Yahoo made some management moves a couple of weeks ago, with VP Adam Cahan becoming head of the company's mobile endeavors and its photo-sharing service, Flickr. Cahan was previously the founder and CEO of IntoNow, a 12-week-old company that Yahoo acquired last year for $20 to $30 million.
This morning Instagram made a huge splash in the social networking scene by launching its own web profiles for viewing users' photographs through a web browser. Each profile shares a user's photographs, profile info, and pretty much everything the mobile view has. The service just became a lot more Facebook-like.
It's no secret that Twitter was interested in acquiring Instagram before Facebook swooped in and snatched it up. Now, instead of running the popular photo-sharing app, Twitter is waging war against it. Twitter cut off Instagram's API access for the app's "Find Your Friends" feature a few months ago, but that was just the beginning. The next major bombshell announcement is coming soon: photo filters.
Amazon has launched Cloud Drive Photos, an Android app that makes it easy to store and share photographs to and from the the cloud. It's a consumer-oriented app build on top of Amazon Cloud Drive, a cloud-storage service that competes with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer held her first earnings call yesterday, and it appears that stockholders were pleased with the company's latest quarter figures: the stock price has been soaring since then. Among the areas that Yahoo sees promise in are Flickr and mobile, as well as a combination of the two.
Well, that's quite a turn of events. Yesterday we reported that photo sharing app Color had denied rumors that the service would soon be shutting down. Based on the app's lack of users, we said that Color would need to find some traction -- and find it soon -- for the $41 million invested in it to pay off. Turns out they won't be needing a miracle after all, because they've reportedly already found one: the app will reportedly be acquired by Apple.
People say money can't buy happiness. Turns out there's another thing it can't buy: photo sharers. Despite raising a staggering $41 million in funding before even launching, the photo sharing app Color has been struggling to find users. Even after major pivots that changed the service's DNA, the app only has less than half a million active users.
There was a good deal of buzz in the tech world today after Ricardo Bilton of VentureBeat reported that the app has been slated for closure.
Shutterfly is making a habit of gobbling up photo sharing services that camera companies no longer want to run. Less than half a year after acquiring Kodak Gallery from Kodak for a meager $23.8 million, Shutterfly has now taken another photo site off the hands of a company very similar to Kodak: Fujifilm. The Japanese imaging company has agreed to dump its photo sharing and printing business SeeHere into Shutterfly's lap, shutting down the service on November 8, 2012.
Since launching last year, JPEGMini has become a popular web-based option for trimming the file size of JPEG images without compromising their appearance. The web app magically shrinks photos by up to 5x while keeping the quality relatively unchanged. In May of this year, the company repackaged the technology for Macs as a simple space-saving app. Its next frontier? Mobile photo sharing and iOS.
It's seems like many photo enthusiasts are hating on Instagram and retro-filtered photos these days, but not photographer Richard Koci Hernandez. He has written a piece for CNN titled "Photographers, embrace Instagram," in which he explains why he thinks that "Smartphones have ushered in a golden age for photography."
Want to see what it looks like for a photo to go viral on Facebook? Check out these visualizations by San Francisco-based studio Stamen Design, which took three of the most shared images on the social networking service -- Marvin the Martian (visualized above), Famous Failures, and Ab Fab London, all shared by George Takei -- and created a visualization using the data from the hundreds of thousands of shares.
Tumblr jumped into the mobile photo sharing game today by releasing Photoset, a new photo sharing app for the iPhone and the iPad. The app is stupidly simple and is focused on doing one thing well: sharing groups of photos with others.
New York City-based filmmaker Casey Neistat has strong opinions on social networks and how they should be used. His …
It is commonly said that a picture is worth a thousand words. It seems that US smartphone users agree, for Instagram has now passed Twitter in active user count. The legions of Instagrammers aren't just checking their beloved social network more than their Tweeting counterparts -- their eyeballs are glued on it longer as well.
Last year there was a minor controversy when the Portland Police Department began posting photos of arrested Occupy protestors to Facebook. It may or may not have been inspired by the PPD, but Pottstown, Pennsylvania newspaper The Pottstown Mercury has begun sharing photographs of wanted individuals through the popular photo sharing service Pinterest.
