I have looked at three previous apps for the iPad from Fotopedia: on Burma, and on North Korea (both topical right now) and on Japan. In all three reviews I have written, which I am putting online again, the app is secondary to the content: the beautiful photographs that even oppressive regimes can do nothing about. This week a third app came into my collection: Wild Friends. This free app is available for the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad.

Fotopedia Wild Friends is a collection of images from 69 photographers in the Wild Wonders of Europe group who (collectively I presume) spent some 1100 days in the field in Europe examining the wild creatures and recording what has become a major comeback for some of the animals. The app is produced in a collaboration between Fotopedia and Wild Wonders of Europe. I examined this on an iPad 2. As with the other apps, an internet connection is needed to download and update images, but these are kept in a cache.

Each image displayed has a text explanation below. Navigation tools are to the left of the picture and above. There is also an organiser at the bottom of the screen. All of these (text and icons) disappear when the screen is tapped once leaving the image full-screen in all its beauty.

The tools on the side (from the top down) are: shuffle (reordering the images); slideshow; a star to make the image a favourite and enter it into the Favourites section in My Activity on the main page; a globe icon that reveals a map of where the photograph was taken; an Information icon (i) that opens a text panel to the right of the photograph with a Wikipedia text shown (an arrow takes us to the Wikipedia page); and a search tool that brings up a panel with Fauna, Flora, Locations and Miscellaneous. As an indication of the wide-ranging nature of the app, some 46 countries are listed in Locations. Flora has Flowering Plant and Others Plants (sic), while Fauna has 18 classifications from Amphibian to Worm.

At the top left of the screen are a back arrow and a Home icon, both of which took me back to the Home screen. At the center top of each picture is an image title. To the right are three icons: a star which shows a list of the user's favourites; an Export icon for sending an image by Twitter, email or Facebook, or to Gif the App (to another user, say as a new year present). A final export function is to save the image as wallpaper. As with the other apps, this saves the selected image into the photo library and it is then available as a wallpaper selection.

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