Most image editing apps for iOS are built to enhance photos or add artistic flourishes such as filters and frames, but what about using text to get your message across? Swipe makes it fun and easy to adorn your pictures with type and quickly share them with the world.

Swipe is a model of simplicity: Merely swipe your finger across the screen wherever you want to add text, tweak to your liking, and then whisk the results off to most anywhere you’d like. Images can be loaded from your device or taken right inside the app, and sharing options include email, Camera Roll, and popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and Instagram). Text can be laid out using more than 100 available fonts, with control over size, color, transparency, rotation, and alignment. To place additional type in a different style, simply swipe again in another part of the image. Texted photos are saved in full resolution, and the app is optimized for the iPhone 5 plus universal for native iPad support.

While the premise of Swipe is deceptively simple, the UI occasionally makes editing harder than it needs to be. While landscape images can be edited in Swipe, the app is locked into portrait mode only. Because the text editor takes up half of the iPhone screen, adding type to the bottom of landscape images was occasionally a challenge. Likewise, we found the text editor less helpful than we’d like. Color can only be selected by moving your finger across the palette, making it a challenge to pick exactly the right hue on smaller screens. Aside from the inability to rotate the display, none of these issues were a concern on my 3rd-gen iPad.

Although the typography is crisp and font choices abundant, I found myself longing for individual stroke and drop shadow tools. Swipe does include a glow tool at the bottom of the text editor, but even at the highest setting, type laid over brighter parts of an image tends to blend into the background too much.

The bottom line. Swipe is a lot of fun for adding multiple layers of text before sharing images with friends. With just a few improvements to the text editor and better support for landscape images, Swipe has the potential to become an indespensible tool for your photos.