Just last week we wrote that the Museum of London had released an augmented reality iPhone app that overlays historical photographs over live views of the location.
If you don’t live in London, you can play around with the same concept using Historypin, a website that allows you to pin historical photographs onto Google’s Street View. The screenshot above shows a photograph of London bikers in 1926. Even though the views aren’t “live” like with the iPhone app, it’s still neat to see old photos in the context of present day images.
Here’s a useful tool you might want to bookmark: findexif.com. It has a super simple web interface in which you simply paste a URL to a photograph in order to display the EXIF data embedded in the image. It should work for any photograph that hasn’t had the EXIF stripped out for some reason, and can be a great way for you to learn how certain images were made. Here’s an example page showing the EXIF data of a photograph I made a while back.
Mugtug Darkroom is a new browser-based photo editor that uses HTML5 rather than Flash. It was presented at the Google I/O web developer conference yesterday to show off what’s possible with HTML5, the proposed next version of HTML that’s gaining steam.
Web apps taking advantage of HTML can take advantage of new scripting APIs that allow such things as offline data storage and drag and drop functionality.
The app is indeed impressive, but only worked in Firefox 3.6 for us. It might or might not work for you depending on what browser you’re using.
After loading up an image via upload, URL, Flickr, or Picasa, you can do many of the basic edits you might do on a photo in more advanced programs like Photoshop.
Looks like there’s big improvements coming to our internet experience in the very near future.
Picsean is a new travel magazine that resembles Laura Brunow Miner‘s Pictory. Photographers submit their best photographs and stories to themes, and the best submissions are selected and featured.
However, unlike Pictory, Picsean will publish a magazine separate from the website featuring the work, and pays photographers based on how many pages the work spans in the magazine at the rate of $100 per page.
While there haven’t been any magazines released yet, there’s a number of existing themes that are currently accepting submissions.
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.
You can submit up to 9 of your photographs into photobattle, and the 10 most successful photographs are displayed on a scoreboard.
The app was built using Rails by Canada-based developer Kyle Fox. Fox also works for Fotojournal, a newly launched photoblogging service that we covered recently.
If any of your photographs make the top 10 list, leave a comment letting us know!
Israeli startup Dropico thinks there’s time to be saved in online photo management. The company has just launched its flash-based web application that allows you to manage your photographs across various web services (i.e. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc…) all in one place.
Each photo sharing service is displayed in a separate box, allowing you to easily drag and drop photographs from one service to another. Transferring a photograph from Facebook to Flickr took literally a couple seconds, and photos can be moved in batch as well, but currently requires clicking a checkbox on each one.
A problem we found was that giving after giving Dropico permanent access to your social media account, there doesn’t seem to be any way to revoke permission or to change accounts unless you go to that application (i.e. Facebook) and revoke the permissions there.
Despite the current lack of advanced features and minor usability flaws, the idea behind Dropico seems pretty solid. Also, TechCrunch reports that the service is planning to provide an aggregate stream of your friends’ photographs across social networks, allowing you to follow all the latest photos in one place.
contacts who’ve faved is a web application that allows you to quickly browse through photographs that your contacts recently marked as a favorite. Simply give the application read permissions by logging into it via Flickr, and it will display a grid of thumbnails for you to enjoy. The service was created by Aaron Straup Cope, a senior engineer on the Flickr team.
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.
Fotobabble is a newly launched service that allows you to add a short audio clip to photographs via either your computer or iPhone (using their free application).
Here’s the description on their website:
Fotobabble lets you create talking photos in two clicks. Simply upload a photo and then record your voice directly through your computer to create a talking photo. You can easily share it by e-mail, Facebook, Twitter or embed it into a blog or website.
It’s free and all completely web-based. No software to download, just register and get started in seconds.
Here’s an example Fotobabble found on the website that we embedded into this post:
