My Samsung Google Nexus 10 was the first device in the household to receive Android 5.0 Lollipop, beating the Nexus 5 by a couple of days. Here and now, isn’t the time (or place) to write about how my 10 works great running Android Lollipop, because I don’t tend to use the big Nexus tablet to take photographs. So it wasn’t immediately obvious that the Google Gallery application had now completely vanished from the device to be replaced with the Google+ Photos application. By the time I had taken a look at Photos, I was happy enough with Lollipop and didn’t give it a second thought… but I know that many of our readers were less than happy that Gallery has gone to…well…wherever it is that old, unwanted applications go! And okay, this shouldn’t be a problem because this is Android, we can replace stock applications with a third party alternative without a hitch, right? Yes and no. Yes we can, but no because there are more photo gallery applications in the Play Store than I can drink cups of coffee in a morning. And believe me, that’s a lot!
It’s time to introduce Lumific. One of the cleanest and most functional third party gallery replacement applications that I’ve used for Android. The application has a lot going for it: it’s around 19 MB in size, it’s free and the developers are responsive to feedback (and this, for me, is really important). Even the icon looks good! As regards to features, Lumific has a number of tricks up its sleeve. You see, as well as the straightforward showing your photographs, Lumific sorts them and has a beautiful interface. It has three image enhancement technologies embedded into the application – it can auto enhance images, crop and straighten. For somebody who is occasionally, ah, trigger-happy with the camera and not always aware of how I am holding my device, this is a powerful feature. It can be enabled or disabled from the Settings menu. Another really handy feature is the ability of Lumific to group together similar photographs and only show the best as a preview. This is great if you tend to take several pictures of the same scene in the hope that at least one turns out good. I’m guilty of that too and yes, it clogs up my gallery with similar images. Lumific allows the ability to hide individual photographs from the summary view, create highlights and albums too.
Currently, Lumific is in beta and it’s free to use. The application isn’t perfect and you may experience some issues running it but as I’ve said, the developers are enthusiastic and engaging, which is one of the most endearing things about the Android scene. As the application is in beta, this gives us the ability to shape things going forwards. So if you’re interested in this, you can download it from the Play Store. Let us (and the developers) know how you get on.