I downloaded the Facebook camera app today and was impressed. It is clean and fast.  I had found the actual Facebook app for the iPhone and iPad to be pretty confusing. This app is a dramatic improvement.

Rather than try to be all things Facebook, this app focuses on pictures being shared by your friends and allows you to quickly upload good pictures.

I have found that good pictures make a world of difference in creating engagement. 

As you can see from the opening screen, it is a clean interface. You have your pictures across the top, and friends recent posts which you can scroll through.

You click on the camera, and are taken to a pretty straightforward camera screen.  The buttons include a flash setting, button to pick front or back camera, and a blue camera button to take the picture with. 

Where it gets interesting is what you can do after you take the picture.  As you can see, you are shown a preview of the picture, along with a crop tool, a wand, and a blue post button.

I have to say, I only rarely take a picture that wouldn’t benefit from some cropping.  My typical post processing workflow involves adjusting the exposure, color balance and basic cropping. 

When you click on the crop icon, you are presented with a grid that you can drag by the corners.  

I wanted to see how it worked, so I moved the window to crop more than half of the picture.  I readjusted to present me with a new frame that I could work with.

You can slide the picture around in the grid once you’ve sized it.  It worked exactly like I would have expected. 

I expect this to be a real plus for events where you cannot move or “sneaker zoom” to compose the picture.

The wand tool takes you to some filter presets.  These aren’t “creative” filters, rather more like white balance fixes to correct for color shifts.

I was able to stand and compare the different filter settings to the actual room, which was kind of useful.  In this case, I liked “Bright” the best.

I didn’t spend long with the filters, but even the more extreme sounding ones like “neon” were still pretty nuanced and effective. 

See the little grid box on the left?  That is one of the best features in my mind.  It presents you with a grid of images on your iPhone and allows you to select multiple pictures for upload.  It is very clean and works!  I didn’t use it on this one, but last week was at a graduation ceremony and took multiple pictures.  Waiting for each one to upload was a pain. 

If you click on the blue post button, you are taken directly to a very familiar looking post screen.  Added some nice words and hit send.  It then took me back to the main screen. 

The Facebook camera app is not a “power tool” for photographers, but it offers the best way that I have seen yet to quickly create and post very good images from your smart phone.