Opened in 1949, the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York is the world’s oldest museum dedicated to photography. It’s world renowned for its collection of more than 400,000 photos and negatives dating back to when the medium was first invented.
If you would like to check out some of the museum’s photos but can’t make the trip out to Rochester, there’s now a sleek new way for you to browse the imagery. The museum announced this week that it has become the first photo museum to join the Google Art Project.
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Want to enjoy some of the world’s latest and greatest news photographs on your iPad? Reuters has a new app designed just for you. Called The Wider Image, it’s a photo experience that’s designed to bring beautiful photojournalism to life in your hands.
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If you’re a photo enthusiast who uses Pandora for personalized music listening, you’ll feel right at home using Art.sy. Just as Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to offer automated music recommendations, Art.sy has an Art Genome Project through which 20,000 images of art from 275 galleries and 50 museums have already been digitized, analyzed, and stored.
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What if there were an up-to-date live stream of photos from any location on Earth, allowing you to see whatever is happening “right now”? Well, there is: Worldcam is a simple web app that’s designed to do just that. Simple provide it with two pieces of information: city and location. City is pretty straightforward, but location is the cool one; you can type things like businesses, buildings, parks, and more.
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Curious about where people like to take pictures in your part of the world? Sightsmap is a simple Google Map app that takes geo data from the photos uploaded to Panoramio (now a Google service) and uses it to generate a heatmap.
500px, quickly becoming known as the “Flickr for artsy photographers”, has released a new iPad app designed to deliver a beautiful photo viewing experience. In just a few days the app has already risen into the top 5 free photo apps in the app store, and now serves half of all traffic seen by 500px. GigaOM reports that users spend an average of 35 minutes per visit, viewing 80 photographs in the process.
The website has also been experiencing incredible growth. Traffic has grown over the past year by more than 20x to 3.4 million visitors per month, and continues to grow at 30% month over month. The service — which has 12 employees — currently stores 2.5 million photographs.
500px [iTunes App Store]
The people behind camera comparison and recommendation website snapsort have just launched lenshero, a site designed to recommend the lens you need at the price you want. After telling the application your camera and what you’re looking for in a lens (e.g. type, focal range, price), the site will spit out some recommendations of lenses that fit your criteria, ordering them by their pros and cons. It’s a neat little app that you might want to bookmark if you’re in the market for some new gear.
Twitter sees hundreds or thousands of Tweets published every second, and many of these are photos of things happening real-time. Hashalbum is a new website that aims to help you browse this constant stream of images in real time by allowing you to do a simple search by hashtag, returning images that are found in Tweets containing that hashtag.
Hashalbum (via Lifehacker)
We featured Flickriver’s Lens Explorer page a couple days ago for browsing photos taken with specific lenses, but many of you responded saying you wanted to see other options (e.g. camera model) provided as well. Pixel-peeper is a similar sample photo site that has a higher degree of filtering. Using the Advanced Search page, you can specify everything from lens and camera combo to focal length, aperture, exposure time, and ISO. If you’re considering a new lens or body, this might be a useful site to help you know what your resulting photos might feel like.
FindTheBest is the latest startup founded by Kevin O’Connor, the guy who started the online ad company DoubleClick and sold it to Google for over $3 billion. It’s a human-powered comparison engine consisting of “comparison apps” in which various things of the same category are compared side by side with comparison points specific to that category. For example, the camera lenses comparison app allows you to browse lenses from a number of manufacturers, filtering and ordering them by things such as focal length, minimum aperture, and weight.
The site needs to gain a lot more traction before other photography-related apps turn up (e.g. tripods, photo labs, etc…), but the site could potentially be very useful for browsing camera gear and other photography-related categories in the future.
