Don’t be fooled by the “cam” in the name of the GE MoodCam iPhone app. This free app is far more concerned with lighting your room differently than turning your digital photos into faux-vintage pictures.
Confusing name aside, the GE MoodCam doesn’t seem to work all that well at its stated goal, either. The idea is to take a photo — or use an existing photo — and apply different GE light filters to it in order to gauge how you might want to change the lighting in your room.
In a general sense, this works. The app’s six filters, ranging form “Cozy” to “Dramatic” each represent some sort of change in the way your photo appears lit, and the gradient filter strength is a nice touch for you to see if you’re perhaps not quite as cozy as the app filter would like you to be.
But these filters look much better on the already included “Sample Rooms” than they do on your own pictures, where the difference in lighting seems more like a filter and less like an authentic lighting choice.
The other portion of GE MoodCam is designed to help you pick out the bulbs that you’d need to recreate these filters in your own home. This is fairly helpful, as it does outline some pretty serious lighting solutions, although disappointingly there’s no explanation for how the bulbs should be situated in your room for maximum effect.
That seems like it misses the point, because without the proper layout, all the lighting in the world is going to look pretty awful. There is a portion of the app that has “design tips,” but they mostly boil down to “Buy these GE lights to achieve these effects.”
Finally, there is the “Bulb List” portion of the app. I have no idea what is under that button, because GE Moodcam crashes every time you tap it.
Until the technical bugs can be ironed out, and some more helpful features added, GE Moodcam will continue to appear like a thinly-veiled advertisement for GE light bulbs, and nobody needs an app like that.
