Blackcap Blog

Published at 17:27 on 12 March 2023

To begin, three points:

1. You probably don’t need one. Go here for why. In many cases, a third party app can easily lead to worse photos, if one does not know how to make good use of its extra features, or if those extra features keep getting in the way and messing things up.
2. This is one of those things that Android does better. The standard Android camera app allows for more creative controls and manual overrides than does the standard iPhone one, while being more intuitive and less packed with gratuitous features than most third party apps. If the built in camera is really important to you, consider a high end Android phone. (Note that Android doesn’t do everything better, just some things. More than likely, a tradeoff will be involved. I am just saying that you should seriously consider a leading-model Android phone if using a phone camera is important to you.)
3. Third, sometimes such an app makes sense, if you understand how to use manual overrides. The inability to manually focus was ruining lots of macro (close up) shots for me.

So what I’m doing is giving Halide a try for a year, and using it in those situations where the limitations of the standard Apple camera app are really getting in the way. For situations where the standard app’s limitations don’t get in the way (and this is most photographs), I use the standard app, because it is simpler and easier to use. (Thankfully, it is easy enough to make the two store their photos in the same place, which makes managing them easier and simpler.)

Note that this is only for those situations where for some reason I do not have my interchangeable-lens camera, with my dedicated macro lens that I can focus with a focus ring and a proper viewfinder, along with me. It’s a fallback for macro photography, nothing more. The main reason I have an iPhone because it works better as a phone; performance as a camera is secondary to me.

Finally, it is still annoying, because Android does it significantly better. Much nicer to have just one camera app that once can use in all situations than having to bounce between a limited app and a feature-bloated one.