Magpie

Take notes with your camera.

$7.99 (OR 99C/MONTH) | GETMAGPIE.APP | NEEDS IOS 11 OR LATER

Magpie is a variation on the Notes app, but instead of text notes or audio notes, it’s designed with photographs in mind. That means it’s best on your iPhone; it’s fine on iPad but the more portable your device, the more convenient Magpie becomes.

Magpie describes itself as a digital scrapbook, ‘the beautiful lovechild of Apple Photos and Notes’, although we think it’s closer to Pinterest as a notes app for visual content. It’s ideal for those of us who tend to use the Photos app as an ongoing collection of interesting things, only to wonder what on earth those things are and where they came from. With Magpie, when you see something you want to remember or share, simply snap it. Unlike the Photos app, you can then add some context so it’ll still make sense later: your comments, perhaps, or the URL for a product, or the map location.

You can get images into the app in several ways. The camera is the most convenient, of course, and as you’d expect you can import from Photos. On iPad you can also drag and drop from Safari, which is handy for saving things from online shops or social media.

It’s simple to set up and to use: just create a list and add as many items to it as you like. You can add multiple images to each individual item, which is handy if you want to record multiple views of a tourist attraction or fashion item. You can also share your lists with others, either for them to view in their own app, or by posting to a social network.

TAKING NOTE

It works well, but the info you can store is limited. Each item gets just four fields: price, link, location, and a free-text notes field. This is fine for a few items, but if you start recording lots of things the lack of tagging or categorisation is likely to be an issue. It’d be nice to be able to group your lists in the sidebar too, rather than just reorder them.

Perhaps that’ll be addressed in the future. For now, Magpie is a useful app, and there’s a one-week free trial so you can try it before signing up.

“Magpie describes itself as a digital scrapbook, ‘the beautiful lovechild of Apple Photos and Notes,’ although we think it’s closer to Pinterest”.

Magpie makes it easy to It’s organise possible and to create add context large, to complex anything video you can productions photograph. on your iOS device.

It would be good to have custom fields or categories.