Nutshell Camera: Instant mini-movies with text and animation‪.‬ 4+

I love this app - it’s one of the few really “new” photo apps to come along in a while. And it is truly free - no crippleware, no ads, no in-app purchases. BUT - and this is a huge BUT - the “get started” instructions (and the description above) have a fatal omission and they almost guarantee that your first video will be total crap.

The instructions tell you to “take three photos” … something that most people would think allows you to take a photo, wander off, mess around, set up an new shot, take that pic, move on to the third, etc etc. But you aren’t really taking photographs here. What the app wants is you to mark “key frames” in an actual video. It’s not entirely obvious (although you figure it out after your first botched attempt … or maybe two) that you have to hold and move the camera BETWEEN the three photos in the same way you would when shooting a standard video.

So take a short video, and hit the camera button to mark your key spots. Then the app makes a sweet little time-compressed video and lets you annotate the key spots with animated text and stickers. It comes out looking really cool and its really easy - as long as you know you are shooting a video and not just “taking three pictures”.

I would give this five stars in a heartbeat, except for the misleading instructions. Until Prezi fixes this, I can only give it a four.

It’s also worth nothing that the built-in sharing system uses either a Facebook or Google login, so if you are at all interested in privacy or data security you need to use a manual sharing method. However, since Prezi gives you that option with a “save to camera roll” function I won’t dock them a star for this.

This app is really fun and easy to use. I'd love to have the ability to change and or inport sounds and music after. Filters and stuff for the video would be nice too.

I love the little animations, but there aren't enough of them. A good start.

Love making something simple with the kids