Image Toolbox

★★★★☆

An extremely powerful image editor for Android. And not just the usual features like crop, adjust contrast or brightness, maybe apply a filter, but you can do batch edits, format conversion, scaling the actual pixel image, editing metadata…all the things that mobile apps tend to hide behind the curtain (because why would someone need to even know the pixel depth, never mind change it? :eyeroll:). The downside is that it’s a bit awkward to use.

This is the first image editing app I’ve tried on Android that I can get to keep both location and timestamp intact when editing. Sometimes. You can make a lot of adjustments, including cropping, arbitrary rotation, saturation, etc. and it’ll preserve the EXIF metadata!

Unfortunately, it also tends to shrink the image when you crop it. Sometimes that’s OK for an iNaturalist observation, since what I really want is to keep the timestamp (and location if it’s present). But it’s terrible for artistic shots.

Fortunately, Fossify Gallery has fixed the bug that kept it from preserving EXIF data, so I can use its built-in editor now.

Google Play vs. FOSS Variants

The version in the Play store uses Google’s machine learning for some features, as well as Google’s crash reports and other analytics. It can also be built as capital-F Free software, without the telemetry and Google-dependent features, making it suitable for F-Droid’s stricter requirements (though there’s a bug keeping the latest release out of F-Droid).