Image editor Aviary keeps exif data

Aviary

Android picture editor Aviary is built into apps like Easy Photo Editor, but a recent update makes Aviary work as a stand-alone app too. Most image editing apps downsample your pictures, but Aviary saves pictures up to 12 megapixels at their original resolution.

Like just about every other Android image editor, Aviary used to lose your exif tags. But not anymore. Aviary learned to keep the exifs, sort of. The only exif problem left is the date tag. The "date picture taken" tag is very useful. Not only to remind you of the day and time you shot the picture, but also because gallery apps use it to sort images by date.

However, Aviary changes the date you made the picture to the date you edited the picture. You lose information, and the sort order in your gallery gets out of sequence. If you edit the picture of the appetizer it will appear after dessert.

Maybe the next Aviary update can leave the date tag alone? There's no need to change it, because files already have a "date modified" property to indicate when you changed them.

Update: date tag issue fixed! Aviary now keeps your exif tags the way you want them.

A grid view in the built-in picture gallery would also be a welcome addition.

Easy Photo Editor

Easy Photo Editor was the first free image editor in the Android Market, err Google Play Store that didn't throw your exif tags away. It uses the Aviary engine, so both apps look like twin brothers and they share the same set of editing tools (brightness, contrast, colors, saturation, effects like sepia, red eye removal, and one click touchup).

Shootout

The difference between Aviary and Easy Photo Editor? There are three two differences that matter:

Aviary is ad free. Easy Photo Editor has ads unless you use a junkfilter like AdAway. Psychologists agree that ads are a source of stress and unhappiness, so blocking them is good for your health.

Aviary lets you choose the output folder of your edited pictures. Easy Photo Editor doesn't let you choose. You can move your edited files around with gallery app QuickPic. You can also use a normal file manager for that, but then you may end up with ghost thumbnails in your gallery.

What makes Easy Photo Editor win for now is that it doesn't change the "date picture taken" tag. It does change the "date modified" flag of the image file, but QuickPic lets you replace "date modified" by "date picture taken" to restore the order in your gallery sequence.

• Aviary
• Easy Photo Editor
• QuickPic