It's not uncommon for camera manufacturers to launch their own online photo storage or sharing service, but Canon is looking to make a bigger splash than most. At Photokina last week, the company announced Project 1709, an upcoming cloud-based service that will allow photographers to store their entire library of photographs online. As with most cloud services, the images would then be available from anywhere in the world, accessible using any device (e.g. computer, tablet, smartphone, Internet-connected camera).
Social photo aggregation service Pixable has been acquired by Singaporean telecommunications company SingTel for $26.5 million. The service helps in photo browsing and discovery by aggregating photographs from your various social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flicker) and using a special ranking system to only show you the interesting images. Billing itself as a "photo inbox", users can also keep up with their friends' photographs on-the-go using the company's popular iOS and Android apps.
Love it or hate it, Instagram is currently a pretty big deal in the mobile space. Big enough, perhaps, that many smartphone users might not even consider switching to a phone running Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system unless the photo sharing app is available. If you're one of those people, get ready to think about jumping ship: Instagram is coming to Windows Phone.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighter Renzo Gracie was walking on the sidewalk at 22nd street and 10th avenue in Manhattan last night, when he noticed two shady-looking fellows following him. Suspecting that they were planning to mug him, Gracie began sending live tweets and photos to his 100,000+ followers on Twitter. Once the two men finally approached him, asking for a cigarette, he decided to launch a preemptive strike by beating the crap out of the would-be assailants... while live-blogging the whole thing.
Just a few hours ago, a man opened fire at the Empire State Building in New York City, killing a former co-worker before being gunned down by police. Ryan Pitcheralle was passing through the area when the shooting occurred, and used Instagram to capture a photograph of the victim lying in a pool of blood.
Flickr's Android app is almost one year old now, and the service is getting it ready for its birthday by pushing out an update with a fresh UI and new features. Version 1.5 introduces a new navigation menu, new explore features, metadata editing, new camera options, and more.
If you've been looking for a way to hold "photo conversations" with friends and family as easily as you chat through text messages, Skype has a solution for you. The company has added one of the features requested the most by its millions of users: mobile photo sharing. Upgrade to the latest version of Skype's iPhone and iPad apps, and you'll be able to beam your latest snaps to anyone on your contact list without having to worry about things like file size limits or paying for MMS charges.
Geotagging is one of the big trends in photography these days, as more and more cameras allow GPS coordinates to be baked into the EXIF data of photos to document where they were taken. iOS app developer Reddyset wants to join in on the location tagging fun, but from a very different angle: taxitagging.
They've released a fun new iOS app called Taxi Snapshot that allows people to snap and share anonymous photos based on New York City taxicabs rather than static locations.
Photobucket is quietly one of the 800-pound gorillas of photo sharing. First launched back in 2003, the nearly-10-year-old service boasts a staggering 100 million users, putting it in second place behind the picture sharing juggernaut, Facebook. As the demise of MySpace showed, however, the mantra for online services needs to constantly be "innovate or die".
In an effort to stay hip in the crowded market of online photo sites, Photobucket has begun rolling out the first major redesign in its 10-year history.
Instagram has rolled out version 3.0 of its photo sharing app, which now boasts over 80 million users around the world. The new release focuses on improving the browsing experience for photos, with geotagging being one of the core ideas. There's a new Photo Maps view that's similar to what you can find on services like Flickr. The page overlays photos onto a map, allowing you to browse images based on where they were shot.
If you've been shying away from posting your photographs to Facebook because you don't want them stolen, security software company McAfee has come up with a solution for you. It's a new tool called McAfee Social Protection, and helps you protect your photos using invite lists, blurring, and lock-down.
Ever since Google+ was launched in June 2011, users have gushed over the beautiful mosaic view for photos uploaded …
If you browse the photos in your iPhone's camera roll, there's a good chance there are some in there that you forgot to upload, email, or otherwise share with your friends. Whenever you're out with a group and photos are being taken, the end of the night always consists of handing out e-mail addresses or promising to upload photos to Facebook, but sadly, more often than not, we forget. Enter Flock, a new "magic" photo sharing app from Bump Technologies.
Instagram grew to its $1 billion acquisition price through a service that's used almost entirely through a mobile app. As it continues to balloon in size, it only makes sense that it would expand onto the web to compete against the likes of Flickr and 500px. That day may be closer than you think.
Flickr users have made quite a commotion in the past couple days begging new Yahoo CEO Marissa …