photosharing

It's out with the old and in with the new: Google today announced its plan to shut down its Google+ Photos service after the launch of Google Photos back in May.

On Monday, we shared that Instagram had begun quietly storing larger 1080px versions of photos, up from the 640px resolution of the past (when the service launched the size was 612px).

Instagram has now confirmed the resolution increase across its photo-sharing service, and says that the change will improve the quality of photos while having minimal impact on file size and data usage.

If you’re an Instagram fan, there is a good chance that your experience is about to get quite a bit better. In the past, Instagram has uploaded and stored user images at a meager resolution of 640x640. In a world in which smartphones are beginning to include quad HD displays, a non-HD resolution seems subpar. Luckily, it appears that 1080x1080 Instagram uploads are on the way.

Instagram wants to be more of a pulse of what's going on in the world, so today the service announced overhauls of two major sections: Explore and Search. The changes are meant to help connect people to things in the world as they happen.

Facebook today launched a new standalone app called Moments that's designed to help friends build collaborative photo albums for easy sharing of memories.

When signing up for virtually every photo sharing service, you'll be asked to agree to a lengthy terms of service document that's filled with legalese. If you're confused by the text and want that agreement spelled out for you in simpler terms, check out Terms of Service; Didn't Read (TOSDR), a new site that's dedicated to explaining terms and giving out report cards based on the conditions.

Last month Flickr proudly announced major new features, a slick new redesign, and 112 million members, but the service may have rolled out a disappointing change as well: increased compression that reduces the quality of photos.

If you like the idea of online photo sharing but dislike the idea of popular users getting all the attention, ROL is a new app you should check out. It's a competitive photo sharing service that focuses on promoting images based on their merits rather than on a photographer's follower counts.

Kolektio is an application designed to make sharing photographic moments with friends easier than it has ever been before. The app designed for Apple iOS devices (coming soon to Android) allows users to create a ‘moment’ and then contribute snapshots to it. Kolektio wants to make sure that you are never worried about losing another party photo ever again.

Google today announced its new and long awaited Photos service, a standalone service that's separate from Google+. It's "a single, private place to keep a lifetime of memories, and access them from any device," Google says.

In short, Google wants to be the place that stores your digital memories safely for the rest of your life and the place from which you share your memories with others.

Having had a few weeks now to spend significant time exploring Flickr 4.0, I thought I’d write up a detailed post about my ongoing thoughts on the recent update by Flickr.

MyAlbum is a new service (currently in beta) that lets you transform a set of photographs into beautiful photo essays that you can share with a simple link.

It has been rumored for months now that Google is planning to separate its Google+ Photos service from the social network as a standalone offering. That new service may be very near, and some first details about it are starting to emerge.

Flickr is basking in a fresh wave of press after launching a revamp of its website and mobile apps, but the leader that oversaw Flickr 4.0 won't be around to see whether it pans out. Bernardo Hernandez, chief of the photo sharing service since 2013, has left his position at Yahoo.

Flickr today officially launched a major redesign of its service across all platforms and rolled out some powerful new features that improve the viewing, organizing, and searching of photos and videos.

Instagram's lineup of filters is getting more and more crowded. After announcing five new ones last December, the company is back again with another three. Also announced today was new emoji support for photo hashtags.

A police officer in Albury, Australia, did some online photo sharing that drew quite a few chuckles last week. After someone turned in a lost iPhone at his police station, the officer found that the phone didn't have any type of passcode protection. So, to get in touch with the woman who lost it, he started posting humorous photos to her Facebook account.

Photo sharing service EyeEm has raised an additional $18 million in funding after taking $6 million from investors back in 2013. The new war chest will be used to further the company's mission of becoming the top network for photographers looking to make some money with their photos.

Manga artist Joanna Zhou created a series of 12 illustrations showing the common types of photos you'll come across when browsing Instagram.

Flickr's photo search engine is getting a makeover and a boost in power. Starting earlier this month, Flickr has been rolling out a powerful new unified search interface to its users. Instead of a simple search feature for photos that match keywords, the new search will contain additional image search parameters and will be able to look up people and groups.

Smartphones and social networks have made snapping and sharing photos extremely easy to do, allowing us to preserve our memories and broadcast our experiences. It's not all positive, though: there are downsides to our snap- and selfie-happy culture.

