Tidy Organizes Your Smartphone Photos Into Albums With Just A Swipe

A new application called Tidy wants to help you better organize the photos you have stored on your smartphone, by grouping them into albums by time, distance, or even by “shapes,” meaning type of photo – panoramas, squares, screenshots, portrait or landscape, for example.

The app doesn’t do the groupings automatically, but rather offers an interface that lets you drill down into your photo library, choosing the photos you want to separate out into their own albums using search filters. For example, you can tap on the “time” filter to pull out photos grouped by hours, 6 hours, days, weeks, months or by year. A “location” filter, meanwhile, lets you pull out photos that are 500 m, 1 km, 100 km, or 1000 km away from you. (Yes, metric units – Tidy is built by covworks of South Korea).

Eng_UntidyTidy uses photos’ metadata to make these groupings initially, but you can then swipe on any individual group to turn it into an album that can be further customized. You can also swipe left to archive the photos in an individual group, similar to the way you swipe to archive email in an app like Mailbox, perhaps.

Tidy’s albums can be 3 or 4 columns wide, or you can designate a “collage” style which looks more like something you’d make with Pic Stitch, for example. Once the album is created, you can favorite photos, add memos, or share individual photos via mail, SMS or social media. You can also move a photo to a different album, set which photo should lead the album, copy photos, or assign them to a Contact.

Unfortunately, there’s not currently an easy way to share an album in its entirety with another user, which is something of a miss, but maybe a temporary one.

In a future release, Tidy will add themes, an album backup and sync service, and support for collaborative albums you can build with others. Presumably, some of these features will be premium upgrades.

Tidy comes from Covworks, a web and app development company from South Korea which has created a number of mobile apps for photo manipulation and management, including things like Uface, Pictory, Toonface, ColorManager Cam, and more. Most of Covworks’ team members have worked for internet companies in Korea, including Naver and Cyworld, for example. Over the past two years, the company has published 12 apps.

Tidy itself is free download on iTunes and Google Play.