Jump-start your imagination with this free app for putting together inspiring groups of all sorts of images.
Hooray! It's another app for sorting pictures into groups that you can use for design inspiration or for organising ideas or moodboarding! We looked at Curator for iPad the other week; today it's the turn of Ember.
It occupies a similar sort of space to Curator: you can build themed groups of images either by snapping photos or importing them from your camera roll, then add notes and tags to them. Ember can auto-detect iPhone and iPad screenshots and sort them accordingly, and most impressively it'll sort through all your images and analyse them for colour content, enabling you to simply search for a particular colour.
If Ember feels a little basic, that's because it is - and the developers admit that it's early days. It has some clever features such as smart collections based on tags and other metadata, but if you're just using it on one device without any of the iCloud features turned on, we reckon you'll find it a little underwhelming.
However if you have the Mac version of Ember - reviewed here by our friends at MacFormat - you'll find that the app becomes a lot more useful. You can sync the two of them together and share your Ember library across your devices so that you can access and update your collections wherever you are. You'll most likely use the iOS version for quickly adding images as you find them while out and about, then use the more fully-featured Mac version to do the heavy lifting stuff, like resizing or drawing annotations.
If you don't have the Mac version, well, Ember for iOS may not be especially sophisticated but it's free and perfectly functional. More powerful features are on the way, probably in the form of in-app purchases, but as it is Ember's a decent little app for sorting out various forms of visual inspiration.
