PixeGrab

Posted by: AndroidAppLog August 25, 2011 in Android App Reviews, Tools 1 Comment

Been to a party where you snapped a lot of cool pictures but unfortunately used your friend’s phone for it, and now that you need them you don’t have any to share with your online friends, family and colleagues. Requesting your friends to send over a dozen MMS’s isn’t a fair idea and to some extent is inhuman way to share pics, neither is sharing pictures over social media a great way to get and send pictures. Wouldn’t it be cool if the receiver puts in all the effort to get the pictures rather than the sender? What if you could get all the pictures you snapped last night with your friend’s phone in just a couple of taps from your own device. Yes that’s the power of computing and exactly what PixeGrab does for you.

The name PixeGrab could give you a hint about what the app does but let us tell you how well it does and how easily you will be able to share and reverse share your pictures from today.

The app is divided into three main sections – PixeInvite, PixeLive and PixeBox. With the PixeInvite you can invite people and request access to copy pictures from their device. PixeGrab uses phone contacts directory to choose people and send invites in a much familiar way like you do using your mms or sms service and search for contacts using the address bar. It didn’t take long before we added a couple of people to our invite list and send them the exact one-time procedure to be followed for any future session. Each session is created for a limited time period and expires after a couple of days; this can also be extended manually later to carry a longer session. The second section is PixeLive which shows all your active and inactive sessions and gives you tools to take total control over them, like you will be able to see the pictures you want to grab, session details, change expiration or cancel the session. You can also send textual messages to the invited people through the same channel you invited them and also add new people in the session. The third and the most important section is the PixeBox which stores all the grabbed pictures, textual conversations and option to recreate and delete session with all the pictures within. Each of the sections has a refresh option which keeps the content updated every time you need it.

Whether or not you need the camera, the app has an inbuilt camera application to let you capture pictures and instantly share with others. Apart from just the basic functionality you can also entertain your friends greeting them with a collage through the PixeTalk section which requires you to invite your friends in the same way you invite them for a reverse photo sharing session and once they accept your request, the app does it all for you. With the settings menu you can choose the way your device notifies you about sessions and pictures, you can also add or edit your profile details like profile picture, name, email, country and phone number which can be used by app for internal routing.

Any Invite sent just requires the receiver to install a free app on their smartphone before they can respond to your request; the app optionally allows you to send detailed instructions to your friends before they complete your request. But what if your friends had an iPhone? PixeGrab will soon be available for iOS devices and offers a similar app which can be used to grab images from iOS devices. Also don’t forget to check out the PixeGrab widget which lets you directly access the PixeCamera section for quickly capturing images.

By far PixeGrab is one of the best photo sharing and reverse sharing experience we had on our android device. With PixeGrab you need not worry about your personal pictures being disclosed to public. Though PixeGrab is slightly priced above the average price of apps on Android Market, if you are seriously interested in simple, reliable and secure photo sharing or reverse sharing, there isn’t a better way to do it over Android.

Android App review performed on HTC Desire with Android 2.2