Even with the new features coming in iOS5, the iPad (and iPhone) Photos app is pretty poor for actually viewing photos — the very reason for its existence. If you use iPhoto to organize your photos on your computer (Mac-only), then you can have it generate albums of faces and places, but most of the time you're left scrolling through the “Photos” section, which contains everything, just to find one photo.
Fotoboard is an iPad app which creates albums. You can make these manually, or you can browse a calendar which lets you go see all the photos you took on, say, your birthday two years ago. This alone would be worth the price of the app (currently free) if it weren't for a couple of annoyances (more on those in a minute).
You can't drag to re-order, but the app sure looks great
Creating your own albums is easy. You click the “plus” sign, add a title and then choose the photos in a batch from the familiar iOS photo-picker. You can add more photos later, too, as well as removing them.
You can view the images individually and swipe through them. In this case you see the pictures on a neat wood-style background, along with a piece of paper with limited metadata displayed (a map will also show up if there is geo-data in the image file). You can also add captions, and send photos via email, Facebook or Twitter.
You can also start a slideshow, choosing either the same wooden-table view, or a fullscreen mode. Finally, you can share photos with other Fotoboard users on your local network via Wi-Fi.
Fotoboard is still very young, and there are some big omissions. You can't re-order photos in an album, for example. But the biggest pain is the behavior of the calendar view.
It defaults to the oldest picture in your library, and to page through dates you need to tap the tiny arrows which flip you one month at a time. Exit the calendar and re-enter and you have to start over. Fotoboard desperately needs a better way to navigate dates.
That said, its easily the prettiest and easiest to use Album app I have yet found (and I have tried a lot). And right now it is also free, which means that iPad-toting photographers have no excuse not to try it out.
Fotoboard for iPad [iTunes]
source: Gadget Lab
