ClipDrop, a new app that lets your phone’s camera quickly grab objects from your environment and place them into desktop apps, is now available to try. It’s a neat twist on AR, that makes the physical world digital, instead of projecting digital images onto the world around you. Promotional videos of the beta app show it being able to photograph everything from plants to TVs and then quickly imported into documents as cropped objects.
Digne says the tool lets you import images and even text from books, for example, into a variety of software and websites, including Photoshop (where ClipDrop has a plugin available to allow objects to be dropped in as a new layer with an editable mask), Google Docs, PowerPoint, Figma, Canva, and Pitch. Of course, you can also just the app to grab images of everyday objects around you to share as you normally would within iOS and Android.
In addition to the iOS and Android apps, the software is also available for Windows and macOS, letting you grab images and text from your desktop or the web and quickly import them into documents.
The idea behind ClipDrop first emerged as a tech demo back in May and quickly attracted a lot of attention. Developers Cyril Diagne and Jonathan Blanchet told Gizmodo that they’ve had over 100,000 people registered on their beta waiting list wanting to try out the software, and have spent the last few months turning this early demo into a commercial product.
Although ClipDrop is now publicly available, Diagne warns it’s still in beta and that users should expect some “bugs and rough edges.” When we tried it for ourselves we found it did a good job at picking out items from a cluttered desk using an iPhone X, although Gizmodo reports it could occasionally get confused by shadows or objects crowded close together.
You get five free photo clips with a download of the software, but clipping more requires a subscription. ClipDrop is currently priced at $39.99 for a year, but after November 20th the price raises to $79.99 a year, or $9.99 a month. Clipping text is free however, according to Gizmodo.
