CameraSync review

We review CameraSync, an iPhone app that floats your camera roll amongst a host of cloud services

It’s a serious downside of the iPhone that it’s got all that lovely, lovely storage space always in your pocket wherever you go, and yet when you connect it to the computer the only access you’ve got is to your photos. And even then it’s a one-way street.

But it’s a useful feature, being able to quickly grab the iPhone’s photos and videos and drop them onto your desktop or laptop. If only the bloated albatross that is iTunes wasn’t laying in wait to grind your computer to a halt as soon as the iPhone goes near a USB port, which is why we often find ourselves emailing images to the computer rather than battle against the iPhone’s limited sharing space.

CameraSync is an app that aims to make that process a lot less painful, by automatically connecting your camera roll with a host of different cloud storage services. That way, once synchronised, there’s no USB, iTunes or emails – all your images are sat waiting for you in a Dropbox folder, FTP server or Flickr account.

On the surface this isn’t a particularly feature-rich app, but that’s only because it aims to be as tap-free as possible. Initial setup requires you to enter account details for your cloud storage of choice, be it Dropbox, Amazon, your own FTP server or whatever else, and the rest is automatic once the app is running.

This synchronisation isn’t passive, either, as the app keeps track of which photos and videos you’ve sent back and forth, so if you decide to delete one from the cloud storage, it won’t be repeatedly replaced by CameraSync.

These are all kept at full resolution, too, so you won’t get home to find thumbnails or compressed images waiting for you. The whole purpose is to link your camera roll directly with an online folder so you can dip in and out exactly as if you were browsing the iPhone’s storage.

CameraSync will even run in the background, so you can leave it synchronising while using another app, and simply receive a notification alert telling you when everything’s been uploaded. It does require you to allow location services to be accessed, but that’s more to do with the way the iPhone takes pictures and saves geo-data along with the image – CameraSync is merely sustaining that information when everything goes online.

All in all this is a damn useful app that should probably be built into the iPhone’s native camera application. It isn’t, of course, which is why you should definitely take a look at CameraSync if you make regular use of the iPhone as a digital camera, or if you like to keep your photos online. Simple, but still impressively sophisticated.

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