Photo sharing is proving to be one of the main battlegrounds in the social networking war between Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Facebook launched another counterattack today by increasing the resolution of displayed photos yet again from 720px to 960px, a 33% increase (last year they increased by 20% from 604px to 720px). Furthermore, the company claims that photos now load twice as fast as before.
Well, that was fast. Just a week after opening up its Photovine photo sharing app to the public, Google is now planning to kill it off, along with its second -- and not-yet-launched -- app Pool Party. Google is planning to focus its photo-sharing efforts on Google+, and will be shutting down Slide, the company behind the apps, which Google acquired last August for $200 million. The Slide employees were developing the apps independently, which explains why they were being made for iOS initially …
JPEGmini is a new image compression service that can magically reduce the file size of your JPEG photos by up to 5 times without any visible loss in quality. ICVT, the Israeli company behind the service, explains how the technology works in an interview with Megapixel: …
Earlier this year we saw the launch of two search engines -- Stolen Camera Finder and GadgetTrak Serial Search -- that help find stolen cameras by searching photos on the web for the serial numbers. The idea is neat, but no one knew whether it would actually help recover stolen gear or not. Turns out it does work.
Emotional Breakdown is a cool new web app that attempts to gauge the mood of the world every day by analyzing the photographs found on The Guardian's 24 hours in pictures. Using facial recognition technology to find happy, sad, angry, surprised or neutral faces in the images, the app creates a colorful pie chart breaking down the emotions. From the chart above, we see that the world was mostly neutral, surprised, and happy today.
Twitter, Google+, and Facebook are one step closer to becoming clones of each other (at least when it comes to photo sharing) -- Twitter has rolled out photo galleries that display the 100 most recent images Tweeted by users in chronological order.
Here's a nifty visual guide to all the keyboard shortcuts you have access to when viewing a photograph on Flickr. Don't bother bookmarking this page though -- Flickr just added these guides to every page on the site. Simply press the "?" key for the popup to appear!
The photo sharing feature on Twitter that we first reported on a couple months ago is now live for all users. This nudges the service a little more closer towards what Facebook and Google+ offer, allowing users to upload and share photos directly through Twitter. Third-party photo-sharing services geared towards Twitter users can't be too happy about this -- the founder of TwitPic turned down a $10 million offer back in 2009, only to have Twitter drink its milkshake a couple years later.
Alexa's traffic reports seem to show that photo sharing service 500px is growing like a weed. The site has received quite a bit of coverage as of late.
There has been a lot of discussion regarding social media sites and their scary-sounding terms of services that always sound like rights-grabs. Here's what Photoshop guru Scott Kelby had to say after trying out Google+: …
Millions of people know Instagram as a fun way to share photographs, but get popular enough on the service and it can be a profitable one as well. Keepsy, a startup that helps people quickly create albums from Instagram and Facebook photos, has launched a new curated gallery featuring top Instagram artists. Fans can purchase photobooks from the site at a price set by the artist, and profits are split 50/50 between the service and the photographer. While only about 20 users are represented …
Want to play role in the legendary agency Magnum Photos? Well, now you can as a "Magnum Tagger". The cooperative is having a tough time keeping their large archive of historical photographs organized and easily searchable. Of the 500,000 images they've uploaded to the web, about 200,000 have little or no associated metadata.
Photorank.me is a new web app that attempts to calculate how influential you are in the world of online photo sharing. After giving it read-only access to your social media accounts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc...) the app computes a numerical score based on reach, activity, and quantity. PetaPixel got a score of 63, and the highest ranked person on the global leaderboard is currently English Purcell Struth, AKA "photoeng" on Instagram.
Google has added EXIF data to Google Images, allowing you to quickly look up details on how a particular photograph was taken (as long as the data is embedded). Simply click any of your search results to see the details in the panel on the right. They don't seem to be doing anything with geotag info -- displaying where the photo was taken on a Google Map, for example -- which is probably a smart choice. Something tells me a lot of people would have a problem with that, even though the data is …
You can now create instant photo books with your favorite Instagram (AKA two-minute noodle) photos using Blurb. After logging into the page with your Instagram account, your most "liked" photo is used for the cover and the rest of the pages are filled with your most recent images (they can be changed, of course). A 40-photo, 20-page book starts at $11.
A little update to the recent brouhaha over Google+'s Terms of Service: Tom W of Getty Images posted the above message to fellow Getty members on Flickr informing them that Getty's lawyers have no problems with the ToS. He writes, …
Did you know that earlier this year YouTube added a free image stabilization tool to its video editor? It lets you smooth out the jitter in your videos without having to shell out dough for an expensive rig or software solution. The downside is that the stabilization makes your video look like it was shot by a robot.
