The Best Third-Party Camera Apps for iPhone (and When You Should Use One)

Apple's Camera app is still the best option for most people. It has a beautiful, simple design, is fast and free, and ties in nicely with the Photos app to let you view and edit photos. This is a complete photography suite that's good enough for casual users. Options such as Portrait, Night Mode, Panorama, and others ensure that there are more than enough options here for most kinds of photography, and the app also ships with a great video shooting mode. That's a big plus, because many third-party camera apps focus only on photos or videos, and not both together.

I don't have too many complaints about the Camera app, but I don't like the fact that its updates are linked to OS updates, so if it develops an annoying bug, you'll have to wait for Apple to release an iOS update to fix it. Apple's Camera app also doesn't have full manual controls, so you can't easily change the shutter speed or aperture to take exactly the kind of photo you're going for. 

Price: Free

Every time you take a photo on your iPhone, the software automatically processes it to make the picture look better. If you want more control over the look of your images, you should consider using Halide Mark II instead. This app has a mode called Process Zero, which lets you remove all of Apple's post-processing, and gives you a more natural looking picture. You can then take these photos to your favorite editing app to complete the look. Halide also gives you full pro controls, the ability to customize button placement in the app, and it lets you view photos after you've clicked them. It even shows you complete EXIF data, which is something every pro photographer wants.

I also like one Halide feature in particular, which automatically strips location data from photos when you're sharing them to any Facebook-owned app. While Halide does offer a free seven-day trial, it doesn't have a free tier. You can subscribe to the app for $10/month, $20/year or buy it outright for $60, which is a little pricey. The features are worth the asking price for those who need them, but the pricing also puts this app out of reach for casual users.

Price: $10/month or $20/year or $60 (one-time purchase)

Slow shutter photos keep your camera's shutter open for a long time, which allows you to capture light trails, the movement of stars, or motion blurs. The stock Camera app doesn't let you manually lower the shutter speed to capture these kinds of photos, but you can use a dedicated app such as Slow Shutter Cam to get it done. It lets you select modes for various kinds of photos (eg: Motion Blur or Light Trail), and makes it easy to capture those pictures. Since the camera's shutter remains open for a long time, you'll need to keep it really still to take good photos, and using a tripod with Slow Shutter Cam helps improve the results. 

This app also has a built-in intervalometer, which lets you automatically capture a preset number of photos with a custom time interval. You can ask the app to take 100 photos with a delay of 45 seconds between each picture, as an example. This helps a lot in situations where pressing the shutter repeatedly isn't a good idea, as it can shift the frame or mess up the timing of your photo. The app also has a basic photo editor, which is good to have. I like this app's focus on slow shutter photography, but you do need a tripod to make the most of it, and you wouldn't find this app as useful for other types of photos.

Price: $2.99

(Not Boring) Camera is one of the best new camera apps on the iPhone, and ironically, it mimics the film cameras of yore. I love its UI's emphasis on replicating the film camera experience, with all the right sliders, buttons, dials, and even neat effects like the drop shadow below buttons that keeps shifting as you move your iPhone. It has really large buttons, which is a great accessibility choice too, because not everyone can hit small button targets easily. In committing to the film camera experience, it also uses a rather small viewfinder, which is the only major con of this app.

There's much more to (Not Boring) Camera than its UI, though. The app lets you customize lots of controls, supports importing LUT (lookup table), which is a staple for all pro photographers, takes photos in RAW format (another great pro feature), and is full manual configuration options. Some of these pro features are locked behind a subscription, but all the features aimed at casual users, plus full manual controls, are available for free. Be aware that the app has no native photo editing controls. You'll have to open your photos in your favorite photo viewing/editing app for post-processing.

Price: $14.99/year or $60 (one-time purchase)

If you want an excellent app for taking videos with your iPhone, you should check out Blackmagic Camera. It's free to download and use, and provides you with a vast array of pro controls for videography. It has neat features such as locking white balance levels once recording has begun, which I value a lot, because automatic white balance adjustments can keep changing the color tone of recorded footage and it's very hard to correct that while editing videos. 

Beyond that, there's an array of audio and video settings that will please professionals, which is incredible for a free app. You can tweak frame rates, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, and a lot more. If there's any criticism I have for this app, it's that the interface is a bit intimidating for casual users. It records in landscape by default, and you have to enable a vertical camera mode in settings to take portrait videos.

Price: Free