Aqua Eagle Multi-Photo Email

Backing up or transferring photos off an iPhone can be an arduous task, particularly when there is no sync cable in sight. In these situations users are often forced to e-mail the photos to themselves or a friend one by one. Aqua Eagle's Multi-Photo Email addresses this issue.

The application employs a user interface that looks like a template from one of Apple's iLife applications, featuring a woodgrain background and very iPhone-esque buttons. The interface is attractive — increasingly uncommon among most of the App Store's inhabitants — and easy to navigate.

Multi-Photo Email is independent of the core Mail client. Users simply have to choose from a list of SMTP servers — Gmail, MobileMe, AOL are preconfigured or users can manually add their own — and provide login details for their account. Once completed, Multi-Photo Email is able to interact directly with the SMTP server without involving iPhone's Mail client.

Multi-Photo Email insists on performing an SMTP test once the server settings have been entered. This crashes the application to the Home Screen; fortunately, the SMTP settings are saved prior to testing, so users aren't stuck in an endless series of crashes.

Using the application is as simple as hitting Add Photos and choosing as many photos as you wish (we added more than 50 with no problem) from the iPhone's photo library, regardless of whether the photos are situated in the Camera Roll or other folders. The photos appear in the main interface as large thumbnails, and users can delete them at will.

Once the photos are chosen, the app guides the user through the process of sending the photos to one or more recipients. Users can input custom subject and body text, or set default text for quick e-mailing. The application then displays the progress and notifies the user once completed. The entire process is quick and pain-free, and much easier than using the iPhone's own Mail client.

Of course, as the number of photos increases, so does the size of the email, the amount of data being used (over Wi-Fi and 3G) and the time it will take to send. Aqua Eagle's Multi-Photo Email addresses these issues by offering a Reduce Image Size option and a customisable JPEG Image Quality setting. The Reduce Image Size had no apparent effect on photos, but the image quality setting successfully reduced file size.