[eckza]

Personally, I've been waiting for an app like this for a long time.

I don't use social media, but I have a group chat with a handful of close friends. Sometimes, I like to insert emojis into a photo for comedic effect.

Now I can do this without fighting with iOS's horrible Markup editor.

(Quite frankly, I'm surprised that this isn't part of iOS already.)

[vxNsr]

But it’s relatively easy to use iOS’s markup editor. The whole time he was explaining this app all I could think was… it’s so much easier to just use the markup editor.

If you’re sharing to WhatsApp… just use their editor, it allows adding stickers and emojis natively, it doesn’t auto detect faces… but is that strictly necessary?

For double points, if you don’t wanna share on WhatsApp you can still use their editor and just send it to yourself. Now you are still only using one app, and the new photo is saved automatically to your camera roll.

[perardi]

I kind of hate-listen to ATP at this point, as the only one who lives in the real world is Siracusa…

…but this is actually not easy to do via the iOS markup editor. It defaults to a pencil tool that draws way too fine of a line to mask a face without a loooot of scribbling, and adding a shape is a lot of taps. And text, forget about it, that's a pain in the default iOS editor. (Instagram: way better at this.)

This is a weird niche of a tool—it's for people who are posting photos to the Instagram timeline where you can't use the built-in stickers feature, or sending a lot of photos via Messages. But for this tiny niche: sure, useful.

[greedo]

Siracusa is great to listen to since he can make very complex subjects seem simple. His writing with Ars was similar. I listen to his other podcast and wish there was a way to mute his co-host so I only heard John. Despite the rambling, incoherent interruptions from said co-host, I still listen to the podcast because the value in listening to Siracusa outweighs the pain from MM.

[kiwijimm]

You've found Casey's next app right there...

[soylentcola]

Can you do it in the default photo editing app? Don't have any iOS devices handy to check out, but on my current phone, the standard Google Photos app has text markup - including emojis.

Just tested it out and I was easily able to put an emoji over a face and resize/rotate it with pinch/drag type motions. Anything like that in the default Apple app?

Granted, there is nothing like the automation features in OP's app, so at least that part is interesting.

[perardi]

Frustratingly, no.

If you insert a photo into Messages and hit Markup, the first view gives you a bunch of pen/pencil/brush options, with fixed sizes per brush. There's a plus button that allows you to insert shapes and text…but you can't pinch-zoom to scale the text. You then have to tap around again to set the font size and color.

It's a weird, neglected-feeling interface. They could borrow a lot from Instagram's story editor.

[graftak]

What the author of the app can do however is creating an <x-Apple>OS photo markup plugin that provides the more usable mask ‘aid’ tools. A feature I haven’t seen utilised once since it’s inception.

[Grustaf]

Yeah, that's definitely what he should do. Very surprising he didn't do it already, this is the perfect use case for markup plugins.

[tedmiston]

I just tested and you can do it in Photos.app (activate Markup in the top right).

That said, fully agreed the UI is very clunky compared to doing similar things in Instagram's editor.