Phone cameras have always been a great way to grab quick snaps, but with ever-better technology, the latest phones have become serious photography tools. Bigger sensors, better lenses and powerful AI processing all add up to brilliant landscapes and captivating portraits, not to mention smooth and slick videos.
Many people are happy to simply leave whatever they film on their phone, but doing so means you could be missing out. Get the right apps and you can raise your photos and videos up a level, for example by cropping out distractions or using sliders to improve lighting. Alternatively, you can just apply a filter to add a touch of style, or inject a dose of humour.
Other photo and video apps help you share your creations to an appreciative community, or back everything up to a secure cloud account. That way, losing your phone doesn’t mean waving goodbye to your memories.
Smile at the camera
Before we get stuck into video and photo apps, it’s worth a quick recap on phone cameras. Most of today’s high-end phones have exceptional systems, capable of sharp and detailed images – even in dimly lit rooms or outside at night. The better your phone’s camera, the better your shots and films will be. No amount of editing will reveal details that your phone missed in the first place.
CTA: Which phones are best for photography? Find out in our guide
If you are choosing a phone for its camera, don’t get too caught up in the race for more lenses and higher resolution. While both may be important, they won’t necessarily mean better pictures. If you want to know what a phone’s camera is really like, read reviews like our best camera phones guide. You might also try searching for a phone on a photo sharing site like Flickr – you should see a selection of shots people have taken with it.
Mozillion rating
Why install?Take, edit and share photos
Why avoid it?Social features aren’t for everyone
If you haven’t discovered Instagram, where have you been? It’s a social app, built around the taking and sharing of photos and reels (short videos). Instagram has grown from a hipster’s paradise into a thriving community, full of people sharing photos and updates that are typically focused on art and lifestyle. You’ll also find your favourite businesses, showing off their own products and what they’re up to.
Instagram is about sharing, so it’s not a great app if you just want to take and tweak your own photos. If you’re happy to share, it’s easy to take a photo (or grab an existing one), and apply some filters and edits to improve the way it looks. When you’re happy, post it, and the people following you will see it in their feed.
This app has a wide range of useful photo editing tools, and because it’s cloud-based, it offers a little protection – even if your phone gets destroyed the photos you’ve posted will survive. Images are strictly limited to a square format, however, and some live effects can cause problems on slower phones. If you like the social side of photography, or you want to share and enjoy lifestyle updates, Instagram is ideal. If you’d just rather edit your own pictures, though, look elsewhere.
Adobe Lightroom
Mozillion rating
Why install?Brilliant photo editing
Why avoid it?You’ll need to pay for pro-level features
Adobe Lightroom is one of several pro-level photo and video tools that have found their way onto mobile devices. Still part of the workflow for many professional photographers, Lightroom’s Android and iOS apps now help enthusiasts make more of their work. Lightroom is free, although you’ll need to create a (free) Adobe account. Once installed you’ll also see regular nags to buy a subscription, which adds features like RAW format support, cloud storage and batch editing.
Even the free version is powerful, offering adjustment of everything from highlights and shadows through to noise reduction and lens corrections. Importantly, edits are non-destructive, and the app keeps a version history as you apply them to your photos – you can revert to a previous stage at any time.
The free version of Lightroom doesn’t support batch editing of many photos at once, but its Profile feature provides a quick starting point, such as converting to black and white or applying various artistic effects. Lightroom might be overkill for casual snappers, but its strong features and useful tutorials will help enthusiasts get more from every picture.
Snapseed
Mozillion rating
Why install?A great, free photo editor
Why avoid it?Works best with Google Photos
If you want a free photo editing app with as many features as possible, Snapseed is for you. Developed by Google, it offers the usual collection of quick filters – here called Styles – along with a massive battery of more configurable editing actions. These, too, include usual suspects such as crops, curves, levels and rotation, but also much more advanced features such as perspective and brush tools.
Snapseed can access local photos, along with any you’ve stored in Google Photos. Open an image and you may find you’re happy with applying a quick style. If you want to really get stuck in, however, opening the tools menu reveals nearly 30 different adjustments. Where a tool has multiple options – for example, the seven properties you can edit with Tune Image – you select by swiping up and down, then adjust by swiping left and right.
Easy controls aside, Snapseed has some impressive high-end features. Perspective lets you rotate the apparent position of the camera, correcting the skew you get if you’re not straight on to a subject. Where this introduces gaps at the border, the app tries to intelligently extend the image to get rid of them. You can lighten and darken areas by hand with the dodge and burn brush, or create localised adjustments to brightness or contrast with the Selective tool.
