Websites

The Stolen Camera Finder is a new search engine developed over the past two years by programmer Matt Burns. His idea is to search the web for photographs that have a stolen camera's serial number embedded in the EXIF information. It uses two web crawlers -- the first is a standard one that accesses Flickr's API, while the second is a Google Chrome browser plugin that silently runs in the background and peeks at the serial numbers of images on any webpage viewed. These serial numbers and URLs …

Did you know that 1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some kind of color vision deficiency? X-Rite has an interesting online "Color IQ" test that helps you find out how well your eyes see colors. You're given four strips with color chip squares, and are tasked with arranging them in order by hue, starting from the fixed chip on the left side and ending with the fixed one on the right. It's an online version of the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue test, which has been used by the government …

Hiding or censoring part of an image through obfuscation is as easy as selecting the area in Photoshop and applying the Pixelate->Mosaic filter, but what if you don't have an image editing program at your disposal? If you're seriously paranoid about your privacy on the Internet, there's a new service called PhotoHide that helps you quickly add these pixelated areas to any photo. Everything is done through the web browser, and you can download the final image once you're done.

If you're looking to buy used camera gear on sites like eBay or Craigslist, a trick you can use to find a good deals is to search for listings that contain spelling mistakes that keep most people from finding them (e.g. "Canom" instead of "Canon", or "Mikon" instead of "Nikon"). With less exposure -- and therefore less competition -- you may be able to win the auctions at far below the item's value.

Matthew Rothenberg, the man who has led Flickr the past two years has Head of Product, announced today that he is leaving the service. In a message posted to his Twitter account, Rothenberg states, …

For a Yahoo HackU programming competition, a group of students at the University of Washington created FlickrMosaic, a simple app that creates photomosaics from Flickr photographs. The website randomly selects a Creative Commons-licensed photograph from Flickr, then begins transforming it into a photomosaic by adding other photos as small squares.

Emphas.is is a newly launched Kickstarter-esque website that brings the latest Internet craze of crowd funding to photojournalism.

What you see here is every still frame of the famous 1939 film The Wizard of Oz compressed into a single frame, creating a colorful "barcode" for the movie. moviebarcode is a neat blog that publishes these images for a wide range of famous movies.

Cop Block created an interactive map showing the "War on Cameras" in which each marker shows an incident where someone was "harassed, detained, threatened, attacked, arrested, or charged with a crime" by government officials for using a camera. It only has about 60 markers on it at the moment -- a more solution would be to have a crowdsourced map where anyone can contribute and add events. Still, this is pretty neat for those interested in photographers' rights (a pretty big issue last year).

Artist Billy Brown took 100 different pieces of photography gear and turned them into pixel art. What's neat is that he's making them available for any kind of use as long as you credit him. There's everything from old film and Polaroid cameras to memory cards and the latest telephoto lenses.

Google has changed the way it limits Picasa photo storage, allowing users to store a virtually unlimited number of photos... provided that they're small. Previously the service limited users to 1GB in storage and 1,000,000 photographs (split between 1,000 albums). While the photo limit is quite generous, it was difficult to reach since users would likely hit the storage limit very early on (you could only store about 10,000 100KB photos). The million mark is easier to reach now thanks to Google …

External hard drives are a convenient way to store your digital photographs, but they have finite lifetimes and eventually fail. Failing drives have a number of distinctive sounds that can warn you and give you some time to start a data-exodus to a healthier hard drive. Datacent, a data recovery company, has a useful page on which you can listen to some of the most common "bad drive sounds". These are categorized by manufacturer, and include things like stuck spindles, disk heads crashing, …

When Mirco Wilhelm tried to log into his Flickr account yesterday, he was surprised to find that his 5-year-old Pro account with roughly 4,000 photographs had completely vanished. It then dawned on him that only a week earlier he had reported another account for posting stolen photographs.

SunCalc is a super-simple web app created with Google Maps and Javascript that helps you determine the best time to shoot depending on the quality of light you want in your photos.

Here's another site you can bookmark if you're constantly on the hunt for cheap, used camera gear to play with: PropertyRoom.com is an online auction site through which law enforcement agencies can sell goods that were stolen, seized, or found. There's a section just for for photography that includes cameras, lenses, and accessories. Like the Goodwill auction site we featured last year, the fact that these auctions sites are lesser known means it more likely that you'll be able to find a crazy …

Did you know that Idée Inc., the company behind reverse-image search engine TinEye, also has a web app called BYO Image Search Lab that can take any photo you provide it and find photographs that look similar to it? It's a neat way to be inspired by how other photographers approached shooting similar scenes.

