Are you always losing track of your best photo and videos? If so, the GoPro Quik app is back from the dead to help you out. It was originally created to automatically find the best moments from videos and photos – such as speedy sections, jumps, extra-steady footage and smiling people – and compile shareable videos without hours of editing, but a few years ago it disappeared.
Now it’s back as apps for iOS and Android with a new ambition of being everyone’s private content feed – and also the new way to control every GoPro camera.
That’s ambitious for one app, but there are lots of reasons to like what GoPro is trying to do with its new GoPro Quik app.
Initially a free download, Quik automatically pulls photos and videos from your smartphone, whether the original source was a GoPro, a DSLR or any other device. It’s completely device agnostic, as the previous iteration of the Quick app was, though the new version can also be used to operate a GoPro, transfer content to a phone and live-stream.
Quik includes 25 filters and 18 royalty-free music tracks as standard, with a US$9.99/UK£9.99 per year or US$1.99/UK£1.99 per month subscription providing unlimited access to all features.
If you’re still using the old Quik app it will continue to work until you download the new one, but you won’t lose any content. Ditto the existing GoPro app, which will be replaced by this new Quik app after an update. GoPro subscribers (US$49.99/UK£49.99/year) will have to log back into their account to access stuff on the cloud. But you don’t have to have a GoPro camera to subscribe to the Quik app.
Key features
Quik is out to be your new private content feed. Key to this is its ‘Mural’, a hub area that will show you all of your best and your favourite photos and videos. It’s been showcased in the GoPro app since December. Post it to your mural and Quik auto-edits it into a highlight video set to music.
If its clever AI doesn’t do it for you, Quik also includes a bunch of editing tools including multi-speed video (really useful for resurrecting otherwise dull-as-dishwater footage), filters, themes and music.
However, saving to the Mural necessitates you creating and titling a new video. So it’s not really a place to store your favorite content, but only that which you want to turn into an animated showreel.
A cloud backup service which GoPro promised would be coming became available for Quik subscribers from August 2021. This uploads every photo and video posted to the Quik mural feed at its original quality, and no additional charge - offering a much more effective way of backing up your footage than most cloud storage services.
Interface and usability
Quik has a streamlined new look designed to appeal to everyone wanting got to have more control over their photos and videos. Front and centre is ‘Mural’, easily Quik’s highlight, which can be viewed as a swipe-down gallery or as thumbnails, with a pinch-to-zoom to swap between the two looks. To post a shot to your mural does mean creating a video and then selecting which photos and videos you want to go in it, however, so it still requires some time and sorting.
Quik treads a tightrope because it also has to appeal to users that just want to operate their GoPro. Happily, the regular GoPro control app is only a tap away thanks to an icon in the top right-hand corner of the app’s main page.
Quality of results
The compilation highlight videos are beat-synced to music, but they’re very simple. Footage is brief, zoomed-in on, and centred upon, so sometimes photos are mistakenly cropped, while transitions between them are very basic. However, everything is simple to change, with basic re-ordering of clips and photos a drag-and-drop affair while inserting and new content is easy. Each video or photo in a reel can be adjusted for exposure, contrast, colour and vibrancy, and it can be trimmed, cropped, filtered, and text added. It’s also possible to extract still images from videos.
Most impressive of all is a new multi-speed mode that allows you to adjust the speed of a video mid-clip. That’s really handy for, say, a ski run, which you can speed through then slow-down for a jump or any interesting moment. Sadly, that feature is limited to subscribers, as are a plethora of exclusive filters and music tracks.
Once you’re done you can export the video to your camera roll, directly to linked accounts for Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, or generate a share link.
Verdict
Much improved on the original Quik app and a total refresh for all GoPro users, the action camera maker’s new device-agnostic app has a slick new user interface including new filters, tools and music. Star of the show is a ‘mural’ page for keeping track of your favourite photos and videos, though it’s video-centric and you do have to subscribe to get unlimited access to its editing tools, which will put off many.
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