glitch

Lucky Accidents: Viewing Corrupted JPEG Photos in a New Light

I've always had bad luck with portable hard drives. Over the years I have had failures with several brands and models, so nowadays I have almost everything in the cloud for more security. The last time this happened was a couple of months ago: one of my backup hard drives became corrupt, I took it to the tech and they gave me a very high quote that at the moment I could not afford to pay.

Amazon Honoring a $500 Pricing Error on a $2,200 Camera Lens

When major pricing mistakes are made by online retailers, purchasers usually receive order cancellation notices and apology emails shortly afterward, informing them that the absurdly low price was due to a glitch. But it seems like Amazon is choosing to honor a $500 pricing mistake.

When a Panorama Selfie Goes Wrong

The intelligent panorama features on smartphones these days can help capture some pretty neat shots, but they can also produce some very strange results if things go wrong. Mitchell Flann and Erika Gomos were using the Wide Selfie mode on a Samsung Galaxy S7 recently when Gomos sneezed midway through the exposure. The gem above is what resulted.

This SmugMug Glitch May Be Quietly Damaging Your Photo Business

Editor's update: It appears that SmugMug has identified and fixed the issue described in this article.

I recently discovered a glitch with SmugMug that's now causing me a massive headache. If you use SmugMug, this may be negatively impacting your business as well, so this article is a heads up for any photographer on SmugMug that may be affected.

How to Create Glitched Portraits with Your Phone’s Panorama Mode

Almost every smartphone camera comes with a dedicated panorama mode nowadays. Normally, this mode is used to capture large areas in a single image. However, its true abilities are only limited by your imagination.

As YouTubers Sam and Niko show us in the above video, the feature can be used to create glitched panorama portraits that humorously warp and contort subjects.

PSA: Dropbox Can’t Automatically Backup Your Photos in iOS 8 Yet

Update: Dropbox has contacted us to let us know that the issue has been fixed!

Dropbox users waiting anxiously for iOS 8 to drop so they can take advantage of all the cool new features like manual controls and a more robust photo experience take note: your automatic backup will be temporarily shut off once you update to the new OS and download the newest version of the Dropbox app.

A Cautionary Tale: How a Bug in Dropbox Permanently Deleted 8,000 of My Photos

TL;DR: If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again. Without making a mistake, you might lose your files.

I started using Dropbox back in 2009 and have always loved the service. Over time, I kept moving more and more files to my Dropbox folder and eventually had to upgrade to the Pro plan to keep up with the space requirements. In particular, I moved there all of my photos in order to be able to view/share them online and also to have them backed up.

In April of this year, a hard drive in my laptop was running low on space so I decided to use the Dropbox’s Selective Sync feature to unsync some large directories from the laptop. Because there was never any problem with the service and also because it’s already the year 2014, I thought it might be about time that one can trust a cloud-based storage service and use them as a sole backup of their files. Boy, I was wrong.

Drag-and-Drop Web App Lets You Mess With Glitching Your JPGs

For some reason, corrupting photos has become something of a thing recently. From the Gliché App for iPhone we shared a few months ago to Doctor Popular's glitched ethereal double exposures, people are trying more and more to turn digital corruption into art.

Well, if you're curious and want to give it a shot yourself, developer Georg Fischer has a quick and easy solution for you.

Ethereal Double Exposures Merge Digital Glitches with Analog Street Photography

San Francisco-based photographer and self-proclaimed super nerd Doctor Popular -- the same one that made this film canister valentines day card back in February -- started off his photographic career with an iPhone. Unlike many photographers, he moved backwards, eventually purchasing a film camera "strictly out of curiosity" at a yard sale and shifting his focus more and more to film.

His most recent endeavor, Glitch Double Exposures, mixes the two worlds of digital and analog by combining street photos with photos of purposely glitched images into ethereal double exposures.

Glitché App Intentionally Distorts Photos Into ‘Works of Digital Art’

Aberrations, distortions, corrupt images; all of these are things we typically try to avoid in the world of digital photography. But the Glitché app does the exact opposite. Instead of trying to remove digital imperfections from your photos, the app piles specific distortions on, and in the process turns your pristine pics into "works of digital art" ... at least that's what they're calling them.

Camera Glitches as Electronic Art

If you saw any of these images on the back of your digital camera after snapping a photograph, you'd probably want to get the camera checked out. Phillip Stearns, on the other hand, feels a sense of accomplishment. The Brooklyn-based shutterbug has a project called Year of the Glitch in which he publishes electronic glitches as art.

Year of the Glitch is a 366 day project aimed at exploring various manifestations of glitches (intentional and unintentional) produced by electronic systems.

Each day will bring a new image, video or sound file from a range of sources: prepared digital cameras, video capture devices, electronic displays, scanners, manipulated or corrupted files, skipping CDs, disrupted digital transmissions, etc.

The images in this post were created by cameras ranging from a Olympus C-840L compact camera to a Canon Digital Rebel DSLR.

Flickr Co-Founder Returns to Roots

Some of you might know that popular photo sharing service Flickr was originally a set of tools built for a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. In November of 2009 we also reported that Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, had left Flickr and was returning to his original project, Game Neverending.