CameraBag review

Mark Mackay

We review CameraBag a camera effects app for the iPhone

Published on Sep 21, 2009

Thankfully, coding geniuses all over the globe have produced a myriad of applications to make the iPhone’s decidedly average camera take more interesting snaps. One such an app is CameraBag which applies filter effects to your photos.

CameraBag can be downloaded and used on either the iPhone or the iPod Touch, though as the latter doesn’t feature a camera, you can only use to apply effects to stored images. In addition to using freshly taken photos on the iPhone, you can import images from your photo library.

Once you have your image, it will be displayed in portrait configuration in the CameraBag menu screen with ‘Original’ tagged at the top of the screen. You can then scroll left or right through the different versions of the image with the various filters applied to it.

The ‘Helga’ filter mutes down the colours in the image, giving it a washed out appearance while ‘Mono’ makes it back and white. The ‘Magazine’ filter crops the image to a landscape format and applies a yellow hue.

The ‘1962’ and ‘1974’ filters do a convincing job of making the image appear like it’s been taken in either of the two eras. There’s a filter that makes the image appear as though it was taken using a fish-eyed lens and one that’s supposed to look like an infra red lens though the latter really just looks like a messy black and white image.

The options menu is comprehensive and allows you to turn any of the above options that aren’t your cup of tea. You can also turn off boarders or cropping and select the image size to be 400, 600, 800 or 1,200 pixels.

However the menu system does warn that 1,200 pixel images may cause the app to crash ‘due to memory limits’. CameraBag lets you email images though unlike many similar apps, you have to set up your emailing account in the menu screen which is quite frankly a pain in the lens.

All in all, CamerBag is a decent way to bring some fun to your iPhone photography. However it’s not the best we’ve seen and a few of the filters are a bit samey and unconvincing.

If you don’t want to fill your iPhone with camera effects apps we’d recommend ToyCamera which is the same price and boasts more features. If you’re looking to add to your collection of camera effects apps, then you could do worse than CameraBag.