Anima Camera

Early last week, I got frustrated with the iPhone's default Camera app. I'm a big fan of the iPhone's 48MP lens, but I was constantly turning the feature on every single time I wanted to take a photo. Whenever I quit the Camera app and re-opened it, I needed to turn my 48MP settings back on. It was really annoying. So I thought hey, it'd be great to develop an app that always shoots 48MP photos, without needing to adjust your settings. From here, Anima was born.

Funny enough, when I was trying to understand connecting Anima to the iPhone 16 Pro's camera button (a feature coming soon), I was digging in the Settings app under Camera. Lo and behold, there's a menu called "Preserve Settings", with ProRAW toggled off by default. You'd think your camera settings would save automatically, but they don't. From here I faced an interesting problem. What I set out to create originally was now redundant and unnecessary. Or so I thought...

While digging into the specifics of how the 48MP sensor functions, I realized that if you enable flash in the default Camera app with the 48MP lens selected, the lens will automatically default back to 12MP when you take the photo, resulting in a lower quality photo. As somebody who loves flash photography, this doesn't make sense. So I came up with a way to "trick" the camera into taking a photo with flash enabled by turning on the "torch" instead. ;-)

My direction shifted: Anima is no longer a way to save your 48MP ProRAW preference, but rather, a way to take photos in a totally new light!

Having complete control over your 48MP lens is essential as a professional photographer. Anima grants you this power.

Why's it called Anima? Originally, the app was called Always48 - which after finding out you can preserve your 48MP preferences with the default Camera, didn't make sense. Always48 also lacked a sleek marketing edge. The word anima means "soul" in Italian. The soul is a pure embodiment of a human's spirit. This is a perfect name for this utility because it actualizes the finest details of your moments, especially when shooting up-close flash photography of people, animals, and objects.

Unfortunately, demonstrating the quality of these photos is difficult on a blog that prioritizes smaller size photos. To see just how well it works, you'll have to check it out!

Anima is now available on the Apple App Store for 99¢. You can download it here.

To celebrate the release, here's 10 FREE download codes:

• JF79T9KF9NKP
• 9YMPMAHTH7E9
• TA69RFLF3WPE
• FPEEYWPHAWPF
• YJARWALYXWF9
• 3L49J9XPWNNP
• TLRMTJNYYN67
• 34TJR4JFTXNK
• M49RJXH4YN4K
• N67R7LRJA9YY

Redeem your code here.

These codes expire as soon as the next update is released, so use one while you can!