Gathered – Collect Inspiration stands out as an exceptional app tailored for digital creators and artists who seek to organize and archive their visual inspirations. This program, available initially for free on the Apple Vision Pro platform, brings to life the concept of a digital creativity scrapbook that’s both intuitive and functional.
The core functionality of Gathered revolves around helping users curate a personal library of pictures and images that serve as references for their creative projects. The process of growing your digital image collection is remarkably versatile. Users can drag images from another app directly into Gathered, import pictures from their photo library, select files from the file system, or simply copy images from the clipboard. This flexibility ensures that wherever your inspiration comes from, Gathered can efficiently accommodate it.
One of the highlights of Gathered is its seamless integration with iCloud Drive. This ensures that your carefully curated library is effortlessly synchronized across all your devices, providing easy access whether you’re working on your iPhone, iPad, or MacBook. This feature is particularly useful for professionals who are always on the move, allowing them to tap into their creativity anytime and anywhere.
The app boasts several sophisticated features that enhance the user experience. Users can define and manage custom collections of items, a vital tool for organizing different themes or projects. Another impressive feature is the ability to extract color palettes from images, a fantastic utility for designers. The drag and drop functionality allows users to add, move, or reorder items effortlessly. Furthermore, each image can be named, and notes can be added for context, making it easier to recall why a particular image inspired you. For those who wish to retain geolocation data for images taken with their camera, Gathered supports this as well.
Testing out Gathered comes with a limitation of up to 50 images and 5 collections. To unlock the full potential of the app, users can purchase Gathered Pro, which provides unlimited access. This model is common among productivity apps and allows users to explore core features before committing.
Opinions from current users reveal a mixture of praise and constructive criticism. Many users appreciate the app for its role in organizing and saving inspirational imagery in an organized manner. The ability to keep everything within reach and sorted in a visually appealing way is a major plus. The user interface is polished and intuitive, making it easy for even the less tech-savvy individuals to navigate through their collections.
However, users have noted some shortcomings. One significant drawback is the inability to share collections or inspirations directly with others. This is particularly inconvenient for users collaborating on group projects who need to distribute visual references easily. Another frequent criticism is the presence of a few bugs, such as issues with saving images to the photos folder, which necessitates restarting the app. Additionally, synchronization problems between devices have been reported, which can be troublesome for users who depend on fluid cross-device functionality.
Despite these setbacks, users still find Gathered invaluable. It’s often compared favorably to similar apps like Pinterest or Dropmark but is praised for its minimalistic, native design and integration with the Apple ecosystem. The inclusion of the native markup tool right within the app is also highlighted as a beneficial feature, further simplifying the annotation process for the users.
There are suggestions for improvement which, if addressed, could make Gathered even more robust. For instance, enabling the annotations from the markup tool to be visible at all times, adding functionality to save reference websites alongside images, allowing bulk image addition, enabling tag creation for better organization, and improving image navigation within collections would elevate user satisfaction significantly.
To sum up, Gathered – Collect Inspiration is a promising tool for digital creatives, offering a polished, intuitive platform to store and organize visual inspirations. While it has room for improvement, particularly in collaborative and advanced organizational functionalities, it remains a preferred choice for many due to its seamless iOS integration, ease of use, and thoughtful feature set.
