Websites

Michael Zhang

Flickr Designer Writes Blog Post Publicly Criticizing the Site’s Usability

There have been a number of stories lately reporting that a large number of Flickr users are leaving the site for new photo-sharing services that are cropping up, including Instagram and 500px. Earlier his week, a designer at Flickr named Timoni West wrote a post on her blog that publicly criticized Flickr's usability. More specifically, she calls the "Your contacts" page (the one that shows your contacts' photos) the "most important page on Flickr", pointing out the problems with the page and offering redesign ideas that would address them.

Michael Zhang

Preserve Your Privacy by Pixelating Photographs with PhotoHide

Hiding or censoring part of an image through obfuscation is as easy as selecting the area in Photoshop and applying the Pixelate->Mosaic filter, but what if you don't have an image editing program at your disposal? If you're seriously paranoid about your privacy on the Internet, there's a new service called PhotoHide that helps you quickly add these pixelated areas to any photo. Everything is done through the web browser, and you can download the final image once you're done.

Michael Zhang

New Look Strobox Even More Useful for Learning Lighting

When we featured Strobox back in 2009, it was a simple idea: provide an easy way for photographers to create lighting diagrams and share them with others. Since then, they've upgraded their website to include a gallery where you can browse photographs done by others, view their lighting diagrams, and comment on them.

If you don't have a full arsenal of lightning equipment, you can filter the photos by what kind of lighting equipment was used to browse photos that are more relevant to you.

Michael Zhang

Send Your Best Images into Photo Battle

photobattle.me is a fun little web application that pits two submitted photographs against each other and asks the visitor to vote on which photo they think is better. Of course it's entirely subjective, and photos can be of different types and flavors, but it's an interesting way to see what the general public thinks of your work compared to other photos.

Michael Zhang

Calculate Your Local Golden Hour

The golden hour in photography is the first or last hour of sunlight in a day that photographers often aim to shoot in, since the sun's position produces a soft and warm light with longer shadows. The Golden Hour Calculator is a useful website that can help you calculate the golden hour(s) for your location, telling you exactly when the sun rises and sets.