Posted by Ryan Johnson on Jan 21, 2010

dTECT

Categories: Photography, | 3 comments | |

We’ve all griped about it. There you are, hanging out with your boyfriend, close friends, family, whatever and you want to snap a cute self pic with your iPhone. Of all the things the iPhone is great for, one thing it isn’t is taking self pics. It’s a total pain in the butt. That was until now! dTECT, a nifty new photography app for iPhone makes taking self photographs and group pics soooooo easy. It’s completely hands free and uses facial recognition to detect when to take a picture and from there takes it automatically!

Using dTECT is really easy. It’s got the typical settings that you’d expect from a photography app like a timer and the ability to have the app open straight to the camera. It also comes with a few extras like a vibration setting that lets you know when it’s about to take your picture (ideal for self portraits), a color setting that lets you customize the app’s background color, and a share option that allows you to post your pic directly to Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and send it by email. The share option is pretty slick because when you’re posting to Twitter for example, not only can you select a photo from your image gallery, but you can also type in a message. It’s basically a built in Twitter client. The interface for Facebook and Flickr is just as seamless as well. Good stuff!

So, after taking dTECT for a spin I have to say I was thoroughly impressed. It definitely works as advertised. Before trying the app I figured the facial recognition thing might be a little bit of a stretch and that I’d probably be able to point the camera at just about anything and it’d fire off a pic. After testing it out on my hand, leg, work phone, and other objects I really started to wonder if the app even worked. However, the moment I pointed it at my face I heard a beep, my iPhone vibrated, and the camera snapped a pic. It’s really sweet! After trying out all of the options I personally recommend tweaking the app so it opens straight to the camera, that vibration is turned on, and the timer is set to at least 1 second. I found these to be the ideal settings for taking top notch self pics.

Overall dTECT is a really sweet app. It works like a charm, takes good quality pics, and if you’re a self picture taker it’s totally worth the download! If there’s anything I’d like the developer to add in a future update it’d be an instructions page. Currently I think it may take people a few minutes to figure things out and to get the hang of it.