Laughing Giraffe’s new Soundpix app makes your photos talk

A tiny subset of photography apps has slowly emerged from the vast pack on Apple’s app store to offer an alternative multimedia experience, a hybrid of stills and video: Images with sound.

Soundpix, a free app released today by Laughing Giraffe Technologies, gives you the auditory pleasure of your cat’s meow or your kid telling their absent sibling where to go (nicely, of course) without having to view tedious, poorly shot video footage. Soundpix is not the first app out there to embrace this concept. Shuttersong, for example, lets you attach a music file to your image, while AudioSnaps offers a distinctly social network approach.

For a shooter, Soundpix could not be easier. Just launch the program, and tap on the gear icon. That’s where you’ll set parameters for your sound file. You can record in three-, six-, or nine-second increments before, halfway through, or after your shot. Then aim and fire.

Note too that the halfway setting actually records sound both before and after the image is shot.

Once you have your picture, you can pass it through one of nine filters for a polished look.

The image and sound are compressed into an MP4 multimedia file. The longest duration came out to under 830KB, small enough for emailing and easy sharing to Facebook as well as via SMS and email.

Soundpix does not automatically save photos to the camera roll, but you can choose to share the shot, and the app will pass it to the camera roll as a video file.

Soundpix works with iOS 7 and is available now on the Apple App Store.

➤ Soundpix