Strips works really well, turning your iOS photo collection into comic book-style movies set to catchy pieces of music
Price: $2/£2
Version: 1.0
Size: 63.7 MB
Developer: Storymatik Software
Platform: iPhone & iPad
Your Photos app is probably full to the brim with old photographs, ranging from one-off snaps to your latest holiday pics. If you’re looking to add some life to your photos, consider taking Strips for a spin. This smart new app turns batches of pictures into impressive comic book-style movies, and the overall effect is really good.
Strips automatically turns selections of photos into comic book-style movies.
When you first launch Strips, the app will present a selection of premade videos based on events in your camera roll. The app will also name these videos for you. Tapping on a video then lets users make tweaks or view the actual mini-movie, and the first thing you’ll notice here is how good the app’s comic effect is. The pictures genuinely look hand-drawn: you really will marvel at how different your familiar snaps look once Strips has worked its magic.
The app sets these videos to music and will choose a title for your video, too, based on the location of the images and the dates between which they were taken.
The effects in Strips are really quite impressive.
Strips does a really good job of automatically generating these comic strip videos for you, but users can configure aspects too. First and foremost, you can choose the pictures you’d like to be included in the clip. It’s also possible to apply one of three filters to the video, each one applying a slightly different artistic style and color palette to the generated pictures. It would be great to see more of these added in future updates.
It’s a shame to see that the app isn’t able to render video, and that although Live Photos may be added into timelines, they’re transformed into still images in the process. This is something the baked-in Memories feature in the default Photos app can already do (albeit without the cartoon effect) and might be a nice direction for the developer to take Strips in a future update.
You can configure exactly how your video turns out.
When you’re viewing the video montage itself, users can choose backing music and can alter the title text. There’s a wide range of music available to choose from in Strips, all of which is included in the price, with no further in-app purchases in sight. Of course, you can choose to have no soundtrack, too, if you’d rather make a silent mini-movie.
There are a lot of music tracks available in the app too, and all of these are included with the purchase of the app.
When you’re happy with your comic strip video, you can export it from the app and send it on to friends and family. Or you can save it into the Photos app or Files app. The whole experience of using Strips, from start to finish, is excellent. The app puts together brilliant comic book-style movies using your existing photos as the raw ingredients – and the overall effect is superb.