Here's a short video that gives a small glimpse into how Google's stealthy Photovine photo-sharing app works. Like we reported yesterday, it's an app that's focused around sharing photos based on a theme with both friends and strangers.
If you're not convinced that Google is jumping into the photo-sharing pool head first, get this: the company has not one, but two stealthy photo sharing apps in private beta. Besides the Pool Party app that came to light at the beginning of the month, the rumored Photovine service has now materialized into a website -- well, a landing page, at least.
Last year Scott Bourne caused some commotion among photo-enthusiasts by claiming that Twitter's ToS forced photographers to give up rights to photos shared through the service. After Google launched their new Google+ social network, Bourne again wrote a very similar post warning his readers about the ToS. We weren't planning on weighing in, but seeing that the FUD has spread to our comments and even The Washington Post, we'd like to clear some of it away for our readers.
For photo enthusiasts, Google's new Google+ social network is something like Flickr mixed with Facebook. It has the social sharing power of Facebook while providing features and tools Flickr users would appreciate thanks to the fact that Google runs a full-fledged photo-sharing service in Picasa (soon to be brought into the Google+ fold and renamed Google Photos). One such feature is the EXIF data section, easily accessed for each photo by Action->Photo Details. Most Facebook users would likely …
Mashable is reporting that Google will be rebranding Picasa as "Google Photos" within the next six weeks, coinciding with the public launch of its Google+ social networking service. Blogger will also be rebranded as "Google Blogs". Furthermore, images up to 2048x2048px won't be counted towards the 1GB of free storage offered by the service for Google+ users, up from the 800px rule announced earlier this year. Larger images uploaded after the storage limit is reached will be automatically …
One of the gripes some people have with Flickr is that it doesn't offer an easy way to download your complete collection of photos if you ever want to move your images elsewhere (though, hopefully you're not using it as your only backup).
OpenPhoto is a new "open" alternative to Flickr being built by programmer Jaisen Mathai -- an engineer who quit his job at Yahoo (Flickr's owner) back in May 2011. Instead of storing images using company servers, this new service will allow users to connect their own online storage accounts to store their data within arms reach. This would be like using Flickr to share your images while having the photos themselves be stored in a location that you control (e.g. Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc...).
An integral part of being a respectable artist is to have your artist statement be so confusing that you can't even decipher what it means. If coming up with one of these statements requires more time or brainpower than you have on hand, then check out Instant Artist Statement, an online generator that authors a perfect statement on your behalf for you to paste all over your website, exhibitions, and portfolios. Here's ours: …
Photographer Jamie Beck has done quite a bit lately to popularize the "cinemagraph": Harry Potter-esque photos that are given an extra dimension by adding a dash of animation. If you want to learn how to make your own, Photojojo recently published a great tutorial on how to make them using Photoshop. Photographers Fernando Baez and Christopher Mathew Burt have also published tutorials and some helpful tips.
In March 2011 we reported that an iPhone photo sharing app called Color had raised a whopping $41 million in funding before it had even launched. Sequoia Capital, one of the most prominent VC firms in Silicon Valley, invested more money in Color than they had originally invested in Google. Now, just three short months later, Color is still struggling to find users while its less-funded competitors are leaving it in the dust.
Last week we featured Shopobot, a new website that can show you the price history of camera gear and tell you whether it's stable or not. Decide is a new service (just launched yesterday) that goes a step further -- it not only tells you whether to buy or not based on price stability, but checks to see whether there's a newer model available or likely to be announced in the near future. The service bases each decision on 40 price factors, historical trends, and relevant rumors regarding …
Even though it seems like the photo sharing market is saturated with services competing for the world's photos, the incredible growth of many young companies (e.g. Instagram) shows that there's still plenty of untapped areas for growth, with mobile sharing being one of the big ones at the moment. A trademark for "Photovine" filed by Google earlier this month seems to suggest that the search giant is looking to expand beyond Picasa.
You've probably seen countless photographs already of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan back in March, but they were likely captured by professional photographers looking to have the images published in news outlets. What, then, would photographs look like if they were taken by ordinary people who were directly affected by the disaster? Aichi Hirano found out the answer to this question by distributing 50 disposable cameras to survivors at a number of shelters with a note …
Shopobot is a new shopping tool that helps buyers determine the best price to buy products from various retailers by tracking their price changes across time. Retailers often change the prices of different items often to determine the best price point, which can cause frustration for people who buy a product only to find it $50 cheaper the next day. If you're looking to buy a camera, lens, or any other piece of gear, you might benefit from doing a quick search on Shopobot to find the price …
Flickr is a popular method of sharing photos, but the service doesn't provide any easy way to download them in bulk. Flick and Share is a web app that creates simple download links for Flickr sets that you can send to family and friends, allowing them to quickly download a copy of the images you shot at an event. We've tested it out, and it works as advertised.
