Classic Camera by Hipstamatic Reviews

I’ve been using and enjoying creating imagery with Hipstamatic since 2010, when I first discovered ClassicCamera while leading a photo tour in Morocco. What originally drew me to ClassicCamera was the look and feel it had like a separate and unique camera, and the unpredictability and fun of pairing the many different lenses and films. So I was very disappointed when I started experiencing continued crashing over the past months.

I first contacted Hipstamatic Support in early August and received an immediate reply from Allan. He asked a lot of questions and then, had me do a few tests, and also had me send him some diagnostic information, which he then passed on with a log I sent him, to Hipstamatic developer, Ryan, for investigation.

We communicated regularly over the next month, with Allan keeping me up to date on the progress they were making with the crashing issue. In late September, Allan wrote that they had an update to Hipstamatic that was in beta testing and told me that as soon as that new version was fully tested, it would be sent to Apple for approval. He said they hoped to have the update out soon. And now, with the update to Hipstamatic Version 352, it appears that this problem is solved!

Thank you, Allan, and the rest of the Hipstamatic team, for your hard work on my behalf..and for the many, many photographers who have been creating with this wonderful app for so long. I’m glad I was patient!

I’ve been using Hipstamatic for years, invested in a lot of the filters and have had nothing but a five star experience up until a few months ago. It seems to coincide with the release of iOS 11 and more importantly iPhone X. Since then, my go-to app for genuinely terrific photography has crashed, frozen, failed to save, etc. If the developer keeps crash reports, there’s got to be a whole library by now just for me given the number of times ClassicCamera has let me down and yet I keep coming back to it.

I can echo a lot of recent reviews by saying “Come in guys...”. I understand the desire to make the software compatible with the newest technology but if it is at the expense of the experience of loyal users who have invested a great deal of time and more than a little money on extras, you’re not doing your due diligence when it comes to addressing issues with ‘recent’ technology.

I’ve hoped after every of the last 5 or so updates that the bugs would be quashed, yet in many cases the experience is worse rather than better. I’m hanging in there guys but please reward my and others patience with a functional app before we find something that doesn’t consume half our time retracing our steps over and over.

As the overall 4.8 out of 5 rating indicates, ClassicCamera has captured the hearts and imagination of a lot of folks... but the preponderance of recent reviews reflect my experience with both my iPhone8+ and iPad Pro... sadly,ClassicCamera crashes at the most inconvenient moments. When the camera, lenses, films, and flashes work, the images can be stunningly satisfying... and editing images, with the options of changing lenses and films after the fact, is very nice... provided things don’t crash.
My recommendation is to go ahead and get ClassicCamera , but don’t go crazy getting the add-on lenses, films and flashes until you get a sense of how the basic camera works on your device. Otherwise, you may find it incredibly frustrating to have spent money and time tooling-up and exploring the possibilities... only to end up with a crash-prone and buggy app.
On the good side: the developers seem to be available, and my experience with them has been quite positive. There’s a lot that must be going on “under the hood” of ClassicCamera, and making every device play nice must be very difficult. We can only hope the crashes get fixed in the next update.

I’ve been using Hipstamatic for years. I also have Tintype and Hipstamatic X. But my first love is Hipstamatic. The fact that I can apply favorite lens/film/flash/etc. combinations to existing photos is fantastic, though I more often let Hipstamatic surprise me with preset combos. One of the best things about ClassicCamera is their purchasing model. No subscriptions, no $50 price tag to get all the bells and whistles. You like a hipstapack, you buy it, you don’t like one, you pass on it. Wish more apps would copy this model. I and many of my friends have passed on many subscription apps because the cost just adds up too much too fast when app updates aren’t even guaranteed. Kudos to the Hipstamatic developers.

This sad day has been many years in the making, but I finally had to remove my beloved Hipstamatic from my iPhone. I have been a Hipsta devotee since day one, so much so it’s the only reason I’m still on an iPhone. It has been my singular stylized iPhone shooting and editing app since the first time I used it, and I suffered through all the issues over the years (they never really conquered iCloud syncing of edits, did they?).

But since approx v3 it’s just become so unstable to a point that it was ruining shoots. The issues started about a year ago, when Hipsta started killing my battery routinely taking my phone from 30% to a hard dead in seconds. On one shoot on the Highline in NYC Hipsta killed the phone so badly I had to take into an Apple store to get it restarted. Now with the latest version it’s completely dead, crashing on every start, displaying the lens on the case off-center, quitting but still running in the background, and still with the battery issues.

It’s a sad day indeed, but if you can’t rely on your photo software then it’s time for the software to go. It was a good run, old friend...😢

I’ve been a loyal promoter of Hipstamatic and have purchased almost every single lens & film they’ve produced. It pains me to have to write this review but it seems someone’s asleep over there because it pains me even more having to run the same course of action to fix a bug I encounter ONLY when using Hipstamatic. While listening to music from your phone, and opening Hipstamatic, the volume noticeably goes down. As if that’s not irritating enough, to fix this issue, you have to not only close ClassicCamera altogether but turn off your phone and turn it back on again. This is a HUGE issue for those of us who’d like to use your product that we paid for while also listening to music. I thought It would be fixed in earlier versions but nothing happened. I though it might be the phone I’m using but this problem persists across three phones and no, I don’t restore from back ups. Do I have to discontinue use of your product altogether or do you think someone will finally address this? I promote you everywhere; Facebook, Instagram and word of mouth.

