The Breakroom

Introducing Exify

June 20, 2016

By Craig Hockenberry

Exify for iPhone screen shot

For the past year or so, I’ve had an app on my iPhone that no one else has. It has helped me become a better iPhone photographer by letting me check composition and exposure. It also remembers when and where I took a picture. It lets me grab colors out of an image and even helped me understand how the CCD sensor in my phone works.

That app is Exify and you can download it today.

I originally wrote this app after I discovered how much additional information is embedded in the photos we take every day. Apple follows the Exif standard and includes a lot of metadata in our files. Unfortunately, much of this data doesn’t make its way into Photos and other apps that use our imagery: so I wrote my own.

Additionally, there is a lot of information you can extract from an image: things like sampling colors, measuring the proportions of a composition, and generating histograms that help you get the right exposure. Exify can do all that, too.

If you’re a professional photographer, you already know how important it is to copyright your work before distribution. Exify’s editing extension lets you add both a copyright and watermark to an image while editing in the Photos app. These edits are non-destructive, so you can easily remove the information and get back to your original photo.

One of the features I love the most about this app are the action extensions. They let you examine or query any image using the share sheet. Want to know where a photo in Messages was taken? Or check the info for an image you’re viewing in Safari? Or magnify the pixels of an image in Photos? Exify can do all of that and more.

For a full rundown of what this app can do, we invite you to check out the short video and documentation on the product page. Exify is available from the App Store today. Enjoy!