So I thought I’d do an informative post today….some handy apps that I always use on the go. I’m not very appy or techy (believe it or not! I’m on google like the rest of you) and most of these you’ll probably have heard of but sometimes these little nuggets of information prove useful!
1. OLYMPUS
I know I’ve said this before, but my Olympus camera is a real gamechanger. You can shoot great quality photos in square and then send via its private wifi to your phone within seconds (I only just realised the camera wifi works on the tube – amazing!). If you want to be serious in the blogging industry, I would highly recommend it – and you will notice such a difference to your photos. I use this Olympus app on my phone every day – you can also even use the wifi to set your phone up as a remote, so sometimes when I have no one to take my photo I take a tripod and do it myself!
*I work with Olympus but this post was written before I had any commercial relationship with them.
2. SNAPSEED
I have used VSCO cam in the past but now edit all my photos in Snapseed – it’s free and its editing is very subtle – you do the saturation, ambiance, brightness, highlights and shadows separately. And at any point you can see the new pic vs the old one (so you know when you’ve gone too far!). Below is a pic we took in Paris – as you can see I don’t like to over edit but it’s good for keeping consistency to your photos and feed.
3. BUFFER
I actually use Buffer more as a website (but there is an app, too). But when it comes to my blog, this website tab is always open. It’s free to use and allows you to schedule posts on Facebook and Twitter on a few accounts (it’s free but you pay to have access to more accounts). So when I have a madly busy day and don’t look at my phone, I know that some posts are scheduled in to let people know what’s happening on the site that day. Takes a huge amount of stress off.
4. FACETUNE
Facetune gets a bad reputation for only being used to smooth wrinkles and bleach out skintones on selfies. But it has a lot of uses! I often use it to whiten walls that have gone a little yellow (mainly on my house!), take away some chewing gums marks on the floor etc and make a bag ‘pop’ more in the image (using the ‘details’ icon). It’s the best app purchase ($2.99) I have made (and I HATE paying for apps). Below I used it to tidy up the bright green moss in the image (within reason – go too far and it won’t look real).
5. LATER
This sounds crazy and I know it defeats the point on Instagram being, well, instaNT…but rather than posting 3 pics on a good day and having nothing to post the next, I have started to store pictures and schedule some for days when I’m stuck in a studio or behind my laptop via Later. You can upload and save your pictures in this app (again, it’s free), it doesn’t post for you but sends you an update telling you to upload it – you just press okay and it takes you straight to Instagram with your pre-written caption. For me it’s great as I like to break up my feed with interiors and still-life for pace etc so it’s also good to see how my feed is shaping up and how it will potentially look. You can use Later for other social media scheduling too, but I only use this for Instagram.
So when people think it takes 1 minute to create an image – this is the reason behind why it doesn’t – but these apps also help me gain control over images and content and I hope this list has been in someway helpful to you, as well!
Thank you very much. V Helpful. I am such a sloth when it comes to anything remotely technical. H x
This is super useful, especially with so many apps around it's good to know which ones really get your seal of approval! Will be definitely trying out a few of these 🙂
Exactly! As I sad i don't use too many (I watched some videos of bloggers using about 5 or 6 apps for one photo!!) x
Some very useful tips xo Dara @ http://www.champagneinateacup.wordpress.com
Thank you for sharing. Definitely going to have a look at Picasa and Latergramme. I have used Buffer before and got into a good little routine with it but have forgotten of late so thanks for the reminder! x
Latergramme makes my life much easier -especially at the weekends! xx
Thanks for this fab and informative post! Picasa is just what I've been looking for (I've been looking for something I can add numbers in with) but I didn't know how to find it – I'll definitely be using it from now on ☺️ Thanks!
Katie x TheEclecticity.org
Glad to help! Changed the way my blog looks 😉 x
Thanks Alex, great advice. Picasa looks like a fantastic tool to use on a blog. Can I ask, do you have any advice about setting up the content for an automatic mailchimp email/ rss feed. I've set one up but at the moment it's only being sent to me because I can't seem to get the content of my posts to appear within the emails. Thank you anyway, love your blog. 🙂
So my RSS feed is part of blogger, it kid of automatically set up turning my blog into an email (thank goodness!). I started using MailChimp but I kind of want my newsletter to be exclusive content, so it's a bit trickier – hence why it hasn't really turned into anything yet. But as far as I know from using it, it is quite simple if you just want to recreate content and send people back to your site – and it's free!
Hi Alexandra,
Thanks so much for sharing the #laterlove! That means a lot, we really appreciate hearing from our community – especially bloggers who create so much content.
If you ever have any questions or feedback, please don't hesitate to tweet to us!
You can also join our FB Community where we connect visual creatives: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1613794475565023/?ref=bookmarks
Stephanie | Latergramme Community Manager
You're so welcome, it really does help! x
I love this post and everything you do 🙂 I was just wondering (which might be a stupid question) but do you use another app or piece of software to crop around the images before you put them in a collage in Picasa?
You can crop them in picasa…but apart from that no, I put them in picture Pile mode, then unclick add shadows, so it takes off the borders, then manually place them xx