How To: Categorize Old & New Photos Automatically by Topic on Your Nexus 7 for a Tidier Gallery

It can be a pretty exasperating ordeal to hunt for one image on your tablet when you have hundreds and hundreds of photos in your gallery. Luckily, there are ways to make this a pain-free process on your Nexus 7, as well as make sure it's never a problem in the future.

Previously, I showed an easy way to sort through an iPhone's camera roll by creating automatically generated albums by topic, and at the time, it was for iOS devices only. That was until Qualcomm hired Euvision Technologies to develop Imapla for Android with some additional features that only certain Android devices can benefit from.

Auto-Sorting Your Photos into Topic Albums

The main function of Impala is to take all of the photos in your gallery and separate them into categories that make the most sense, like Outdoors, Party life, Food, Cars, Women, People, etc.

This allows you to easily locate that one picture out of the hundreds that you have on your device. Simply launch the app and it will begin the sorting process. Tap on "Find" to see its magic and an estimate of how long it will take.

This is the basic functionality of the app, and you can find more details in my guide on using Impala on iOS devices, which shares the same qualities as this Android version.

What separates Impala for Android from the iOS version is the Qualcomm-specific feature of real time object management, which I'll cover next.

Getting Real-Time Photo Recognition

If you wan to keep your photos easily organized by topics, start using the Impala camera to take all of your pictures. When you focus on a subject, the real-time recognition allows you to see the tags (in the top left of the camera's interface) that would be applied to the image for sorting.

You don't even have to snap the picture to see what topic folder it would go in, and it's really fast at doing this, since Qualcomm manufactures the 1.5 GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor in the Nexus 7 tablet.

And Going a Step Further...

Under the app's settings, you can also enable the detection speed, in case you're curious of how quick the recognition actually is.

Additionally, there is the ability to Pixelate when seeing hands, which is a glimpse of Impala's potential for selective recognition. Right now, it will only let us recognize hands, pixelate the image, and prevent us from taking the photo.

We can speculate that eventually we will be able to adjust and specifically blur out the actual item, like nudity, faces, or personal information. We'll just have to wait and see, considering how fresh this app is to Android.

Applying Filters Automatically

Maybe not as prominent, yet still impressive, is Impala's ability to adjust filters depending on what you're taking a picture of (another Android exclusive). On the camera interface, enable the auto-filter in the bottom-left corner. On the bottom right, you can change to the front-facing camera.

The Future of Mobile Photos

The potential for Impala is vast. Imagine being at the beach, and Impala is able to instantly detect that you're outside, adjust the filter, blur out or remove extraneous background movement, and automatically place the picture in an "Outdoor" or "Beach" folder. This could revolutionize the way we organize photos, and I for one am pretty damn excited about it.