A new application called Slidebox aims to help Android users clean up their photo library by swiping to delete unwanted photos, as well as use other tools to more easily organize photos into albums. It’s sort of like a “Tinder for Photos” with a few extra features, in fact.
The app is now one of many utilities arriving to address a longtime challenge smartphone users face – that is, our devices make it simple to take unlimited photos, but they don’t offer the same ease of use when it comes to reclaiming free space from our phone’s limited storage.
Slidebox was previously available on iOS where it competed with apps like Room for More, Ice Cream, PhotoShrinker, InfinityRoll, Everalbum, and many others.
Designed by former Amazon developers who originally built the app because they, too, struggled with having too many photos and no good way to organize them, the idea with Slidebox is to let you quickly move through your many images and make instant decisions on what to do with each one, using gestures.
On Android, you’ll swipe up on the photo to trash it, which helps to free up space.
In actuality, the photo gets marked as “trash” in the app, but nothing happens outside of the app until you take further action. This allows you to recover photos from the trash, in case of accidental swipes. To fully remove the trashed photos, you have to actually empty the trash in the app – similar to emptying the trash on a Mac or PC.
In addition, Slidebox lets you place photos into albums just by tapping a button at the bottom of the screen. While the iOS version requires you create albums by name in the app instead of pulling in existing albums, the Android app lets you add existing albums from your gallery as well as create new ones. That makes it a bit more useful on this platform.
“There’s definitely a lot of ‘Tinder-esque’ app to delete photos, but none that helps you organize albums,” explains founder Jiho Park, as to why he thinks Slidebox can best its competitors. “Slidebox lets you add a photo to an album with a tap — and we think albums are the key to staying organized,” he says.
Another handy feature – and one not many competing apps offer – is the ability to compare similar photos in fullscreen, side-by-side. This is especially handy when you’ve taken a number of pictures at the same time, and only want to keep the best shots from the group.
However, there are still some issues with using this app for photo management. For starters, it doesn’t yet support SD cards, though that is said to be coming soon. The app can also get out of sync with your Android photo gallery if you make changes to albums outside its app.
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While these sorts of utilities may not be for everyone, their proliferation across today’s app stores speaks to issues consumers have with managing the storage space utilization on their devices. Going through photos one-by-one using the mobile OS’s default photo gallery applications is a user experience that needs to be more efficient – and a lot faster. At the end of the day, that’s what Slidebox hopes to offer on both iOS and Android.
The app is a free download on Google Play, and all the current features are also free. A future release may introduce new, premium features you can buy via in-app purchase.