Capture every moment of your life with Days

Days 2Whenever I head out on a road trip or drive into the City for a day of record shopping and urban adventuring, I take pictures. If I see a cool sign or some really fancy graffiti, I whip out my iPhone and snap a quick pick. I’m always thinking I’ll show these pictures to someone, someday. Most of the time, they never make it past my Apple TV screensaver.

Days – Your Visual Photo and GIF Diary lets you gather all of your daily antics into one collage so that you can share it with others without making them scroll through hundreds of individual shots of your pizza dinner…

Design

One of the enticing features of Days is its minimalist design. You can only perform a handful of tasks and there isn’t much background noise to distract you. The first thing you will do is to start your first day’s journal. You can change the color of the background, but you can’t adjust anything else.

To start your journal, tap the camera icon and prepare to take a picture. You can switch between the front and back-facing camera, but there are no filters, effects, or any special features.

Each time you take a series of photos, they will be added to one of your journal’s squares as an event for the day. If you take a rapid succession of pictures, they will all go into one event, and the result will look like a GIF.

At 5:00 the next morning after you’ve started your day’s journal, you can post it. Before then, it will only be viewable as a draft. Once it is posted, it will look like a Tumblr feed on your iPhone and a photo collage on a Web browser.

Divider tabs separate the sections. To access a different feature, tap one of the dividers at the top or bottom of the screen. You can see your daily journal, your drafts, your Days feed, and notifications.

You can comment on yours and other’s Days journal entries. When you add a comment, a badge will appear in the top-right corner of the GIF or image.

If you log into Days with your Facebook or Twitter account, you can add friends that are also using the service. If none of your friends are already signed in with Days, you can invite them. You can also find friends using your device’s contacts list.

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App Use

To start a photo diary, go to “My Drafts” and tap the camera icon in the first square. Each day’s journal is made up of a grid of squares. Each square will eventually consist of the pictures you’ve taken throughout the day. You can either take a single picture for an event, or snap a rapid set of images that will all fall into the same square and create a GIF-like series.

For example, if you are jogging at 5:30 AM, you can take a couple of quick shots of the scenery for your first event of the day. The time will automatically be added to the event. You can add your own comment so that others will know what they are looking at.

Take pictures every time something interesting happens so that you can get a full day’s journaling in. You won’t be able to finalize and post your journal until after 5:00 AM the next morning. So, if you are out late with the guys, you can keep snapping away and regret your decisions the next day.

Once your journal is ready to publish, tap the “Post” tab to send it to Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. It will also appear in your Days feed. If you don’t want to share your journal with anyone else, Change the posting options in the settings section to private.

Journals will appear on your iPhone as vertical scrolling feeds. Each event shows the time of the day, any titles you’ve added, and a comment badge in the corner.  To read comments from others, tap on the triangle in the corner. You will see all comments for each event.

If you want to comment on your own, or someone else’s event, tap the image to see your options. You will see nine icons. The first one is simply for commenting. The other eight are emoticons that you can add to your comment. For example, if you tap the icon that shows a fork and spoon, the words “Nom Nom” will appear in a text bar, which you can change if you want to. The resulting emoticon will appear in the comments section of the image with the icon next to it.

If you’ve made your journal public, everyone that follows you will be able to see it. You can also have it linked to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. If you have your account set to private, but want to share one particular journal entry with others, you can send a Web link to Facebook or Twitter. You can also send it directly to friends and family though SMS or email.

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The Good

This is a great way to share a day’s adventure with others without any effort. You don’t get to pick the best photo, or make it look amazing with filters. You will be sharing your day with others using a series of snapshots that you don’t get to edit. The time stamp is great for keeping track of the day’s antics. You don’t have to worry about trying to remember when you took the ferry to Alcatraz or what time you met up with your friend from high school.

The Bad

I experienced bad lag time when trying to connect to Facebook. It crashed multiple times before finally connecting. Under the Find Friends section, the app froze up on me multiple times. I was never able to get my Facebook friends to show up. That wasn’t a big deal, since I sync my Facebook friends with my iOS contacts. However, the Facebook connection issue could be a real problem for some.

Value

If you are the kind of person who likes to take lots of pictures of every thing you do every day, this is not only a great app for you, but it is also invaluable to friends and family that you make sit through 250 photos of your day at Disneyland. Since it is free, the only price you will pay is if you inadvertently post a journal entry of last night’s whiskey drinking competition with your boss’s wife.

Conclusion

Days – Your Visual Photo and GIF Diary is the perfect photo journal for those looking for simplicity. You won’t be bogged down by additional cropping, filtering, or tilt shifting of each image before sharing it with the world. If you like to take a lot of photos of your daily adventures, this app will let you condense your images into one, manageable journal entry.