WordFoto Review

Merging words and photos.

by Pu on May 24, 2011

A photo is worth a thousand words and it’s up to you, using a camera, to express something. Like photography, typography is an art on its own. Text alone can create visually appealing images, but mastering it is not the easiest of tasks. Using text in combination with photos can be a good point to start.

WordFoto by bitCycle lets you play with photos and text to create fancy typographic works on your iDevice.

Main Features

  • Full resolution available;
  • Use custom text;
  • Create custom styles;
  • 15+ fonts available;
  • 8 preset styles;
  • Zoom in/out;
  • Crop;
  • Send via email or share on Facebook.

Appotography Opinion

You can start both with photos from your camera roll or you can take one with the built-in camera. After that, you can proceed to alter your original image. You can start by cropping it — you can edit cropping at any moment, if you are not satisfied. Then you can choose text to be merged with your original photo. You use your custom word set by inputting single words that will be combined together or you can pick one among the many preset messages included —  you can also delete them, if you want to. After you have decided on the text, you can set your style.

WordFoto by bitCyble AB for iPhone

There are eight presets that come with the app, but you can create your very own by playing with foreground and background parameters, adjusting for each values such as blur amount, saturation, contrast, padding, and so on. Obviously, you can also change the font. The font selection is perhaps not that great and varied, but at least you can use more than a font in a single image. To finish up, you can fine-tune by changing values for edge width and threshold and color tolerance of your text. You can also render multiple times to try different randomly generated final effects. Finally you can save, email or share your photo on Facebook.

WordFoto by bitCyble AB for iPhone

One of the aspects I found more unnerving when using WordFoto is the absence of an undo feature — at least, I couldn’t find any undo feature. If you want simply to go back to a previous setting, you cannot do it by undoing, you have to manually re-set parameters. Not a big deal most of the times, but still quite annoying and time-consuming.

As I see it, WordFoto is definitely not a memorable app, one you cannot do without after you try it, mainly because the effects you can achieve are very limited and not particularly original. They are OK, but they can get quite stale after a few times. Nevertheless, WordFoto is still a curious app that can still have some use in a few instances, especially if used creatively.

Overall

Name: WordFoto
Developer: bitCycle AB
Compatibility: iPhone (3GS, 4), iPod Touch (3rd, 4th), iPad. iOS 4.0 or later.
Price: £1.19||$1.99||€1.59
Vote: 3/5

WordFoto - bitCycle AB

Jens May 24, 2011 at 6:43 am

Hi PU! I’m one of the developers of WordFoto. Thank you for reviewing WordFoto! I just wanted to let you have a look at what people are doing with WordFoto, often in combination with other photo apps:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=wordfoto
http://www.iphoneart.com/search/wordfoto/medium

Some of our favorites:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/defoty/5751595664/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxsiphotos/5749252698/
http://instagr.am/p/EoDlx/
http://www.iphoneart.com/users/378/images/46545

Make sure to find and look at the full resolution versions of the images where they’re available, so you can see all the small type! : )

Pu May 24, 2011 at 4:02 pm

Hi Jens,

thank you for the links!

Tre May 26, 2011 at 5:14 pm

@PU – Thanks for the review and the great site!

@Jens – Any idea when you are going to have an iPad native version? While the current one works since it is an iPhone app, it would be great to take advantage of the entire screen!

Jens May 27, 2011 at 2:45 am

@Tre We will focus on correcting and improving the current iPhone version first. We might invest time to do a native iPad version at some point in time, but it is not likely to be very soon.

Denis Boucher May 27, 2011 at 3:26 pm

Just bought it, great app! I only wished there was a similar application for OSX, to create full size posters…

Teresa Schmidt May 31, 2011 at 3:26 am

I sooooo want this as a plug in for Photoshop. please send or develop asap. i love this app but want to use it further. Please say you’ll make a plug in for photoshop as soon as possible!!!!!

tolga May 31, 2011 at 11:18 am

Best App I have bought (apart from iGo, because I don’t get lost 😉
I also hope for an osx, photoshop plugin version…

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