Here’s another nail in the fail coffin for the much-hyped but not-very-popular photo-sharing app Color: TechCrunch reports that Color received a staggering $200 million acquisition offer before it had even launched, but the company turned it down and raised $41 million in venture funding instead. Things haven’t been going so hot for Color since then, while Google saved itself $200 million and has a couple photo-sharing apps in development that are generating some buzz.

Image credit: Money Hand Holding Bankroll Girls February 08, 20117 by stevendepolo

Sometimes Photoshop’s amazing Content-Aware Fill gets it almost right, yet so very wrong.

(via Reddit)

Image credits: Image by mendy331 and used with permission

The United States Postal Service admitted last week that the Statue of Liberty photo found on 3 billion newly printed stamps was in fact an image of the half-size replica (shown on left above) found in front of the New York-New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas rather than the original in NYC. The original photo was shot by photographer Raimund Linke and was found through Getty Images.
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You’ve probably heard people say that you shouldn’t try to get a cheap photographer for wedding photography. Here’s a good example of why.

Can you point out all the things this wedding photographer is doing wrong? Leave a comment and we’ll get a running list going here.
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MI5 might have missed a golden opportunity to prevent the 7 July 2005 London bombings back in 2004 when they cropped a photograph of two of the terrorists badly before sending it to the FBI. The photograph was of two of the bombers — Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammad Sidique Khan — and was shot by an undercover agent at a motorway service station. For some reason, MI5 decided to desaturate the photo, crop Khan (the ringleader) out, and make Tanweer look hardly human with blurry facial features and a blob-like profile.
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This poor wedding photographer wasn’t looking at where he was going and, as a result, caused a huge commotion and likely ruined his pricey gear. On the plus side, he’s probably learned to make note of his surroundings for the rest of his life. Hopefully the photographs survived.

(via DigitalRev)

Here’s a funny example of a photo-based security feature gone wrong: starting in May, Facebook started doing user verification checks when logging in from an unfamiliar computer in order to make sure it’s actually the account owner logging in. The verification checks are photo-based, and involve correctly naming people you have listed as friends. Unfortunately, the feature will sometimes ask users to correctly name unfamiliar things: people they don’t know very well, dogs, cats, objects, gummy bears, etc…

The above screenshot was taken by Facebook user Eleanor Herman, an author who connects with her readers and who hasn’t been able to correctly identify 5 out of 7 random friends. After failing the test, one must wait an hour before trying again. Herman has been locked out of her account for the past 10 days.

(via ReadWriteWeb)

Back in May we featured an Olympus commercial that was shot entirely with the camera it was promoting (the Olympus PEN E-PL1), lending credence to the camera’s video capabilities.

Panasonic recently posted a behind-the-scenes video to its YouTube account showing how a new ad for their Lumix G2 camera was made. However, a close look at the video seems to reveal that most of the filming was actually done with Canon 5D Mark II cameras and a set of L lenses. Most of the comments on the video poke fun at this, with one commenter saying,

You shoot a commercial of an HD camera with another HD camera but post the footage in standard definition? Fail.

The takeaway for camera companies: eat your own dog food.

(via CrunchGear)

Quip is an iPhone application that provides simple “private” photo sharing without MMS. A flaw in the service was posted to Reddit a day ago by FlamingZebra90:

Here’s the deal. As stated in the title, QuipText is a service that lets iPhone users send picture messages to others over the internet. The service works by saving the image as a webpage on their server with its own unique URL and then texting the person in question the url. The only problem? They’re only using 5 alphanumeric, noncase-sensitive characters for the URL, meaning it can be brute forced in a few seconds.

So basically, the way in which photos are accessed is similar to services like TwitPic, with the difference being that users of Quip had the expectation of privacy for their photo sharing. Before long, tech-savvy folk had whipped up automatic scripts for harvesting these private photographs, and the story has erupted in the past day as thousands of private photographs have been released to the Internet.

Ish, a founder of Quip responded to the Reddit thread stating:

As soon as this post came to our attention, we immediately shut down our servers. We have also now disabled all S3 access and have started to systematically secure all files in the system. We will not bring the system back up until we have adequate security around all files shared over Quip.

I apologize to our users for this security breach and promise we will do everything in our power to make sure none of their information is exposed once we bring the service back up.

The vision for Quip has always been to provide users a quick, simple, and affordable way for iPhone users to send picture messages without paying exorbitant carrier fees. We are a small company (3 people) but we will work as quickly as possible to bring back the service up in a safe and secure manner.

The makers of Quip have since completely shut down the service in an attempt to protect whatever photos hadn’t been breached yet (if any). Furthermore, the app is no longer available from the iTunes store.

A takeaway for those in the photo-sharing business: if your users have an expectation of privacy, those photos had better be inaccessible to the general public.

(via News.com.au)

Image credit: Iphone sunset in the Andes by Gonzalo Baeza Hernández

Some weeks ago I was walking around in Emeryville (where Pixar is based) and came across a store window with a lenticular display (when the image changes depending on your angle). What caught my attention was how disfigured the model in the advertisement was from my angle, since I was seeing half a face from two different images. The above image probably isn’t what you want potential customers to see when advertising a beauty product.