The camera on the
Galaxy Nexus is a thing of beauty. With image stabilization and ZERO shutter lag, makes taking photos as fast as you can a thing of wonder. As great as the hardware might be, the
Ice Cream Sandwich updates and changes how we use the photos, view the photos and ultimately interact with them is what stands out the most. After all, those are features that we will see in all devices since it is software and not hardware.
First up, sharing your picture. In most current devices you need to navigate to the photo you just took by tapping on the preview image and then hitting menu and hitting share and then tapping on the available options for Twitter, Facebook, Google + and so on. In ICS all those options are conveniently located directly under the photo and can be shared via your preferred location immediately. Pretty nice feature.
Another great addition is the ease in which you can zoom. There is a slider located at the bottom of the screens capture area that allows you to slide left and right to zoom in and out. This feature also carries over to video recording, allowing to actually zoom in and out while in the process of capturing a video. That is one feature that has been requested for a very long time. Nothing was more annoying than having to stop a video to zoom in more and start over.
The camera app also includes automatic face recognition. If you are taking a photo a people, the camera will find those faces and auto focus on them for you. You still have the ability of tapping on the screen to focus on background objects or foreground objects based on what you are trying to capture.
The hits just keep coming, how about a built-in image editor? Yup, ICS includes one now. No more downloading a bunch of 3rd party apps, closing the camera, opening a different app, finding the image, editing, re-saving and then sharing. You can do it all in one fail swoop. Simply hit the options button at the top right of the image preview. You now have access to a whole host of things. You can do the basics from main drop down menus like rotate left or right, crop or set as. Where it gets really fun is under the actual ‘edit’ section. From this area you can adjust the white balance, add effects, adjust the angle of the photo, crop it and even remove red-eye. All edits are saved as a copy of the original so you have no fears of ruining a photo and losing the original.
The photo album, or gallery, has also received a complete redesign. It is now laid out in a slick-looking magazine style layout. With what I describe as tiles, or WP7 look. Each image has is sorted into various albums to make finding particular day, location or person a breeze. You can change how the photos are presented to you by simply tapping on the ‘Albums’ icon at the top left. Inside that drop down you are presented with various choices, Locations, Times, People and tags. All of which work based on what you have set up. Locations will display photos from a certain location using the GeoTags associated to them, People will show the photo collection of the photos of people you have tagged. Makes finding certain photos much quicker, easier and less painful than having to create multiple folders.
The ICS camera also offers Panorama. I know many of us already enjoy features like this, but this is the first time it has been introduced in Android as a standard feature across the whole OS. It is a nice feature to have for those amazing scenery photos.
It really is a huge improvement over how we take photos, share photos and even view your photos. Later on we will get into the particulars of the video camera app. That has a whole host of new functions that is sure to please. Check out the gallery of images collected from the presentation showing all the various elements of the new camera and gallery below. To find this section on the full length video, you will want to head straight to the 42 minute marker.