After Alan Taylor started "The Big Picture" photo blog over at the Boston Globe in 2008, it quickly became one of the most popular sections of the website. In addition to starting a large format photo blogging trend among news organizations, it has also won two Webby Awards and a SXSW nomination for "Best Blog". Taylor announced yesterday that he will be leaving "The Big Picture" to start up a new photo blog over at The Atlantic called "In Focus". His last post at The Big Picture will be on …

In case you're wondering whether Yahoo still cares about Flickr (acquired in 2005), the answer appears to be yes. Chief Product Officer Blake Irving recently tweeted a short message affirming the company's support for the popular photo sharing service, saying, …

Flickr member Deeepa Praveen 4-year-old pro account was deleted recently without any warning or explanation, and in response she created this graphic showing what she lost in the blink of an eye. While Flickr is undoubtedly one of the best photo-sharing services on the web right now, the fact that pro accounts can be permanently deleted without any warning doesn't sit too well with many users. Even if the deleted accounts deserved to be removed, it would be much nicer if they followed a notice …

The Twilight Calculator is a free and useful web app that takes in your location and spits out a table with when you should photograph if you want to shoot during golden hour.

Last week Alexandre Oudin's creative Facebook portrait idea spread like wildfire on the Interwebs, and was even featured by CNN. If you'd like to do the same thing with a portrait or photograph of yours but don't have the time or technical know-how to do so, there's a new website called Pic Scatter that does all the work for you. All you need to do is upload and resize and reposition the image to your liking, and the website will allow you to download all the individual photos for the "hacked" …

Google's new Books Ngram Viewer is a cool new site that allows you to search for words and view a graph of how the usage of that word has fluctuated over time. A quick search of the word "photography" in books published between 1835 and 2008 provides a pretty interesting look at the history of photography.

Tagging friends in massive group photographs is about to get a whole lot easier. Facebook has just announced "tag suggestions", which uses facial recognition technology to automatically group together photographs that have the same face in them.

Pummelvision is a neat little website that aims to help you see your life flash before your eyes by taking your Flickr, Facebook, and Tumblr photos, combining them into a rapid-fire slideshow set to music. Once the video is done the service uploads it to Vimeo or YouTube for you. The above is an example Pummelvision video created with the photos of Justin Ouellette of chromogenic (we interviewed him a while back).

The people behind camera comparison and recommendation website snapsort have just launched lenshero, a site designed to recommend the lens you need at the price you want. After telling the application your camera and what you're looking for in a lens (e.g. type, focal range, price), the site will spit out some recommendations of lenses that fit your criteria, ordering them by their pros and cons. It's a neat little app that you might want to bookmark if you're in the market for some new gear.

Google just launched a new eBookstore containing over 3 million titles (the web's largest collection of ebooks). What's neat is that there's a large number of free -- albeit old -- photography-related books that enthusiasts might find interesting or educational. Just do a "free only" search with keywords such as "photography" or "camera".

Twitter sees hundreds or thousands of Tweets published every second, and many of these are photos of things happening real-time. Hashalbum is a new website that aims to help you browse this constant stream of images in real time by allowing you to do a simple search by hashtag, returning images that are found in Tweets containing that hashtag.

Aviary just launched a new HTML5 photo editor that lets you quickly and easily edit images without Flash. Third-party websites can also embed the editor, allowing images to be edited in place without having to visit Aviary's website. The widget provides some basic features expected from image editors (e.g. cropping, brightness, contrast, saturation), but also some Hipstamatic-style image filters (instant, toy camera, old photo, retro) that style your photos with a single click.

With the ongoing craze in photo sharing services on mobile devices, it's not surprising to see new photo apps launching left and right. Stealthy startup Path is a bit different though, with their high powered team launching an unusual sharing service service a couple days ago.

The photo-sharing startup scene is getting hot, with social apps on mobile devices receiving quite a bit of money and attention lately. Instagram has hundreds of thousands of users now after just a month, and competitor PicPlz just raised a cool $5 million from the same VC firm that invested in Instagram.

We featured Flickriver's Lens Explorer page a couple days ago for browsing photos taken with specific lenses, but many of you responded saying you wanted to see other options (e.g. camera model) provided as well. Pixel-peeper is a similar sample photo site that has a higher degree of filtering. Using the Advanced Search page, you can specify everything from lens and camera combo to focal length, aperture, exposure time, and ISO. If you're considering a new lens or body, this might be a useful …

If you're looking into buying a certain lens, you might be interested in seeing what kind of photography other people have done with that lens. Flickriver's Lens Explorer page is a pretty easy way to quickly look through example photographs on Flickr that were captured with a specific lens. Just choose a brand and model, and begin browsing the river!

Nikon is a player in the 3D game now, though not by releasing any 3D-capable camera. Instead, they've announced my Picturetown 3D, a 3D conversion and sharing service for registered members of their photo sharing and storage service my Picturetown. The service can take your boring old-school 2D photographs and convert them into 3D for you.

Goodwill has an online auction site called shopgoodwill, and categories in the Cameras & Camcorders section include film cameras, lenses and accessories, and vintage cameras. It's not nearly as well-known as popular auction sites (e.g. eBay), so you might be able to find a good deal on camera gear!