Current Review: Updating to 340 was the biggest mistake I ever made with an App. I used to love Hipstamatic, but this update makes ClassicCamera practically unusable on my iPad Mini, Now the camera is off frame by about 50%, meaning that only about half my recorded frame is what I expected to capture. Additionally, it used to be easy to flip my camera around and customize my lens/film choice. Now I have to dial through a variety of "favorite cameras." This is just awful. v.280 was probably the last good version.

Older Review: For a long time I held off updating from v.280. Now that I've updated to 305, I regret it. Not only did my case from the Long Island Free Pak not make the transfer, but when shooting in relatively low light with moderate light sources, my results show artifacts from failed rendering, bright blue and red pixilization in the highlights and green pixilization in the shadows. The problem first showed in the much touted manual mode and persisted through classic mode. I shot three snaps, all with problems, using a neville+daydream setup. (Now that I'm on v.340, I wish I still had v.305.)

I’ve had Hipstamatic on my iPhones since the beginning, an have loved it for as long as it was loveable. It is no longer, and has been so for a while now. The company’s focus shifted from being a really cool, fun to use, reliable camera to a new pack every month (often with none to little differentiation from packs of the past) to continually try to extract more money from loyalists, all the while ignoring stability issues. It doesn’t matter that I own all but about three of the film/lens packs, They can’t be used at all because ClassicCamera just CRASHES almost immediately EVERY TIME I TRY TO USE IT.
Way to ruin something great with your greed and carelessness. My belated Christmas gift to myself will be to delete this useless junk app, save myself a whole lot of frustration, and get on with taking photographs with some other app that actually works.
Update: Bought a new phone, and this tired app still crashes constantly making it unusable. I found the solution though. Delete! Bye bye.

I have been using Hipstamatic for years, and it’s my favorite go-to camera for many reasons. I prefer it over the default Apple camera app and even the newer Histamatic X (although I’m using that more these days too...)

The most recent version has stopped working with RAW files for some reason. It still works if I shoot in JPG mode, and HX works with the new Apple RAW, so I know it’s something in ClassicCamera. Hopefully we’ll see this fixed soon.

I don’t use the print shop much, but it’s a great feature and the print quality is excellent.

I do wish the devs would provide better support for more social platforms, or at least a better hand-off for sharing. It used to cover the big players, but those built in share features starting failing bit by bit. They even had their own social platform, Oggl, but that just quietly floundered with ever-increasing dead zones until they finally just abandoned it. I thought Oggl was great, but I guess the devs decided they didn’t want to compete with IG - which is a shame because the ecosystem needs alternatives.

It’s not too late to hop on board, it’s still a good app. I hope it still works if I upgrade to the newest Pro Max.

After I updated my iPhone X to the latest version of Hipstamatic my phone crashed each time I tried to take a photo. I got in touch with their support team and Allan (the same name, but not me) worked with me to fix the problem. It took a few days, but Ryan came up with a solution and a bug fix.

I use the Pro Mode for shooting and editing and thanks to a suggestion from Allan, I learned that I could edit photos even though I couldn’t take them with ClassicCamera at that point in time. This actually encouraged me to experiment with the lighting modes in the native camera and come up with some interesting images.

I like ClassicCamera and am happy with the Customer Support that I have received.

ClassicCamera doesn’t get the support it used to. Too much effort seems to go into new Hipstamatic apps that don’t get support either and seem to just flop. It’s really disappointing—especially with the how much money faithful users have pumped into ClassicCamera over the years. Hipstamatic needs an overhaul as far as organizing favorites and cases. When you’ve spent over $100 on all of the gear, organizing it all is such a tedious task and it seems a bit buggy or glitchy when you try to do so. It has become near impossible to find the combo you want with all of the possible combinations you can create. You can’t organize the cases like you can lenses, films and flashes which has become annoying to find the case you want. It’s all just become cumbersome and clunky.

Any plans to update all of the cases so they fit all phone screens? Some of them are still set for iPhone 4S screen sizes. Some new solid color cases would be cool. Navy blue perhaps? Forest green? Neon colors? Chrome?

This camera, though it must be purchased in bits and pieces, is my official new favorite right now because of its ability to allow selection of lenses for the varying moods of a shoot. It’s a spectacular new toy for my arsenal. It’s got so many controls, though, that the initial purchase should come with a link to learn the basic ins and outs of the program in order to save some time. I’m not a techie, but, rather, an old fart. The program should be easy for everyone, not just 18 year old kids. Remember where their money for purchases comes from... yes, dear, old fart dad or mom. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to unload about a hundred dollars in purchases over time and loves taking fabulous photos.

