For photo enthusiasts, Google’s new Google+ social network is something like Flickr mixed with Facebook. It has the social sharing power of Facebook while providing features and tools Flickr users would appreciate thanks to the fact that Google runs a full-fledged photo-sharing service in Picasa (soon to be brought into the Google+ fold and renamed Google Photos). One such feature is the EXIF data section, easily accessed for each photo by Action->Photo Details. Most Facebook users would likely be confused by having a histogram pop up for their images, but for loyal Picasa users using Google+ for sharing and viewing photos, it’s quite a nifty option.
(via Reddit)
Flickr is a popular method of sharing photos, but the service doesn’t provide any easy way to download them in bulk. Flick and Share is a web app that creates simple download links for Flickr sets that you can send to family and friends, allowing them to quickly download a copy of the images you shot at an event. We’ve tested it out, and it works as advertised.
Flick and Share (via Lifehacker)
Mobile photo sharing star Instagram just announced its 5 millionth member and will soon pass 100 million photos, but their domination of the market may not last much longer. According to TechCrunch, Facebook — a service that receives 6 billion photos a month and stores 100 billion photos total — is currently working on a feature-packed iPhone app that may soon be ubiquitous on iPhones.
The information comes from 50MB of images and documents leaked to the blog, and TechCrunch says that the app can be described as Path meets Instagram meets Color meets With. Unlike the legions of photo sharing apps struggling to capture users, Facebook can simply tap its 600+ million users to instantly dominate the market — much like it did with photo sharing on the web.
Update: TechCrunch has just published a large number of screenshots showing the app in action.
The mobile photo sharing space is hot right now, with services like Instagram, Picplz, and Path growing like weeds. A new contender called Color is causing some buzz after successfully raising a whopping $41 million… before even launching. The company has seven notable founders who have either started successful companies in the past (e.g. Lala and BillShrink) or have held executive positions at them (LinkedIn). Among the investors is Sequoia Capital, one of the most influential and successful firms in Silicon Valley and the firm that funded Google. They gave Color more than they gave Google.
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A new German company called X-Pire wants to give you a little more peace of mind with photographs you share online by allowing you to share them with a time-based “self-destruct” feature. According to Yahoo News,
The software should prevent the increasingly frequent occurrence of someone being refused a job or running into other embarrassing difficulties after posting a photo that maybe should have been kept private.
Before the user posts the photo, he or she drags it into the programme which assigns it an electronic key that is valid for a limited time period, said Michael Backes, founder of X-Pire.
If someone wishes to view that photo later, the server checks whether the photo has “expired” and blocks it from being displayed if its time is up.
While this might be effective in dealing with certain privacy situations, it doesn’t prevent people from downloading the “protected” photos since anything that’s visible online can be downloaded (e.g. a screenshot of it can be taken). Still, it’s an interesting attempt at a solution for people wary of having embarrassing photographs come back to haunt them in the future. It’ll be available by the end of Jan 2011 with a subscription-based cost of €24 ($32) per year.
(via Engadget)
With the ongoing craze in photo sharing services on mobile devices, it’s not surprising to see new photo apps launching left and right. Stealthy startup Path is a bit different though, with their high powered team launching an unusual sharing service service a couple days ago.
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Instagram is a new iPhone photo app developed by Stanford grads Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger that offers Hipstamatic-style filters for your photos, easy uploads to popular services, and a Tumblr-esque community built right in. While photo sharing apps in the App Store are a dime a dozen, there are a few things that set Instagram apart.
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DropMocks is a new photo sharing service designed to help you share photographs online as quickly and easily as possible. Created with HTML 5, the service has a minimalistic homepage that invites you to drag and drop photos into the browser. It then adds those photos into a simple gallery, and provides you with a short URL you can share. It’s a bit like file hosting service DropBox, except for photos and done through the browser.
You don’t need an account, though you can create one to keep track of the “mocks” you create. Here’s an example mock we created using some photos from PetaPixel’s Flickr account. Keep in mind that since the galleries are publicly accessible through private URLs, don’t upload anything you wouldn’t want to be made public.
DropMocks (via Lifehacker)
Flickr has just announced a new feature that allows you to connect your Flickr account to your Facebook account to automatically update your Facebook friends when you upload new photographs. The above screenshot published by Flickr shows what the resulting Facebook status updates look like. To get started, visit the Sharing & Extending section of your Flickr account settings to connect your accounts in a few easy steps. For those of you who are already using the Flickr app on Facebook, Flickr recommends turning off that app and using this new feature instead.
Group Story is a new photo service that’s centered around building photo books collaboratively with other people who photographed the same event. For example, the parents of a soccer team could pool photographs together and create a photo book documenting the soccer season.
Everything is done through a simple web interface, and after photographs are uploaded, you can use any of the photographs in the group to create a page. Once pages are created, you can use any of the pages in the group to create a physical photo book.
The resulting 8×8 inch books cost $13 for 20 pages in a softcover format, and $25 for hardcover. Additional pages are 50 cents each. There isn’t currently any feature for sharing the resulting books through the web, but providing an embeddable photo book that users can post online and/or link to might be a good future feature.
Some of the larger players in the photo space are also thinking hard about making photos more collaborative and social. Just early last month Facebook acquired group photo sharing service Divvyshot.
(via Mashable)