Snapseed’s complexity means it takes time to learn and master, but it’s easy to use from the outset. You can quickly toggle between an edit and the original, and walk back through a picture’s edit history, removing or adjusting operations even if you’ve since made other changes. This helps encourage a feeling of freedom: you can edit, safe in the knowledge you can abandon or amend the results at any point. It’s a great app, even more so given it’s free.
iMovie
Price Android Not available
iOS iMovie Free
Mozillion rating
Why install?Brilliant, free movie making for beginners
Why avoid it?iPhone only
Apple has a knack for apps that take the complexity out of creative work, and iMovie is a fine example. Available free for iPhones and iPads, it’s an easy movie-making platform, fully capable of turning casual videos into sleek films or sharpened promos.
iMovie isn’t as basic as its easy user interface suggests. Recent updates have added support for videos shot in Cinematic Mode or using the ProRes format on an iPhone 13. With the former, iMovie lets you play around with focus points and change the depth of field, allowing you to create stunningly compelling scenes.
This app’s features aren’t reserved for iPhone 13 owners, though. Whatever your iPhone or iPad, iMovie will let you pull together multiple clips, add soundtracks, apply filters, and even use picture-in-picture and green screen effects. It’s a great way for beginners and improvers to get into film editing. It’s just a shame there’s no version for Android.
PowerDirector
Price Android PowerDirector Free, with in-app purchases
iOS PowerDirector Free, with in-app purchases
Mozillion rating
Why install?A bit more powerful than iMovie
Why avoid it?Not quite pro-level
If you can’t get iMovie, or you’ve outgrown it, PowerDirector is a convincing step up. Available for both Android and iOS, it’s reasonably easy to use, offering a balance of snappy edits and more in-depth tools. It’s free to install, although you’ll be nudged towards paying for the Premium version, which adds features and removes ads.
If you’re not inclined to pay, PowerDirector offers a surprising amount for free. Load in a clip, open the editing menu and there are tools to help you improve or remove noise from the soundtrack. You can adjust fundamentals such as contrast and brightness, add a tint, or play around with the speed, among many other things.
For the most part it’s easy to move clips around and make edits even on smaller phones, but like most video editing apps, PowerDirector runs best on a big device with a powerful processor. In our tests it ran fine on low-spec Android phones, but became slow to respond once we loaded in a long movie file. With a decent phone, however, this is a good mid-range editor for people who want a little more than iMovie offers.
Google Photos
Price Android Google Photos Free
iOS Google Photos Free
Mozillion rating
Why install?Great for easy backup and sharing
Why avoid it?Not so good for editing
Phones are great for taking photos, but they’re a terrible place to leave them. If your phone gets lost, broken or stolen, you could lose irreplaceable memories. While iCloud will backup your iPhone pictures to the cloud, Google Photos stores them on Google’s servers. It adds much better editing and sharing features, and it’s available both for Android phones and iPhones.
Google Photos is free, although you’ll need a Google account to back your photos and videos up. Turn the feature on and everything you film or photograph will be stored in the cloud – you can configure the app to wait for a Wi-Fi connection first. Photos stay private by default, but you can share individual snaps, or create and share albums. The latter is a great way to keep friends or family in touch with what you’re doing as you go along – for example, sharing your best photos of the grandchildren as you take them.
Google Photos handles backups and sharing brilliantly, but it’s also a good overall manager of your videos and photos. Its photos feed displays a timeline of content from your phone and the cloud, with quick ‘X years ago’ links to what you were up to in the past. Selecting the library shows your albums, favourites and a selection of utilities.
As you might expect from Google, Photos’ search feature is superb. If your camera is storing location data, you can search photos by place, letting you quickly find photos from, say, visits to Edinburgh. Enable face grouping, and Google will group photos according to who’s in them. Add a name to a face, and you can quickly find images you’ve taken of a specific person.
Other behind the scenes AI wizardry makes it possible to search your own photos by subject. Even with a library of tens of thousands of images, you can quickly find every shot of cars – or even search for a specific marque like Porsche. You can look for cat pics, activities like fishing, or even events such as weddings – in most cases the results are astounding. Even more impressively, your videos are indexed and searched too, so the results aren’t just limited to your pictures.
Google Photos’ editing features are limited to basic crops and adjustments, so it’s not a one-stop shop for your photos and videos. However, as a way to store, share and search them, it’s simply outstanding.