Jacob Hall, Editor-in-Chief of TapSauce | APPS | 07.18.2012 @ 5:00 pm
The App: Tiny Post
The Device: iPhone 4
The Price: Free
The Basics: Categorize this one under “so simple, why didn’t I think of it!?” Tiny Post is a captioning app, letting you add captions to your photos. What makes it unique (and what gives every Tiny Post image a very specific identity) is a specific and stylish font that manages to work equally well for comedy and sentiment and a surprisingly versatile “three line” system, which limits where you can place your text but does so in a way that guarantees a good looking image. Making your cameraphone images into instant memes just got really easy.
The Review: It’s almost impossible for a photo to look bad with a Tiny Post caption. The default (and only) font is fantastic, it has juuust enough drop shadow to help it stand out and the app practically forces you to make the proper aesthetic choices on letter placement by limiting where you can put them. It’s wonderful…and idiot-proof.
There’s more going on in Tiny Post than photo captioning, though. In fact, Tiny Post has so many subsections and options that it can feel a little cumbersome at times, but never enough to actually ruin the experience. Like most photo sharing apps, Tiny Post is big on social media, offering options for Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr users at every turn. It feels like more of the app is dedicated to sharing your pictures than making them. Still, that’s a silly complaint, since the makers of the app are aware of their user’s many needs and are catering directly to them. It’s fantastic, really.
Once you’ve set up your various social network connections, you can get to the meat of the app: the captioning process. By tapping a button that’s instantly available from any location in the app, you can opt to pick an image from your library or take a fresh picture (the app follows in the footsteps of Instagram by only letting you take/use square-shaped pictures). After that, three transparent boxes appear along the upper two thirds of your image. Here you can type to your heart’s content, spacing and breaking up your words as you see fit. After that, you select which social networks you want to send the image to the final product is added to your profile.
There are the other standard features: you can follow other users and they can follow you and you click “like” on other images. There are tabs for the most recent uploads and there is a “hall of fame” tab, where you can view the most liked images. There are many, many tabs in this app but once you get used to it, navigation is easy enough.
However, the app appears to be broken in at lost one minor way: when I directed to make a change in the setting to access my photo library, I realized that the button they were referring to doesn’t even exist in the settings!
Still, I’ve been having a blast playing with Tiny Post. Taking cat pictures and giving them inappropriate captions has never been so much fun!
The Final Grade: A-