Hipstamatic has been one of my favorite apps for years. I use it regularly and have purchased pretty much every Pak that’s come out. I just updated my iPhone 5s and iPad Pro to IOS 11 and since I updated, Hipstamatic has become unusable on my iPad. Constant crashing when trying to open a photo from the albums, so can’t edit. Works fine on the iPhone. I do all my photo work on my iPad though because of the larger screen, so having it not work is disappointing and frustrating. I’m also in several Hipstamatic groups online and am now unable to participate. Please, please fix! Will be happy to re-review and give it more stars when it’s working and usable again.

I purchased Hipstamatic approximately one week ago and it worked flawlessly until this morning. I have really wrung ClassicCamera out and found nothing wrong with it until, wait for it, until I updated my iOS. I updated to IOS 11.4.1 this morning and it has crashed regularly since then. I can only surmise that it is not the apps fault or the developers fault but it simply does not perform well under the latest iOS update. Hopefully, the developers will soon release an update incorporating changes that fix the problems with the latest iOS. I hope so because I have sunk a ton of money into ClassicCamera and it’s add-ons.

Update: Nov 28, 2017.
Notoriously crashing and losing pics I’ve taken with the latest iOS... I really want to give you guys a better rating. Please please fix these issues. I hate it also how it defaults to a different lens/film combo after
I reopen ClassicCamera after the crashing. Wonder
If anyone else is having these issues?

Update: 30x was supposed to fix your crashing problems so I gave it another try. But why oh why do guys keep releasing versions that keeping crashing?

This latest version crashed ClassicCamera suddenly. Queued up pics to process are lost which is the most annoying thing. Memories lost. Please please figure out your QA before releasing updates. So disappointed again..

Update:I removed this 30x version and gone back to an older one. Same problems in my wife's iPhone 6+. How can you guys release something so crap when there were so many bugs to work out. I would be embarrassed. Please do yourselves a favour and fix this and win back the your loyal followers.

Come on guys! Please please fix the bugs that keep my fav photo app of all time! It's so disappointing to have ClassicCamera behave so slowly. My iPhone 5 would halt at times. App crashes and automatically closes... Needs to resolve these issues. I may have to remove this and go back to an earlier version now...

Still full of lots of great filters but it seems like the editing photos features have really taken a dive since the last time I used it. For example, there a used to be a slider you could apply to your filter combos. That seems to have been removed, so now you have to individually adjust the film/lens/flash settings instead of all at once. That wrecked a couple of my custom combos that relied on that feature for adjustments. Additionally, you have no idea when you’ll be able to remove a frame from a photo. Sometimes you can, and sometimes you can’t. The editing buttons at the bottom of the screen are way too low and hard to tap. Stick with Snapseed or the Photos app if you need basic editing. This is way too buggy for quick edits.

Update:
Still a buggy app, too many new releases without issues being addressed. The first Friday rarely shows up on a Friday and then you must update ClassicCamera and your iOS.
It seems like arm twisting with these constant ‘update’ before you purchase our product tactic. So you update and it still tells you to update.
I so miss ClassicCamera that first came out years ago. Simple and fun.

Dear Hipstamatic,
From what I am seeing and reading there are a bunch of us long time Hipstamatic users that wish you would have made your new version a stand alone app. Or waited to release when the bugs were all figured out. But you keep releasing new films and lenses ( which are not available to those that didn't upgrade ) and the bugs keep marching on. The thing I keep hearing from my Hipsta friends is that if we wanted to post process photos there is already numerous apps out there that do just that. The fun of ClassicCamera was that it made you think about films and lenses and what would work for that particular photo. Now there's not much to think about because you can just 'fix it' after the fact. Come on let's get this right. Do some maintenance work on the 280, take the new one out for some major fixing and make the pro version a stand alone.

I have not used my Hipstamatic app in a few weeks. I normally use it frequently throughout a week and refer to my “Shot with Hipstamatic” album often. Today I opened ClassicCamera and all the photos in that album are gone! I had backed up most of them so that’s not a problem. But I use that album heavily and had many pics in there that I was using. I just LOVE having them there for convenience & referring to for favorite gear combos. Where did my album go??? I’ve not changed anything & can’t figure out what happened. Please help!! I want my album back.

I absolutely love ClassicCamera. I got my first iPhone in 2008 and this was the first app I purchased. From that minute I was hooked. This is the only app I don’t mind spending money on. In ten years, through updates and changes, the one thing I wish you’d update is the ability to purchase a featured film/lense combo and be able to push a button and have it automatically set in the camera. Currently I have to remember the name of the film and lense get out of that area go change the lense then go back and change the film all to just TRY it out a few times since it’s new.
Other than that everything is perfect!!!

Before the Dali pak was first available and I love it. I enjoy the insane amount of options they have added. But most of all, I love their support. Allen is the best(cheers,;)). He has helped me with many any issue. I still wish they would bring back the original disposable version. That was my absolute favorite app ever. Allen helped console me through my abandonment issues. You’ll know it’s him, because of the “cheers”. For some reason that instantly “cheers” me up. He definitely keeps me here.

Thank you Hipstamatic team, especially you Allen.