Pleasant and efficient user interface, but missing zoom – ALPACA - delete photos efficiently, organize camera roll and save memory Review

I have tried a few photo duplicate remover apps. So far, this one looks promising. After about 5 minutes of use, the app shows a window asking for a five star review and hints at additional free features. The choice to leave a review is optional. The window keeps reappearing about every 5 minutes or so. I chose the "Later" button a few times until I had used the app enough to have something meaningful to say. I'm never impressed with apps that require a 5 star review for functionality or, even worse, continued usage. But the timing of the request in the Alpaca app is better than a competitor's photo duplicate app which requests a five star review BEFORE the user even has a chance to use the app at all. But moving beyond complaints about begging for reviews, I'll focus on the pros and cons. This is a very useful app. The user interface is pleasant and can help you quickly remove duplicates and choose the one or two best shots out of a collection of similar shots. The algorithm for detecting similar shots seems pretty good. The app presents you with groups of photos (minimum 2, but I've had some groups with 15 or more photos) that the app has determined are similar. If you click on a group you get a screen with a sliding succession of thumbnails at the bottom for all the similar shots and the majority of your screen displays one shot at a time from the thumbnails. Swiping lets you change the big photo up and down the list. You star the ones you want to keep and then hit a button to delete all the rest. You also have the option to keep everything or delete everything. The brilliance of this app is that you tap the ones that you want to keep, not the ones you want to delete. This is far more efficient since generally I am looking for the one or two best photos out of a group of around 8-12. There is one missing feature that makes it sometimes hard to choose the ones you want to keep. You are not able to zoom into the photo. There are photo series where I want to check if the people in the photo have their eyes open or are smiling in order to choose the best one. On an iPhone screen, you can't always make out that detail without zooming. This is the one missing feature that makes it sometimes impossible to choose the best shot within the app. For groups where I need to zoom, I have to use a competitor's app. I wish I could do everything in Alpaca. In my opinion, zoom is the only missing critical feature. Some "nice to have" extras would include the ability to rotate and crop photos.
Review by WhenAllIsSaidAndDunn on ALPACA - delete photos efficiently, organize camera roll and save memory.