PhotInfo is 8 years old!
It was published on the App Store for the first time on 7h February 2013. The iOS in use was version 6, do you remember skeumorphism?
Since then the app continuosly developed, even with variable pace. In fact, it is a hobby project, developed entirely by me in my spare time.
At the first version the app was very simple, but it was available for both iPhone and iPad from the beginning. It was one of the first apps to show exif tags of the acquired pictures on iPhone. It used dark colors to let the pictures stand out.
The Map of the location where the picture was taken was added in version 1.01.0 and it wasn’t possible to edit tags, yet.
In May, version 2.00.0 brougth a completely re-designed UI, with tabs at the bottom.
With version 2.01.0 the reverse geocoding feature was introduced: it converted latitude and longitude in a human readable address. Version 2.02.0 added the sharing feature and 2.04.0 finally introduced the possibility to change some tags: date and location. With version 2.10.0, PhotInfo started to adopt the new inteface of iOS 7.
All these changes before the app turned one year old.
The app continued to improve and I started to make videos and a Press Kit to promote it.
Version 2.20.1 was the last to support iOS 6; the next version was the 4.00.0 and it was released about a month after iOS 8, but it took another 20 days to have the App Extension, feature intoduced with the last iOS that let PhotInfo display the exif tags as an extension within other apps, such as Photos. However, it was one of the first apps to adopt App Extension and this was noted.
PhotInfo continuosly gained features and improvements with the 4.x and 5.x versions. Some milestones:
- 5.00.0 support images on iCloud
- 5.10.0 favourite and delete buttons
- 5.11.0 hide button
- 5.15.0 burst photos
- 5.20.0 modify images (beyond saving new ones)
However, the development was slowing down and I was wondering of rewiting completely the app passing from Objective C to Swift. After some months deciding if it was better to migrate step by step, I decided to rewrite completely the app from scratch. The following year, in August 2019, PhotInfo NG was released. It had only a subset of the features of PhotInfo, but it was based on new code, new language and an improved internal architecture.
When PhotInfo NG reached the feature parity with PhotInfo, I released version 6.00.0, using the code of the NG app. It was September 2020.
Since then the app restarted to gain features, such as the information about resources (6.01.0), and in November it arrived on the mac.
I want to say thanks to the beta testers that try the beta versions and give me their feedback. I have a long ToDo list adding new features and UI changes for the next months. PhotInfo will continue to be developed and improved!
Here is a list of screenshots of different versions of PhotInfo.
