Since we first covered its launch back in October 2010, Instagram has become one of the fastest growing photo-sharing companies and iPhone apps. This week founder Kevin Systrom announced that they now have 4.25 million registered users, and that users are posting 10 photos every second, or around 900,000 photos per day. Not bad for a seven month old service, eh?
(via TechCrunch via Small Aperture)
P.S. Just for comparison’s sake, after 5 years Twitter has over 200 million members that post about 2,000 Tweets per second.
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.
Read more…
If you’re both a photography lover and a Mac user (there’s a lot of you out there, right?), computer expert Lloyd Chambers has an uber-helpful section on his Mac Performance Guide website for photographers who want to learn how to optimize a Mac for Photoshop and other photo editing programs.
The Stolen Camera Finder is a new search engine developed over the past two years by programmer Matt Burns. His idea is to search the web for photographs that have a stolen camera’s serial number embedded in the EXIF information. It uses two web crawlers — the first is a standard one that accesses Flickr’s API, while the second is a Google Chrome browser plugin that silently runs in the background and peeks at the serial numbers of images on any webpage viewed. These serial numbers and URLs are stored in a database, and if you’d like to volunteer your browsing for this you can download the Chrome plugin here.
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.
Doing this to every single photo of you on the Internet would be ridiculous, but you might find it useful for more reasonable applications (e.g. hiding your house or license plate number in a photo).
PhotoHide (via PhotographyBLOG)
If you’re looking to buy used camera gear on sites like eBay or Craigslist, a trick you can use to find a good deals is to search for listings that contain spelling mistakes that keep most people from finding them (e.g. “Canom” instead of “Canon”, or “Mikon” instead of “Nikon”). With less exposure — and therefore less competition — you may be able to win the auctions at far below the item’s value.
Obviously searching for various typos by hand isn’t very efficient, so there’s special typo search engines designed to do the hard work for you. A few that you might want to try out are: FatFingers, TypoHound, TypoBay, and TypoBuddy.
(via Phototuts)
Image credit: keyboard shenanigans by cc511
Emphas.is is a newly launched Kickstarter-esque website that brings the latest Internet craze of crowd funding to photojournalism. If you have an awesome photojournalism project that you’d like to do, you can submit the idea to the site to raise funds. If there are any projects that you’d like to see happen, you can help make it happen with a donation between $10 and $3K.
By agreeing to back a story, for a minimum contribution of $10, you are making sure that the issues that you care about receive the in-depth coverage they deserve.
In return you are invited along on the journey. Photojournalists on Emphas.is agree to enter into a direct dialogue with their backers, sharing their experiences and insights as the creative process unfolds.
It’s a pretty neat idea that will hopefully spark some really interesting photojournalistic work.
(via Photojojo)
Google has changed the way it limits Picasa photo storage, allowing users to store a virtually unlimited number of photos… provided that they’re small. Previously the service limited users to 1GB in storage and 1,000,000 photographs (split between 1,000 albums). While the photo limit is quite generous, it was difficult to reach since users would likely hit the storage limit very early on (you could only store about 10,000 100KB photos). The million mark is easier to reach now thanks to Google no longer counting photographs 800px wide and smaller towards the 1GB limit, making it a pretty attractive free storage solution for people with a bunch of small photos to store.
Store More Photos and Videos in Picasa Web Albums (via Lifehacker)
SunCalc is a super-simple web app created with Google Maps and Javascript that helps you determine the best time to shoot depending on the quality of light you want in your photos.
You can see sun positions at sunrise, specified time and sunset. The thin orange curve is the current sun trajectory, and the yellow area around is the variation of sun trajectories during the year. The closer a point is to the center, the higher is the sun above the horizon. The colors on the time slider above show sunlight coverage during the day.
It was created by Vladimir Agafonkin. Similar apps include The Golden Hour Calculator and The Twilight Calculator.
Here’s another site you can bookmark if you’re constantly on the hunt for cheap, used camera gear to play with: PropertyRoom.com is an online auction site through which law enforcement agencies can sell goods that were stolen, seized, or found. There’s a section just for for photography that includes cameras, lenses, and accessories. Like the Goodwill auction site we featured last year, the fact that these auctions sites are lesser known means it more likely that you’ll be able to find a crazy deal.
PropertyRoom.com (via Imaging Insider)
