Pola turns any image into a Polaroid

Pola is a free program from Maunel Barzi that takes any image and tuns it into a Polaroid-esque image. you can download it for free from http://manuelbarzi.com/pola/.


The program has a pretty simplistic interface that looks somewhat basic but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, the program is essentially a one-trick pony and it does the job very well. basically you just drag and drop any image on the program's icon once it's up and running. Once you do this, you are then presented with a crop box. However, the crop margins are fixed and you can only choose where to apply the crop. Once you are happy with the positioning of the crop margins, you have two choices - cancel or apply (labelled as 'shoot'). Assuming you choose to continue and 'shoot', you hear a sound like a polaroid camera taking a picture and a voice says "Pola created".

Bearing in mind that there are no menu items to choose from (such as edit or save) its not obvious at first how to actually save your image. What you actually need to do is click on the image you have created and a floating toolbar will then appear. This has some basic looking icons representing your various options. These are:

1. Continue
2. Load an image
3. Choose output folder
4. Write a comment
5. Choose cartridge
6. Go to Pola.com
7. Donate
8. Language
9. About Pola
10. Bye

 Most are self-explanatory. Choose a cartridge offers up a smaller toolbar and seems simply to change the border from black to white. The 'Write a comment' option brings up yet another toolbar that has 4 options:

1. Continue
2. Font (limited choice with no way of knowing which font is actually being displayed)
3. Size of text
4. Colour of text

The comment will be applied to the border of the image (at the bottom part that is bigger that the other margins, similar to a real Polaroid). It can be a bit hit and miss in terms of positioning and there is no way to undo or adjust the position.

All in all, an interesting program that does one job and does it well. All that is lacking is some refinement in terms of the features and I guess if the author gets some donations he may well put some more effort into the program to refine it further.





Rating 3.5/5