A new study has found that 58% of people believe that "posting the perfect picture has prevented them from enjoying life's experiences."

Family photographs used to be collected in things like photo albums and shoeboxes, but these days digital photographs are scattered across all kinds of devices and services. Bevy is a new device and service that wants to help you and your family cut through the clutter to organize and enjoy the photos you care about.

Flickr is rolling out a new feature called Camera Roll that's designed to make it even easier for users to browse, edit, and organize their photos. It's a speedy and intuitive interface that lets you jump around in time and make changes to quickly select multiple photos at once.

As photo sharing becomes one of the fastest growing niches in social media, a new British advertising campaign is warning kids and their parents about the dangers of sharing too much through online photo services.

Here's a heartwarming case of photos being used to make a difference in someone's life: hundreds of thousands of people around the world are currently sharing their dog photographs to cheer up a teenager who's battling cancer.

Polaroid wants to be a big player in the online photo sharing game. The company has partnered with Blipfoto to rebrand the photo-a-day sharing service as Polaroid Blipfoto.

In the world of analog photography, "film swapping" is an activity in which two photographers each shoot through the same roll of film, creating random -- and often beautiful -- double exposure photographs in each frame.

dubble is an app that wants to bring that same experience to the world of digital photography. It allows people from around the world to create random double exposure photos with each other.

After announcing that it had passed 300 million active users earlier this month, Instagram warned that it would be cracking down on spam accounts and that users may see their follower counts drop as a result. It has come to pass.

If your follower counts just dropped noticeably, you're seeing the effects of the Great Instagram Purge, which has wiped out millions upon millions of accounts.

500px released a major update to its iOS app today. Users can now take advantage of an in-app camera and editing tools powered by Adobe Lightroom technologies.

Photosharing service EyeEm has rolled out version 5 of its popular app. The main new feature to appear is one called Open Edit, which lets you explore the edits other photographers have used on their photos.

Fyuse is a new "spatial photography" app that wants to be the Instagram of 3D photos. Capture a dynamic photo by moving your phone around during capture, and viewers will be able to explore your 3D photo by tilting their phone in their hands.

Ready to see an improvement in all of your Facebook friends' snaps? Facebook is rolling out a new auto-enhance feature for its mobile app that will automatically correct things like light, shadows, and clarity in your smartphone shots.

Instagram has officially passed the 300 million user mark, making it more popular than Twitter (which reported 284 million six weeks ago).

In the ongoing app battle to keep private photos safe and sound from unintended recipients (and the general public), a new app called Yovo – You Only View Once – brings an interesting technology to the table.

It's called D-fence, and is based around the idea that your eyes can see what's behind a slatted fence as you're driving by at a high speed.

If you ever hand your phone over to family and friends with hesitance, afraid they might swipe over one photo too far when you’re trying to show them a few photos, Microsoft Research’s new app Xim might just save you from a few nerve-wracking moments.

After a few teasers made their way around the Web earlier this week, new photo-sharing app Tiiny live and ready for use. Created by an all-star team of designers and developers led by Digg founder Kevin Rose, Tiiny is a unique photo-sharing app that hopes to address the anxiety of sharing photos and videos by keeping the them small and disposable.

Photo-sharing platform EyeEm has officially inked a deal with The Huffington Post that will allow the AOL-owned publisher to use EyeEm's growing archives to find relevant imagery for its content.

Whether or not you’re conscious of it when watching a movie, the sounds and soundtrack play as significant of a role as the actual imagery. Sadly, none of the standard photo sharing options allow us still photographers the luxury of framing our visual message with melody... until now.

A fairly new and interesting platform called Ubersnap is looking to change this music-less status quo.

Dropbox is a Go-To for many photographers. Whether they're storing their photography, sharing albums with clients or, ahem, sending files to the press, more often than not it's Dropbox they use. And starting today, anybody not using Dropbox's Pro offering has a whole lot more reason to do so thanks to a steep drop in price, a big jump in storage space, and a bunch of new features and functionality.

An interesting new app called Looksee is adding a Tinder-like element to the world of mobile photography. Basically, when two users ‘like’ one another’s photos, their profiles become visible to each other, giving them the option to add the other as a personal connection and get more insight into their work or chat back-and-forth within the app.