Recrop iOS App Review

The Recrop app for iOS devices (we downloaded it onto an iPhone 8 Plus) is designed to give you another chance at perfecting your framing by giving you the tools needed to create a compositionally balanced look after you've already hit the shutter button. It seems to have plenty of features but is it an app a photographer really needs? 

Recrop iOS App Features

Recrop is an iOS app that's designed to help you crop, straighten and rotate/flip images to create better compositions after capture. It's priced at $1.99 and is available for both iPhones and iPads. 

Basically, you can use the app to reframe photos, straighten horizons, improve composition by moving the frame or adjust the aspect ratio. You can also uncrop an image should you need to. 

Key Features

• Aspect ratios and grids to help you reframe photos 
• Straightening without losing the resolution of a photo
• Recompose a photo by adjusting the frame
• Undo function 
• Multiple ways to export an image (and save at original resolution) 

Recrop iOS App Handling & Performance

When you open up Recrop you're giving options to read tutorials, access an image from your phone's album (and once you've used the app, an option for 'continuing' appears so you can continue adjusting an image). 

The tutorials are worth a look at as they'll give you step-by-step instructions on how to edit images in the app so it takes some of the guesswork out of using it, particularly when straightening horizons which you have to do by pressing outside of the image area (something we wouldn't have known if we didn't read the tutorial). 

Under aspect ratio, you can reframe your photos and there are various options available including the popular square crop. Applying a different ratio is really easy to do as you just select one, adjust it if you need to, press the x to close the options and hit the tick button to save your changes. Once you do this, the changes are applied.

The recrop feature allows you to move a photo around to adjust its framing or you can drag the photo's handles toward the inside or outside of a photo to recompose the shot. Dragging inside is fine as you're just cropping the photo but when you drag them outside of the photo's edges, the app automatically fills in the expanded areas based on the content surrounding it which, more often than not, didn't do a great job and it spoils your photos when tricky patterns are involved. As a result, you should stick to adjusting ratios within the photograph's limits. 

Recrop provides you with a set of girds you can use to help frame/recompose your shots and classic grids such as rule of thirds and the golden spiral are available. After selecting a grid, you just need to move the photo as needed to balance the photo. Grids are always useful and can really help improve composition so they're a great tool to be built in. 

Next up is the ability to straighten horizons as there's nothing worse than a great landscape capture having a really obvious wonky horizon. You can straighten horizons by swiping left/right, up/down anywhere outside of the photo. The Recrop app creators say the resolution of the image won't be changed when doing this as the blank areas that appear when twisting/turning the image will be filled in by the app which looks for nearby pixels it can use but as said, this doesn't always work very well and can spoil your photo. 

The final tool is a rotate/flip option which does what it says on the tin really. Plus, it's a lot easier to flip/rotate images in the Recrop app than it is with the editing functions available in the iPhone's gallery as you have to manually 'hold and turn' the image. There are no built-in grids (after capture) either but aspect ratio options are built-in. 

The Recrop also an undo/redo function which is always handy and on export, you can save a copy so you don't overwrite the original image file, upload to social media channels, copy to the clipboard, send the image in an email or open it in a specific application. There are also settings for image quality as well as formats so you can check you're saving the original file size before exiting. 

Value For Money

The Recrop app is priced at $1.99 (around $1.49) which isn't expensive but when you can download excellent image editing apps such as Snapseed for free which have similar tools built in, plus more, it's a cost some won't be willing to pay. There are also similar tools, if a little more limited, built into the editing options you can access from the iPhone Gallery, too.

Recrop iOS App Pro Verdict

Recrop is an app with one purpose - to make your framing/composition better in a really simple way and to some extent, it does. However, there are some niggles with it (pixel picking not producing the results you want is the main one) and as free photo editing apps such as Snapseed, which also offer loads more useful features alongside, offer cropping/framing tools, it could be a hard sell for most photographers. You can also use the editing tools built into the iPhone's gallery to make basic compositional edits for free, too, which will suffice for most people. 

It's only $2 so won't break the bank but it might not be something all photographers will download, even if it is reasonably priced. 

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