Scalado Album Review

 For most purposes it does a great job and you are getting several improvements for the price, but there was one feature that we would have liked to see included, but we will talk about this in a moment.

After the app launches it displays a list of all your images grouped and organised into various folders (with thumbnails next to each folder name depicting the last image taken). The latter can be hidden from view but there doesn’t seem to be a way to create new folders or manipulate images by copying/pasting them into existing ones, so there is definitely room for improvement.

However for the most part the app is intuitive to use and performance is good. The app also organises several images into folders based on the Month or Places/Nearby.

With the latter if you have taken photos with your camera and left the GPS-tagging on, the Places or Nearby categories will then allow you to pick images and display them on the embedded Google Maps interface which is a nice touch.

We also liked that heading into a folder with multiple images displays them in a vertical list and that the video thumbnails were animated, showcasing the first few frames of the video (additionally the app also provides its own media player which runs well). Scrolling speed was quick and accessing the full image and swiping between them was equally as fast.

Long pressing on images/thumbnails also allowed us to quickly share photos or delete them. However its best features was the ability to handle 200MB+ images in full-res and zoom past 100%.

Granted the 200MB+ images rendered in the same time as our Samsung Galaxy S II’s default gallery, but the ability to view images with an improved zoom was a great feature.

Summary

Scalado Album offers a useful alternative to your existing Gallery app, simply because it allows you to zoom in past the standard 100%. Also it's fast and we liked the ability to view our geo-tagged images on the embedded Google Maps interface. Only better image manipulation would have added the icing to the cake. Even so for 81p it's certainly a polished app with developers who seem to listen to any feedback received, so touch wood they will implement the changes we suggested in our review.

Note: The only real requirement for this software is that your Android phone needs to be running version 2.3.3 otherwise it won’t work properly. However on our ICS 4.0.3 phone it ran without a hitch!