Jazz up your photos with SnapBox, if you must.

If you simply must have every available photography-related app on your iPhone, then SnapBox, an image filtering function, is for you. Everyone else should take a pass.

While playing around with SnapBox in preparation for this review, I was certain something was missing. A button or a hidden menu, perhaps? Nope. SnapBox is simply an app that allows you to choose a photo from your camera roll and then apply an effects-altering filter chosen from a menu.

SnapBox was recently renamed, from PhotoBox previously, but nothing else about the app was updated, unless you count the pop-up advertising for EffectsLab (The pop-up appears when opening the app for the first time. A less-than-scientific study involving reopening the app a handful of times did not reproduce that result).

The app’s 12 available filters have names that range from aptly descriptive, like “Noir” (black-and-white), to the mildly mysterious, such as “Summer ’69?” and “Hong Kong 1976?” (What does that mean?). These can improve, jazz up or just make slightly weird-looking any photo you’ve got on your phone.

If you take a lot of pictures with your iPhone, you might find SnapBox useful. If not, you may wonder what the heck it is after a few weeks, and delete it.

A few App Store reviewers claimed that SnapBox crashed when they tried to open a photo, but I did not have that experience.

Along with Noir, Summer ’69 and Hong Kong 1976, the app’s other filters include Auto Photo Correction, Cinema, Indie, Nostalgia, Belltown, Lomograph, Polarize, Tweed, Red Flare and Fantasy.

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