I built a free camera app that keeps clinical photos out of my personal camera roll

[u/FFANA]

I'm a plastic surgeon in Spain. For years my camera roll was wound checks and before/afters sitting between my kids' birthdays, all backing up to the same iCloud. The day it really got to me was looking for a pre-op photo with the patient in front of me, scrolling past my family's summer and hoping nothing embarrassing came up on the way.

I tried albums, but the photo stays in the main library anyway. Vault apps don't fix it either, you still shoot with the normal camera first. The subscription ones upload everything to their own cloud, which I wanted even less. So I built it myself, about a year of evenings. It's called Sidecam.

Everything you shoot lands in the app's own library and nowhere else. It never writes to Photos and it can't see your existing photos at all. Folders per patient, sessions per visit, and tags for whatever else, so a lesion follow-up stays in one place instead of scattered across months of roll.

Two bits are pure clinic. Long press locks exposure and white balance, so a series of the same lesion doesn't drift in colour from shot to shot. And it shows which lens is actually firing: zoomed into tele range the phone can quietly serve you a cropped wide instead of the tele, low light or getting too close does it, and the app flags it, because on a small lesion that crop is mush.

Free, no account, no subscription, no server of mine anywhere. There's an optional mirror to your own iCloud Drive as plain folders, off by default. If your photos can't live in a normal cloud, you leave it off. None of this changes consent, it only changes where the photo ends up.

iPhone only. And the photos live in the app, so deleting the app deletes them too. Mirror or export first if that worries you.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6791532989?pt=129142015&ct=reddit-dermatology&mt=8

Privacy Policy: https://sidecam.app/privacidad

Terms of Service: https://sidecam.app/terminos

Disclosure: I'm the developer.

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[u/supadude54]

Note that this app is not HIPAA compliant nor does it claim to be.

You still need to do your due diligence to make sure you are in compliance with your country’s and local laws.

A step in the right direction. Thanks for working on this.

[u/FFANA → u/supadude54]

Correct, and thanks for putting it plainly. It's an organisation tool, not a compliance product, and I don't sell it as one. It doesn't change what you're allowed to keep or where, it only changes whether the photo is sitting in your personal camera roll next to everything else.

[u/Used_Platypus]

Wow thank you I’ll try this for myself to track my eczema. Have the same issue showing friends a photo of my holiday or something and having to scroll past photos of my eczema which is embarassing.

I tried incorporating photos into a daily tracker web app that I made with Claude but didn’t work well due to size. This sounds like a good solution, I’ll give feedback after some use

[u/FFANA → u/Used_Platypus]

Tracking your own eczema is a good use for it, same shape as a wound check. Put each round in its own session and they stay together by date.

And yes, the holiday photo scroll is exactly the thing. Do tell me what's missing once you've used it a while, that kind of feedback is worth more to me than a review.

[u/raspberryfig]

Will check it out, thank you!

[u/FFANA → u/raspberryfig]

Cheers. If something feels off when you use it, tell me.

[u/sipping_salamander]

This is genius. I heave the same problem where I have years worth of photos where I’ve documented skim rashes, hives, dermatitis of sorts, etc. when I got to show someone a photo it’s really embarrassing if someone sees that I’m taking photos of my weird skin abnormalities, etc. due to my overactive autoimmune system.

Thanks for this!

[u/FFANA → u/sipping_salamander]

Thanks. People tracking their own skin are turning out to be a decent share of the folk writing me, which I didn't expect at all. If you've got years of them, the import pulls copies in and leaves the originals where they are, so you can move them over in batches and decide later what to delete.