Bad news for TinEye but good news for photographers: Google is adding reverse image search to their ever-growing list of products, allowing photographers to search using their photos to see the different places they're being used online. You can search for images by entering a URL, uploading from your computer, dragging and dropping onto the search page, or via Chrome and Firefox extensions. The feature will be rolling out to Google's users over the next few days -- once you see the camera icon …
Textify.it is a neat little web and iPhone app that recreates photographs using colored text. Simply drag and drop a photograph from your computer onto the page to get started. The image above is a photograph of Crater Lake that we turned into text using the letters from "PetaPixel".
Need some inspiration? The "Endless Interestingness" page by designers Mark Barcinski and Adrien Jeanjean -- they have an awesome website, BTW -- shows thumbnails of interesting Flickr photographs, and extends endlessly in every direction. If you see a photo you like, simply click it to open up the original Flickr page.
Confused about what a certain acronym means when it comes to Nikon's line of Nikkor lenses? There's a helpful Lens Glossary over on the company's website that provides a short explanation of each one.
DEAR PHOTOGRAPH is a neat photo project by Taylor Jones that collects pictures of pictures from the past in the present. These are images that show old photos held up and aligned to the present day location, offering a glimpse into what once was.
Twitter has just announced that they will be launching their own photo-sharing service that will let you attach photographs directly to Tweets, competing with services like TwitPic. Rather than host the images themselves using their own servers or Amazon's S3 storage, they've decided to partner with photo-sharing giant Photobucket. It'll be interesting to see whether photographers feel more comfortable sharing their images on Twitter now that the functionality will be baked into the service …
One of the big complaints users (or ex-users) have against Flickr is that its account deletion process is often unexpected and almost always permanent. Many users -- even paid subscribers -- have found their accounts deleted and have had no way of appealing and no chance of recovering their data. Flickr finally addressed the issue today by changing its deletion policy -- data is now stored for 90 days on the server after accounts are deleted, giving users a chance to appeal. Huzzah! …
A camera's sensor size is a very good predictor of how good its image quality is, but understanding and comparing the sensors sizes isn't very easy. While televisions and computer monitors are usually measured by diagonal length, sensors sizes are listed with its two dimensions in millimeters. Back in 2008, David Pogue of the New York Times wrote an article about this issue, calling for someone to develop an online tool for converting confusing sensor measurements into the diagonal length of …
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? …
If you're a coffee lover (or addict), adbeus is a photoblog that you'll want to feast your eyes on. They visit the best independent coffee shops in Montreal and photograph each cup of coffee in exactly the same way: the coffee on the right side of the frame, the table serving as the background, and the camera viewing from above. The result is a project that shows how beautiful and unique cups of coffee can be!
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 …
If you have camera gear you'd like to sell, Amazon will now take it off your hands in exchange for gift cards. The new electronics trade-in program currently has a list of about 1,400 accepted cameras along with the dollar values they're worth. Add your cameras to the trade-in list, specify the condition they're in, send it to Amazon using a prepaid shipping label, and gift card credits will be added to your account. With a little more work, you can probably get more money by selling it on eBay …
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.
Since launching in 2008, TwitPic has been at the center of quite a few copyright controversies and legal battles, especially when disasters strike and Twitter users are able to publish photos of things that are happening well before major news outlets. Back in early 2010 photographer Daniel Morel had an iconic photograph taken during the Haiti earthquake widely republished in newspapers across the world without his permission after he uploaded the photos to TwitPic, then later that year …
Deal of the day website Groupon is the fastest growing companies in web history and a popular way for local businesses to generate some buzz in their areas, but some independent photographers are finding out the hard way that offering special deals through Groupon might be the worst marketing decision they ever made.
Online SLR Camera Simulator is a neat flash app that helps teach the fundamentals of using an SLR camera by letting you tweak different variables and settings, then showing you what the resulting photograph would look like. It's a great way for any beginner to become more familiar with a camera's controls, though nothing beats going out and practicing by taking real photos -- though this app would have been a lifesaver before the digital era.
Google Street View photos won't be limited to the exterior of buildings for much longer -- the company has just announced Google Business Photos, a service that will allow Google websites to show the interiors of local businesses. If you thought having vehicles equipped with Street View cameras driven up and down every street in every city was a tedious project, for Business Photos Google is planning to have photographers sent to businesses that apply for the service. Crowd-sourcing the imagery …
There have been a number of devastating tornadoes in the Southeastern United States this past week, with the homes in many communities reduced to rubble. While certain things can be rebuilt or replaced, photographs lost in the storm often cannot be. A new Facebook page has been created after the storms that aims to reunite owners with photographs scattered in the winds, and already boasts close to 50,000 fans and 600+ uploaded photographs. It's a neat idea, and a great example of how Facebook …
