App of the Week: Quickshot shields photos from Murphy's Law

One day you will lose your smartphone, or your laptop. Stuff happens. But if you take your photos with QuickShot, your memories, at least, will be secure on a cloud.

Powered by automated translation

It's 2011 - do you know where your holiday photos are?

Many may still be on an old USB thumb drive buried in your sock drawer. Others could be inside a dusty laptop with a hard drive that barely boots up. A few are, no doubt, loitering around Facebook somewhere. You probably e-mailed six or seven to your sister. There's a good chance dozens are stuck in a long-forgotten Flickr account with a password you can now only retrieve though deep hypnosis.

The point is, in the analogue era, photos were special things that needed special equipment and special trips to special stores that developed them into special prints. So, naturally, after such a special series of activities, we'd put those special photos in a special place.

But while they often still contain precious memories, digital photos are produced more like commodities; they now flow like tap water out of the kitchen sink, bathtub or garden hose.

That's a good thing in many ways, unless - to extend the metaphor - your attention wanes and your niece's wedding pictures end up in the sewer.

For more of the apps that put the smart in your phone, visit App of the Week.

The app

That's why it's good to have an application such as QuickShot (Dh3.6, iPhone, iPod, iPad), which, when combined with the Web-hosting service Dropbox, automatically uploads your photos to the cloud (ie, the magical place on the internet where nothing ever dies) as soon as you take them.

The details

To use QuickShot's main feature, you need to first go to www.dropbox.com and download and install some software on your computer.

A free Dropbox account (which also has myriad uses) comes with 2 gigabytes of storage - enough for hundreds, if not thousands, of digital photos.

Once you've done that, open QuickShot on your mobile device and link it to your new account by entering your Dropbox username and password in the settings menu. Then each photo you take with the app will be instantly uploaded and filed away in the "photos" folder inside your Dropbox account. The uploading process will even continue in the background once you turn QuickShot off to play Angry Birds.

You can adjust the settings to save duplicates on your device. You can also "confirm uploads", but then you'll have to hit a "use" button after you take every picture, which can be kind of a pain.

QuickShot is otherwise a simple app with all the photo-taking features you'd expect. But the next time you lean over a cruise ship railing and Poseidon claims your iPhone for the sea, you can rest a bit easier knowing your photos, at least, are all safe and dry on a cloud.

Have some great personal finance apps that you want to share? Write to Curt Brandao at cbrandao@thenational.ae