This morning Instagram made a huge splash in the social networking scene by launching its own web profiles for viewing users’ photographs through a web browser. Each profile shares a user’s photographs, profile info, and pretty much everything the mobile view has. The service just became a lot more Facebook-like.
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Lytro has been pushing to make their living pictures — interactive, clickable photos that have a variable focus point — easier to share. Lytro is a camera that has a very specific, proprietary way of saving and viewing photographs, so sharing these photos can be tricky. Nevertheless, Lytro has been able to quickly expand living photos across the web through social media, most recently to Google+ and Pinterest through Google Chrome extensions.
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Watch out, Flickr — Instagram is coming for you. The popular photo sharing app has quietly updated its website to include commenting and liking on individual photo pages. Previously the website was “read only”, and any interaction with the social network was limited to its mobile interface. The new website, which also features larger images and a slick blue theme, suggests that the company may soon be breathing down Flickr’s neck by expanding beyond mobile. However, it still noticeably lacks profiles and photo discovery features.

(via The Next Web)

The power of the Internet is awesome when it helps reunite people with lost photos, but it’s even cooler when it uses photos to help reconnect people with relatives. That happened recently with a 71-year-old shoe shiner in China named Shufang Zhong. Zhong’s daughter had moved to a far away city five years ago, and although they could speak on the phone, her daughter desperately wanted to see her face. The problem was, Zhong had absolutely no Internet access and no idea how to reach her daughter.

On June 24th, Zhong noticed a man using an iPad and begged him to help her search online for her daughter. There wasn’t Wi-Fi in the area, so the man snapped a photograph of Zhong instead and uploaded it to Chinese microblogging service Weibo (similar to Twitter). Within just a few hours the image had attracted news organizations, celebrities, and over 100,000 “retweets”, and on June 27 the daughter came across the photo online and saw her mother’s face for the first time in five years.

(via Chengdu Daily via VentureBeat)

Update: After some further digging, it appears the story is different than how we initially reported it (and how our source reported it). We’ve updated the post accordingly. Sorry about that.

Showzey is a web app that helps you collect and organize your photographs from various places on the web in once place.

One of its interesting features is the ability to collect all the attachments in your Gmail account and either save them to your Showzey account, or transfer them directly to a photo service like Flickr or Picasa (Facebook supported too). Here’s how you would collect the photos from your Gmail:

I don’t know about you guys, but usually when I receive a photo attachment in an email that I don’t save to my computer, I never see it again. This might be an interesting way to explore all the various photos you’ve been sent over the years.

P.S. Showzey seems heavily inspired design-wise by Mint

If you’ve ever wondered just how much editing goes into a particular photograph, there’s now a super easy way to find out for yourself. Image Error Level Analyser is a simple web application that takes a URL to a JPEG photo and returns an image showing differing “error levels” in the image. Here’s an example they give:

After submitting the image on the left, they return the one on the right.

Error level analysis shows differing error levels throughout this image, strongly suggesting some form of digital manipulation. Areas to note are the lips and shirt, as well as the eyes. All are at significantly different error levels than their surroundings. Presumably, colours have been altered and areas brightened.

Thus, you can now investigate any JPEG you find on the Internet to see roughly how much the photograph has been edited or manipulated. The app even gives you a permalink to the resulting image comparison. Try it out, and post your permalinks in the comments to share your findings with us!

Update: Here’s an interesting article by Wired on how researchers use this technique.

Everyone wants sharp images when they post their photographs online. After all, who wants to look at a blurry photograph? (Unless it’s intentional, of course). What many people don’t realize, however, is that displaying your images incorrectly in HTML can have a big negative impact on image quality.

Here is the main rule of thumb you should always remember: never, ever do image resizing using HTML.

For example, lets say I have the following 620px photograph:

The image is pretty sharp right? Now, lets say I want to display the same image as a 500px wide photo. The wrong way to do this would be to change the width=”620″ attribute in HTML to width=”500″. Here’s what would result if I did the resizing this way through HTML:

That’s the exact same image file. I simply copy-and-pasted the HTML, and changed the width from 620 to 500. This means the browser actually loaded the same 620px image, and then reprocessed it to display a 500px image to the viewer. Notice how the photograph instantly loses much of the sharpness it had when displayed in its actual dimensions.

To further illustrate my point, here is the same photo displayed at 500px. However, instead of telling HTML to shrink the large version, I used Photoshop to resize it down to 500px.

You can hover your mouse over this last image to compare it to the browser-resized version. If you’re using a browser that renders it correctly, try hovering over this link to see how other less-capable browsers render the same image (you might have to wait a couple seconds for the image to load). That’s a pretty big difference, huh?

The lesson to be learned is that you should always display your images in their exact dimensions. Even a single pixel difference can cause the photograph to become noticeably more blurry in most browsers.

Finally, another reason why you shouldn’t leave resizing to your browser is that the original, full-sized image is loaded anyway, regardless of what size you’re displaying the image at. This means that if you have a large, 1 megabyte, 1024×682 photograph that you’re displaying at 500px in width, the whole 1 megabyte image is downloaded by the visitor before the browser resizes it down to 500px.

Some of you might have thought that using larger, higher-resolution photographs and having them resized in HTML produces higher quality images, since there’s more information or detail in the file. It doesn’t. For best image quality and fastest loading time for your visitors, always resize your images to the desired size prior to uploading!

Update: I’ve added a second link under the mouse-hover comparison for those who are using more capable browsers. If you don’t see any difference in hovering over the image, try hovering over the new link to see how other browsers render the image.

Update 2: Just for your info: This doesn’t apply to uploading full-sized images to photo sharing services like Flickr or SmugMug. These services take your large resolution photograph, and reprocess it into multiple images of various sizes. Thus, when you’re viewing the 500px image on Flickr, it’s actually a 500px image that Flickr resized and sharpened using your original large image.