)

I was impressed with the Flickr app's straighten feature when it was overhauled recently (not so much the crop feature), but it's now added an automatic straighten function. Take a photo, open the crop/straighten function, select straighten, et voila! If you're not happy with Flickr's straightening prowess, you can put your own powers to the test and over-ride it.

So it's not all about automation, thankfully.

How exciting is the iOS 7 camera app?

Whilst everyone else is arguing about whether the new flat design and Crayola coloured icons that comprise iOS 7 are genius or travesty, shall we take a look at what's been updated, reshuffled, and introduced camera-wise?

Taking on an iPhotos feel, photos are now automatically organised into 'moments'. It's a twee name for a fairly neat concept: images are sorted and labelled geographically and temporally using their metadata. This will let you search photos you've taken in one particular location by date. It's a more sophisticated digital version of having holiday albums sorted by year and place, with each photo captioned; you can see all the photos from one place organised by date, too.

Airdrop will allow you to drop an image into someone else's iPhone over the same wi-fi network. If we can Airdrop to other devices, for example a MacBook Air, that'd be neat.

Photo Stream already allowed you to share with your friends and for you to comment on their streams; now you can insert your photos into their shared streams, creating a collective album.

Moving between camera, video, panorama mode, and the square crop feature is managed by a swipe. Yes, you read that right, there's a square shooting mode built into the camera app, along with a range of filters. It feels like a dreadful disease that afflicts smartphones. With any luck, it's a childhood illness and everyone will grow out of it soon.

The conclusion? There's nothing revolutionary or even exceptionally exciting here. It feels more like a consolidation of features and in some respects even a game of catch up. That's not to say that sharing images via Airdrop isn't a welcome addition, it's just that it isn't setting alblaze the world of mobile photography.