At Christmas, HTC released an update to the HTC Gallery application, which included a number of new features although one of these is not yet available in all markets – more on this later. Firstly, I’ll share a few words about HTC putting the application onto the Google Play Store earlier in 2014. The Gallery app isn’t the first HTC app in the Play Store; HTC have moved several across such as the file manager, Dot Matrix case, lock screen and more. This makes it relatively easy to update individual applications and features for individual services, rather than necessitate a device firmware upgrade, which is what would have had to be done going back a few years. As I’m sure many of my readers will be aware, for those of us with a carrier-provided device, this meant waiting for our carrier to try and approve any update, perhaps adding their own update applications in the form of branded bloat. There’s a good chance that any update released this time of year would be delayed until January: traditionally, an improved application like this would have also had to wait until a new point version of Android.
As for the new features, HTC have added in the ability to view cloud galleries depending on your region. There’s a nifty face fusion fiction included in the editor and the ability to tag photographs with keywords. This last feature is especially handy if you have hundreds or even thousands of images on your HTC smartphone and have difficulty keeping track of them. None of these features are revolutionary, but those that I’ve tried work well enough to negate adding a third party application for this function (and encourage me to remove one). If I were a new user, I’d still need a Google account to get the most from my device, but I wouldn’t have to search the Play Store for face merging applications.
The online gallery feature is one that isn’t yet available at my location. Until it’s enabled for my particular blend of device and carrier, I won’t be able to enjoy the ability to connect a number of accounts including Facebook, Dropbox, Flickr and Google Drive, but this will be a powerful feature for those of us with images scattered around a number of different online services. Meanwhile, the tagging and Face Fusion has enough to keep me occupied: check out HTC’s rendition of me wearing the Intel Synapse dress? It does a great job of blending the faces together, right (that’s me by the way, well, sort of)? Let us know if you use an HTC device in the comments below.
