Motorola Gallery on the Moto G 2015

Motorola Gallery is a simple, yet powerful photo viewer and editor, and it's already installed on your Moto G 2015.

Motorola has included their full-screen immersive gallery application in the Moto G 2015 software. While the Highlight Reel feature is not included (it's left for the more high-end devices) the app itself is still feature rich and offers most anything you would want from a photo gallery.

Let's dive in and take a look at how the Motorola Gallery app works.

 

Your Camera Roll and display options

 

The Moto G 2015 has a pretty good camera — especially for a budget phone. To browse through all those pictures and videos you'll take, you need a way to show them all. The Moto Gallery does this nicely. You can choose from a list of albums stored on either the phone's internal memory or the SD card, a list of only videos, or a Camera Roll view with all your pictures and videos sorted and displayed for you. When in the Camera Roll view, you can choose to sort images by the time they were taken, or by event, which groups images and videos based on location as well as date.

It's unassuming, uses Google's Material Design principles, and leaves focus on the images themselves, not the app. It's an excellent way to see the photos and video you've captured with the Moto G 2015.

Image editing

 

Things get a little more robust here. While the gallery view was all about keeping focus on the photos you have taken, the Motorola Gallery also has a powerful non-destructive image editor built in. You'll not find a lot in the way of stickers or caption bubbles here, but for things like filters, frames and borders and even exposure settings it's very nicely done.

To get to the image editing tools, just choose a photo from the gallery view. At the top, you'll see the pencil icon when you have it open. Click on it to get to the editing menu. Once there you have four main categories:

• Color filters range from the Instagram-popular vintage look, to black and white, to cross processing effects. Just choose one from the list and see the effects instantly.
• Frames place a border around your photo, and you can choose from several different styles including bounded borders or the grungy look.
• Transformation effects allow you to crop, straighten, rotate, mirror or draw on your photo. Touch-friendly controls make things easy to use.
• Exposure effects can give you a Vignette look, a graduated filter, negative effects and more. This is also where you can adjust things like the saturation and color balance.

The best part is that you can undo any or all your changes, keep working until you're satisfied and then export it all as a new image — all without making any permanent changes to the original.

The Motorola Gallery is a great way to keep track (and edit) the pictures and video you're taking with your new Moto G. While not every feature we've seen for the higher-end Moto X models is available, you have a nice mix of tools that work well on the Moto G 2015's hardware, and look great while doing it.