The Quality of Your Smartphone's Camera Is Only Half the Picture

Tavis Coburn

I've taken thousands of amazing pictures over the past decade, mostly with my iPhone: two births, countless weddings, mountaintops, sunsets, beaches, foreign lands, and so many other fantastic experiences. And all those photos are in a mess, randomly strewn across dozens of drives in my home and on servers in remote data centers.

We're living in a new golden age of photography, and it's because of the cameras we all have in our pockets: always connected to the Internet and ready to fire. There's a cliché that the best camera is the one you have with you, but that's only half right; capturing a photo in itself means nothing. We take pictures to remember-to document a moment, revisit it, and share it with others. The best camera would actually be the one you have with you that takes great shots, then edits, organizes, and shares them for you.

By that standard, the iPhone is half a great camera. It takes wonderful photos, but Apple's solution for managing those snaps is basically to dump them on a drive-on your computer or in the cloud. While it offers some rudimentary organizing prin­ciples (date, location, and face recognition among them), it makes you do all the most onerous parts of selecting and editing. It gives you incredibly limited sharing options, and good luck getting ­people outside of Apple's eco­system to see those pics.

Because of this, photos have become just as ephemeral as the moments we're trying to capture. We need a search engine for our own photography, capable of handling as much data as we can throw at it. We need a ­Google for our pictures. Turns out, there is one.

­Google's super­nerds managed to turn algorithms into photo editors. Set the ­Google+ app to auto-upload pictures from your phone and it will store them online and automatically correct the color and lighting. It will organize them by date and location. Did you take a bunch of shots in succession? It will turn them into an animated GIF. Most amazingly, the service flags your best shots-where everyone is grinning and the light is just right-as highlights. Magic in the Arthur C. Clarke sense of the word.

Finding stuff is also incredibly easy. The app uses face recognition to pinpoint your friends-and your friends' pictures of you. That's nothing new, but you can search your pictures for, say, 'bikes' and it will find all the images with ­bicycles in them, even if you've never labeled them. When you're ready to show off, ­Google+ lets you share your snaps with a few clicks.

But here's where I reveal a tragic flaw. While ­Google gets the back half right-organizing, storing, and sharing-taking the pictures continues to be a problem. Even ­Google's best phones aren't very good cameras.

The cam on the iPhone 5S simply trounces any flagship Android handset. It's not just the quality of the Android's lenses or sensors (the Samsung Galaxy S4 has better raw numbers) but the apps themselves that disappoint.

On Halloween I took ­the Nexus 5 out trick-or-­treating. It was running the very latest version of Android, released just that day. ­Google touted its ability to use algorithms to make your pictures better, and bragged about the phone's ability to ­handle low light, movement, and other tough situations. My wife packed an iPhone 5S, which had shipped the previous month. We both took lots of pictures.

How'd we make out? My wife had a clot of gorgeous photographs she'll likely never revisit or share. I had a beautifully organized collection of images you can barely make out.

Update: On Monday, Google began rolling out Android 4.4.2, which markedly improves the camera app. The shutter fired several fractions of a second faster than with the previous version of the OS, and the Nexus 5′s camera performs better in poor lighting conditions. But it still can't touch the iPhone 5S.