It started full of hope and possibilities: In 2011, Lytro promised a camera that could change photography forever with its light-field technology, which allowed photographers to refocus after the shot. But having already announced a change in the company's direction towards video rather than consumer still cameras, Lytro has now shut down its online sharing platform for light-field still images. pictures.lytro.com is no more.
If you have a free 500px photo sharing account or are considering joining the service, here's a change that happened earlier this year you may not be aware of: free accounts can now only upload 7 photos per week, down from 20.
You can now research the popularity of what photographers are searching for through the Google Images search engine. Google Trends has expanded to include more "lenses", and one of those is Images.
Hasselblad just took a big step in a new direction of camera sales with the launch of its own online store. The store will make it easier for photographers to buy Hasselblad gear straight from the manufacturer.
re.photos is a new website decided to helping people create and share then-and-now photos. The site helps you automatically align before-and-after photos to show how things have changed over time. Known as "rephotography," this is the act of taking a photo of a scene that has already been photographed some time ago.
Facebook has just introduced the ability to share high-resolution photos on its Messenger app. This makes for a much better, and less compressed, visual user experience for the countless people who send photos to one another every day through the popular app.
Lots of photographers and creators, particularly from the YouTube world, have been relying on subscription crowdfunding services such as Patreon to provide a constant source of income from supporters. There's now a new competitor in the space: Kickstarter has just announced a Patreon competitor called Drip.
Want to quickly find out the current market value of a used camera or lens? Bokeh Market is a new website that can tell you the real-time value of used equipment. It's like the Kelley Blue Book of camera gear.
Want a faster way to add relevant hashtags to your Instagram photos? Photerloo wants to help. The photo management service has launched a new free web tool that uses machine learning to automatically keywords for any photo.
Let's Enhance is a new free website that uses neural networks to upscale your photos in a way Photoshop can't. It magically boosts and enhances your photo resolution like something straight out of CSI.
Google Photos is now able to identify and recognize your furry feline or canine companions, pulling together albums specifically featuring them.
The stock photo service Shutterstock has announced a new powerful photo search tool called Composition Aware Search. It uses advanced deep learning technology to let you search for photos containing certain objects in certain locations.
EyeEm, a marketplace for photographers to sell stock images, has come up with a solution for the annoying problem of having to collect separate model releases for multiple photos that contain the same person.
Adobe Portfolio, a platform for photographers to share images online on their own websites, will now integrate with Lightroom collections. This means you can upload entire collections at once, straight from Lightroom to your online portfolio.
Hello, photographers. Here's a giant list of 194 photo editing tools and photography apps you can use in your photography.
Kodak Moments, the consumer printing arm of Kodak, has launched a new Facebook Messenger chatbot. Its purpose: to try and sell you prints of your old photos.
Researchers from the University of Nottingham and Kingston University have come up with an AI tool that will turn a 2D portrait into a 3D version, using just a single portrait photo you upload to it.
With the upcoming release of iOS 11, Apple's new HEIF/HEVC photo formats will make it trickier to use and share iPhone photos in a world still dominated by JPEG images. Luckily, heictojpg.com is here to save the day with an easy-to-use conversion service for converting HEIC to JPG.
DxOMark, the popular benchmarking website for sensors and lenses, has updated the way it will rank and score smartphone cameras. It's introducing bokeh and zoom as categories in its scoring methodology, with added importance on low-light and motion performance as well.
Instagram is moving further and further away from its mobile-centric routes. Instagram has just announced that Stories can now be watched on desktop Internet browsers.
Back in August 2015, Instagram introduced support for landscape and portrait orientation images. This was great news for photographers, as getting rid of the forced square aspect ratio stopped the need for ugly crops. Earlier this year they introduced the ability to upload multiple photos at once, but this brought the return of the square aspect ratio.
My name is Albert Dros, and I am a professional landscape photographer from the Netherlands. People often tell me that I am "in the right place at the right time." But I obviously don’t post "failed" shoots. And not only that, I also spend a great deal of time planning my shots in order to make my chances of success as high as possible.
The blockchain-based copyright platform Binded (formerly known as Blockai) just launched a new service that may be a godsend for copyright-conscious photographers: one click U.S. copyright registration that makes the process 10x simpler with no extra fee.
Apple just joined Instagram. An unlike most other brand accounts, the new @apple handle won't ever feature ads or announcements for products and services. Instead, it will be used for one, single purpose: to feature the world's best #ShotoniPhone photos.
Google Street View has just added a tour of the International Space Station. You know... just in case you were taking your next summer holiday there and wanted to plan your sightseeing route through the different modules.
The US’s national parks offer some of the most spectacular scenery in the world, perfect for the aspiring landscape photographer. The National Park Foundation recently partnered with Airbnb to create a dedicated site for finding accommodation near 10 of America’s parks.
Action Camera Finder is a new website that allows you to sort through the different action cameras on the market and find the perfect one for your requirements.
Pixel Peeper is an awesome new website that can reveal the Lightroom edits that were made to JPEG files. It launched last month, and now it's getting its first feature update. Starting today, you can now see what Lightroom preset was used to edit a photo.
Since 2003, the popular photo hosting service Photobucket has been letting users upload and host images for free on their servers. They have over 10 billion images stored by 100 million registered users. But now they're going to start charging, and that means billions of images around the Web are now broken.
Here's something that may make you laugh out loud... or feel creeped out. WeirdBox.tv is a new interactive video website that takes your personal Instagram photos and uses them for a humorous short film.
As photographers, we’re always interested in how other people edit their photos to achieve a certain look. Pixel Peeper is a new website that can take a JPEG and tell you exactly how it was edited in Lightroom, along with the camera model, lens, and settings -- as long as that info is found in the file's EXIF data.
In a long anticipated move, Verizon has now confirmed its acquisition of Flickr and other Yahoo assets in a massive $4.48 billion deal. Rumors started back in 2015 that Flickr was for sale, and now the day has come that this is a reality for its users.
Remember Flickr? Yes, the Yahoo-owned (or is it Verizon now...) photo-sharing service is still a thing, and today they rolled out a major, long-overdue update to their profile pages. Say hello to the Flickr "About" page.
A new copyright protection service called Binded just launched this week. It's actually a rebrand of the company formerly known as Blockai, and the purpose remains the same: using the Bitcoin blockchain to protect photographers' copyrights.
Europeana.eu has launched a searchable online gallery of more than 2 million historical photographs, which catalog the first 100 years of photography in Europe.
Apple wants to train you to be a master of iPhone photography. The company just launched a new microsite called "How to Shoot on iPhone 7" that contains 16 videos with mobile photography tips and tricks.
In a bid to become accessible to more people around the world and (hopefully) hit that 1 billion user mark by the end of 2017, Instagram recently added the ability to share photos, like, comment, explore, and more all from your smartphone's Web browser. No need to download the app.
Heads up: you can now upload photos to Instagram from a desktop browser... using a special, unofficial trick. In this step-by-step tutorial, I'll show you how it's done.
Image protection is a fiery issue among us photographers and there’s a good chance you sit in one of four camps...
Instagram has officially shut down one of the most popular botting services on the Internet. Instagress—the same service mentioned in two previous PetaPixel articles about the practice of "botting" to get likes, followers, and comments on Instagram—is officially defunct.