Lifelapse review [iPhone]

Although a title like Lifelapse makes this app sounds like some sort of death clock, that's counting down the days and minutes until you'll no longer need an iPhone, it's actually one of the few unique applications out there on the App Store. Not that a working death clock wouldn't be unique, but it'd be hard to prove its accuracy.

Anyway, Lifelapse is actually a kind of stop-motion photography app. Indeed, there are a few of those already on the App Store, but they all suffer from a particular shortcoming. Would you really want to stand your iPhone on the wall, taking a photo of an opening flower once a minute for six hours? If it doesn't get nicked, chances are it'll get rained on, knocked over or its battery will go flat before the first petal has moved.

Instead this application turns you into a moving time-lapse tripod. A Lifelapse neck pouch, known as a Lifepouch (again, not remotely like its name sounds) is available to buy that hangs your iPhone around your neck while leaving the camera lens on the back uncovered.

You start the app off recording, and the techno-medallion hanging around your neck snaps a photo every 30 seconds. Essentially, this photo is a brief snapshot of whatever you're currently seeing, and the app builds up a slideshow of whatever you've been doing.

For example, touring a museum or city centre, or snowboarding down a mountainside becomes a digital flipbook within the app. You can automatically play them back as a video, or save and share individual photos from within the Lifelapse gallery.

As with most photography apps, Lifelapse is happy to geo-tag your images for a bit of interesting meta data when you come to save them. But more interesting is its date stamping facility.

Rather than literally stamp the time and date on what could be hundreds of individual photos, the app automatically enters your time-lapse recording as a Calendar event, naming the event after the photos. And this function works in reverse, too.

If you've put a holiday, or event, or venue in your Calendar app, Lifelapse checks to see what you've got planned today and associates your recording with that event. The slideshow is automatically named after your Calendar entry, along with any other data, such as location, also embedded in the series of still images.

It's probably not too good for your battery, but should the occasion arise when you want to be taking lots of photos without actually missing what's going on, Lifelapse is definitely the app for you.