It seems like every photography app and update has to do with iOS users, so here’s one for the Android fanboys out there. Amazon’s Cloud Drive Photos app — which went live last November — just got an update, complete with several much-requested features. Read more…

If you got on Twitter yesterday, you probably noticed an abundance of strange, .gif-like video loops. These are the result of ‘Vine,’ Twitter’s stand-alone video clip sharing app that is being called something akin to the “Instagram of Video” by more than a few online sources. Read more…

When shopping online, you’ve probably seen options for entering promo and discount codes during the checkout stage. Most of the time, however, you probably don’t have a suitable code to use for knocking some dollars off the purchase price. Scouring the web can sometimes do the trick, but it’s difficult to sift through the noise and find working codes.

If the experience we just described is all too familiar to you, then you should check out Honey. It’s a new browser extension that’s designed to save you money by finding and applying promo codes for you.
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If you were planning to install 500px’s popular photo sharing app on your iPhone or iPad today, you’re out of luck. The app was abruptly yanked from the iTunes App Store earlier today over the fact that users can search for photos showing artistic nudity.
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When you think “Instagram competitor,” the first app that comes to mind is Flickr’s new offering. Having released just in time for Instagram to royally annoy its users with the proposed ToS changes, disgruntled Instagrammers flocked to Flickr in droves.

But there’s a new kid gaining popularity on the lo-fi block that does exactly what Instagram does, only more… German. It’s the EyeEm app, and it’s been climbing the charts so fiercely that it has established itself as a legitimate Instagram competitor in little more than a week. Read more…

Is your Adobe Lightroom running slowly on your computer? Adobe regularly receives questions through social media regarding sluggish photo editing, and recently decided to start compiling the non-traditional solutions that work onto a single helpful page. In the Lightroom Help section of the Adobe website, there’s now a page titled “Performance hints“.
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We’ve featured Instagram-inspired presets for Lightroom in the past, and today a new challenger has emerged. The folks over at Really Nice Images has released a couple of preset packs that are designed to faithfully imitate the look of Instagram’s popular filters. What’s unique about this new offering is that the presets aren’t limited to the latest version of the mobile app’s filters — there’s also a pack containing the classic filters that were replaced after Instagram Version 2 came out.
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Want to create a long exposure photo but don’t have a camera that can keep its shutter open for extended periods of time? Mansour Moufid of Elite Raspberries is working on a script called “Hipshot” that can take ordinary video footage and convert it into a faked long exposure still photo. He writes,

Long-exposure photography is a technique to capture dynamic scenes, which produces a contrast between its static and moving elements. Those parts of the scene which were in motion will appear blurred, creating a nice effect.

[Above] is a long-exposure shot of a stream I took recently. It is technically not a long-exposure photograph, but a simulation; this image was actually generated from a video recording taken with an old iPod, which was then processed in software into a single image. (Forgive the poor quality, I don’t own a good camera. Nonetheless, this image demonstrates the desired effect.)

You can check out the technical details of how the Python script works here. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download Hipshot over on Google Code.

Simulate long-exposure photography with OpenCV [Elite Raspberries]

Dropbox has been making major moves toward being a series photo-sharing service as of late, and its latest Android app update moves the service one step closer in that direction. The new feature allows users to quickly and easily share entire collections of photographs with friends and family.
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Samsung camera lovers received some good news via Dropbox today. According to Dropbox’s head of mobile business development Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, future Samsung smart cameras are going to come packing Dropbox and 50GB of free storage for 2 years.

The news is nothing new for Samsung Galaxy Camera owners, who already had the service and 50GB built in. But the fact that they’re putting Dropbox on all cameras means you won’t have to pony up $500 to get the automated cloud storage benefits.
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