Best free photography apps for iPhone

iMore's authoritative guide to the very best, absolutely free photography apps for iPhone and iPod touch

Looking for great photography apps for your iPhone or iPod touch? The App Store is home to over half a million apps and games, and a surprising number of them are available for free. Some of the most popular and most-used free apps are free photography apps -- to pair with the iPhone's superb camera.

Instagram

Free Instagram app for iPhone

Instagram isn't just a free iPhone app, it's one of the most popular social photo sharing networks on the planet. It features a large selection of vintage, hip, and fun filters as well as the ability to add the tilt-shift effect to your photos. You can also follow friends and photographers, "like" photos, and leave comments on them. (If you're looking for more great iPhoneographers to share with, check out our Instragram name swap thread!)

Facebook Camera

Facebook is actually very similar to Instagram, just restricted to Facebook. You can view a stream of all the photos your friends are uploading to Facebook as well as share your own. Before uploading your photos, you have the opportunity to add a filter (all of which are very similar to instagram), crop, and tag your friends. Of course, you can also comment on and "like" photos that you encounter. It's Facebook for photos!

Snapseed

There's no denying that the iPhone is equipped with a fabulous camera, but that doesn't mean that many of the images that you take couldn't benefit from a little editing. I dare say that Snapseed is the best free editing tool available for your iPhone in the App Store. It's very robust and super easy to use. Snapseed is actually only free for a limited time, so definitely make sure you pick this one up now! (It's normally $4.99).

Pic Stitch

There are a lot of collage apps in the App Store, but what's great about Pic Stitch is that it's free! With Pic Stitch for iPhone, you can create beautiful collages that tell a story in just a few taps. It features 32 different layouts and after you've finished your masterpiece, you can share it to your favorite social network or another photography app.

Camera Awesome

Free Camera Awesome app for iPhone

If you're looking for a free app that offers more than the built-in iOS Camera app, look no further than Camera Awesome. This fantastic free iPhone app not only gives you a lot of powerful editing tools and filters, but it also gives more control while taking photos as well by allowing you to select separate points for focus and exposure.

More free iPhone apps

For dozens of additional free iPhone apps, including free social networking apps, instant messenger and communications apps, educational apps, entertainment apps, finance apps, fun and games apps, health and fitness apps, kids apps, music apps, navigation and location apps, news apps, productivity apps, reading apps, shopping apps, sports apps, travel apps, and general utility apps, see here:

Leanna Lofte

Former app and photography editor at iMore, Leanna has since moved on to other endeavors. Mother, wife, mathamagician, even though she no longer writes for iMore you can still follow her on Twitter @llofte.

15 Comments
  • Snapseed is free til June 7th
    http://www.iphoneography.com/journal/2012/6/1/app-alert-snapseed-is-free...
  • You're welcome Leanna...
  • Awesome! Thanks for the tip! Just downloaded it.
  • Wait? Is this supposed to be about the most popular photography apps? Because it's far from the "best", most popular? Yes?
  • what are your opinion of the best that are not on this list?
  • The title reads "Best FREE Photography Apps for the iPhone" ;)
  • Title says "best FREE photography app"
  • Are you interested in making your photographs masterpieces instantly with a few taps? Do you want to make your shots awesome, no matter if they are old vintage, black and white or new high resolution colorful photos, by applying a plethora of special effects? Do you want to use selective colors, variety of brush sizes (adjust manually or automatically), gestures like Pan/Zoom/Splash, unlimited Undos, Colorize, Tintalize, Recolor, blend brush to create custom effects and text blending on your photo? Don’t you want to support both landscape or portrait mode and options like loading/importing photo from Cloud, instead of just from camera or photo library? Being an experienced photographer, are you tired of photo editors having several critical limitations? Won't it be cool if you had a choice of 135+ built-in effects on different parts of the same photo and still have the option of creating your own custom effects? Would you like to have option to make favorite list of built-in effects to choose them easily for future? You can also share your masterpiece with your friends through Email, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picassa, Dropbox or post it in form of the post card, to anywhere in the world. If you are looking for an app with all of the above features, try out Photo Splash FX.
  • Snapseed is by far the easiest and best photo editing software I have ever used. It adds that finished look to most photos, very much worth getting for free, even more worth getting for the 4.99. It made by nik software they make incredible filters for photoshop, this app lives up to the high standards that nik has always had.
  • hmm, i dunno if Pixlromatic / picFX / Pix counts.. but good article btw.. yay! =]
  • i am Using Pix App..Quite Good with Filter and Automaticaly Random Filter..
  • You can now enjoy instagram user's photo stream whith the new webapp http://gramgram.net !
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  • Just found a really cool photography app on AppDictions. Downloaded it and have to say it's freaking awesome. Check it out: http://appdictions.com/turn-pics-retro-with-vintique-vintage-photography...
  • I keep seeing all these cool apps for the iPhone and it makes me wish that I had one. Thanks for the collection here.
    Check out my other post for more other free iPhone Photography Apps
    http://www.techlato.com/9-great-photography-for-iphone/