Last week Scott Bourne published an article on Photofocus titled, "Photos On Twitter – What You Should Know". In it, he claimed that Twitter's terms of service (TOS) forced photographers to give Twitter a license to do whatever they wanted with photos shared through the service. The argument centered around a couple paragraphs found in the document: …

If you're like a lot of people, you might have felt the urge to secretly shoot where there are signs posted prohibiting photography. Strictly No Photography is a website that aggregates these photographs, giving the public a glimpse into various things that are off limits to cameras. There's photographs from museums, theaters, and even a collection of "no photography allowed" signs.

FindTheBest is the latest startup founded by Kevin O’Connor, the guy who started the online ad company DoubleClick and sold it to Google for over $3 billion. It's a human-powered comparison engine consisting of "comparison apps" in which various things of the same category are compared side by side with comparison points specific to that category. For example, the camera lenses comparison app allows you to browse lenses from a number of manufacturers, filtering and ordering them by things …

Frank Taylor, the guy behind the unofficial Google Earth Blog, is currently on a 5 years sailing trip around the world called The Tahina Expedition. Google is actually a partner in the expedition, and is acquiring content generated by the trip for use in their products. One thing Taylor has been doing is taking aerial photographs of locations using a kite, resulting in imagery that's much clearer than the photos Google gets from their satellites up in space. Google has already begun …

Ars Technica published an interesting story today about how photos uploaded to Facebook remain on their servers months -- or even years -- after they're "deleted" from the service. We decided to test this out ourselves, uploading the above photo to Facebook, copying the direct URL to the image file, and then deleting both the photo and the album. As you can see from the hotlinked photo above, the image continues to live on as a zombie photo on Facebook's CDN servers.

Just earlier this year Facebook upped their maximum photo size to 720px, an increase of 20%. Today, they've announced that the maximum size is increasing to 2048px, about eight times larger than the previous maximum size. A download link will be included with photos allowing people to download the high resolution versions.

DropMocks is a new photo sharing service designed to help you share photographs online as quickly and easily as possible. Created with HTML 5, the service has a minimalistic homepage that invites you to drag and drop photos into the browser. It then adds those photos into a simple gallery, and provides you with a short URL you can share. It's a bit like file hosting service DropBox, except for photos and done through the browser.

A Day in the Life of MIT (ADITL) is a neat project in which members of the MIT community take pictures on a particular day and then pool the photographs together to provide a snapshot of what life was like on that day. ADITL 2010 happened yesterday, and hundreds of people contributed images to the collection.

The above photo by Aaron Yeo, titled "Woodwards Collage", has the honor of being the 5 billionth photograph uploaded to Flickr. According to the blog Media Culpa, Flickr receives about a billion photographs per year, while 2.5 billion photos are uploaded per month to Facebook.

San Francisco-based photographer Michael Jang has worked in the business for over 30 years but wanted to have this personal website stand out -- so he decided to clone Google. Most visitors to his page will probably think they somehow landed onto a Google search results page until they give the text a closer look. Every link on the page points to something on the web that showcases Jang or his work, whether it's a photo of his in the SFMOMA, or an interview with him by the San Francisco …

Nikon quietly launched its new Nikon USA online store today, allowing Nikonians to buy gear directly from their beloved company rather than through a third-party. Unfortunately, the awesomeness of buying straight from the camera maker is dwarfed by the not-so-awesome prices -- most cameras and lenses appear to be listed at MSRP. Thus, if you're cost-conscious (why wouldn't you be?) you'd be better off sticking with the larger online retailers.

When we featured Strobox back in 2009, it was a simple idea: provide an easy way for photographers to create lighting diagrams and share them with others. Since then, they've upgraded their website to include a gallery where you can browse photographs done by others, view their lighting diagrams, and comment on them.

NASA joined The Commons on Flickr today, creating 3 sets with 180 beautiful historic photographs from various points in the agency's rich history. If you love looking at launch photographs, one of the three sets is dedicated to those.

If you tried to visit the Nikon Rumors site this morning, you've probably gotten an error message. According to the Google information, 47 pages from the site were tested over the last three months, and one page resulted in malicious software downloaded and installed without user consent. It appears that the site was flagged for that content yesterday. Yikes.

Photoshop CS5's Content Aware Fill feature was quite a hit when it came out earlier this year, but what about free alternatives? Webinpaint is a web-based photo app that aims to do just that. You simply open up an image, paint over the area you'd like removed, and click the "Inpaint" button for the app to do its removal magic.

Here's a funny example of a photo-based security feature gone wrong: starting in May, Facebook started doing user verification checks when logging in from an unfamiliar computer in order to make sure it's actually the account owner logging in. The verification checks are photo-based, and involve correctly naming people you have listed as friends. Unfortunately, the feature will sometimes ask users to correctly name unfamiliar things: people they don't know very well, dogs, cats, objects, gummy …