Open Camera

★★★★☆

I checked out Open Camera again after however many years because /e/OS uses it as the base for its camera app. Most of this review applies to both versions.

It’s actually pretty good! (Much better than Fossify Camera.) Automatic settings are fine most of the time, and you can manually set focus, exposure, etc. It can shift seamlessly between lenses on devices that support it (like the Pixel 5), and you can switch manually on devices that don’t (like the Fairphone 4).

One nice thing I haven’t seen with other camera apps is that you can add some features to the floating toolbar…like turning location on and off. I don’t always want geolocation enabled, but I also take a lot of photos for iNaturalist and OpenStreetMap, or when hiking on public trails, and I do want location stored with those. Being able to see at a glance whether it’s on or off, and switch with a tap, is super-convenient.

I had a little trouble with Panorama mode the first time I used it, until I realized I’d accidentally rotated my phone while panning it, and it was showing me an indicator that I needed to rotate it back to match.

Camera Config

I did have to change some output quality settings, particularly when I installed it on the Pixel 5. I bumped the JPEG quality up to 94%, and bumped the edge mode and noise reduction algorithms to “high quality,” which made a big difference after the first hike where I tried using the resurrected phone for photography.

I also had to dig into the camera app settings to allow it to appear on the lock screen, in addition to setting the lock screen to allow the camera app. (That’s been the default on the Android phones I’ve had before.) But now with both phones I can double-tap the power button to launch just the camera without taking the time to fully unlock the system.

Replacing the System Camera

Generally you can’t uninstall the system camera app. So if you want to use Open Camera on stock Android, or use the upstream version on /e/OS, and you want to use the lockscreen shortcuts, you’ll need to run those shortcuts a few times and unlock the phone to choose the app before it’ll offer the “always” option for it. Once you’ve chosen that, you’ll be able to launch the camera every time.