Earlier this month, Microsoft generated quite a bit of buzz by launching a site that can guess the age and gender of people in photos. Wolfram Research just one-upped that.
The software company has just launched a new website called the Image Identification Project that can identify the subject of any photograph you show it.
Flickr rolled out a new search engine last week, but one thing it still lacks is a way to search by EXIF data. A new website has launched to fill that hole. Called shutterdial, it's a Flickr search engine that lets you find photos by camera settings such as focal length, aperture, and shutter speed.
Flickr today officially launched a major redesign of its service across all platforms and rolled out some powerful new features that improve the viewing, organizing, and searching of photos and videos.
We're entering the days of 4K, 5K, and 8K monitors becoming a standard feature of workspaces, but just 30 years ago the best selling computers could only display fractions of a megapixel in resolution. The Commodore 64, the best-selling computer of all time from 1982, had a "high-resolution" mode of just 320x200 and a normal multicolor bitmapped mode of 160x200.
64yourself is a new web app that lets you see what your modern digital photos would have looked like back in the day on a C64 machine.
If you're getting into drone photography, it's important to know where you can and can't fly -- otherwise you could find your activities in the news for all the wrong reasons. AirMap is a new free, comprehensive, and interactive digital map that's designed specifically to help drone users find safe and legal airspace around them.
It was five years ago that we first covered Eric Fischer's Geotaggers' World Atlas project. His goal was to gain insight into the world's most interesting places and routes by gathering vast amounts of geotag data from Flickr photos.
How Old Do I Look? is a simple demo website created by Microsoft engineers who are working on information management and machine learning. Given any photo showing a face, the system will do its best to guess the age and gender of the people in the shot.
Web developer Felix Turner has created an interesting new browser-based app called Mosh that can apply a large number of "glitch" effects to your photographs.
Want a cleaner way to show someone your Flickr photographs? Check out the website I Hardly Know Her (IHKH). It's a free web app that repackages any public Flickr photostream into a super minimalist layout that puts all the focus on your photos.
LinkedIn announced today that it has shelled out $1.5 billion to acquire Lynda, the popular online education site that is teeming with material for photographers. As part of the acquisition, LinkedIn is now the new owners of, among many other things, 500+ photography courses and 24,000+ photography tutorial videos.
word.camera is a curious new website that can magically transform a photograph into words, sentences, and paragraphs that describe what's seen in your image.
If you're just starting out in post-processing digital photos, you may feel overwhelmed with all the different terms and concepts involved in tweaking your shots. To help make things easier to understand, the browser-based photo editing service Polarr has created a helpful interactive website that explains common jargon with interactive demos.
Facebook doesn't allow children under the age of 13 to sign up for the social network, which makes things trickier for parents who wish to organize photos of their kids with tags. Today Facebook launched a new feature called 'Scrapbook' that's designed specifically to allow parents to tag children who don't have their own accounts.
One of the tricky things about online shopping is the price fluctuation that happens for products. The price you see today may not be around when you check again tomorrow. If you regularly shop for camera gear on Amazon, one website that you should bookmark and reference is CamelCamelCamel. It's a website that tracks the price history of Amazon's products, allowing you to time your purchases at historically low prices.
Google is planning to separate its photo services from Google+ to make it a standalone offering, and we're starting to see some shifts in service structuring.
The Mountain View-based company just announced that Google Drive users will be able to access their Google+ Photos images directly from inside Drive.
The Photographic Dictionary is a project dedicated to defining English words "through the literal, figurative, and personal meanings found in each photograph." Each word and definition in the dictionary is accompanied by a photographer-submitted image that illustrates it in some way.
Flickr's photo search engine is getting a makeover and a boost in power. Starting earlier this month, Flickr has been rolling out a powerful new unified search interface to its users. Instead of a simple search feature for photos that match keywords, the new search will contain additional image search parameters and will be able to look up people and groups.
After doing offline auctions for 270 years, Sotheby's is partnering up with eBay to deliver its high-end auctions more widely in the Internet world. Starting next month, prospective buyers of the auctioned items will be able to submit bids in real time through the new website, found at eBay.com/Sothebys. The very first auctions to be held on the service is a collection of famous photographs.
Want to understand the concept of depth of field better? Polish photographer and programmer Michael Bemowski has created a fantastic and feature-rich online depth of field calculator and bokeh simulator that can help you wrap your mind around what's going on when you change things like focal length and aperture.
Google's well-known Street View service is one of several monumental efforts to document the world's travel routes through ground-level photos. These projects generally use fancy camera rigs on cars, backpacks, and even camels to capture their images.
Mapillary is a startup that's trying to do things a little differently. Instead of taking the grunt work of photo-taking upon itself, the service is building a crowdsourced Street View competitor using photos submitted by users.
Dana Keller has made a name for himself as a talented photo colorizer, using his Photoshop skills to offer an idea of what historical black-and-white photos might have looked like had the photographer been able to shoot in color. The video above is a 6-minute look at how Keller approaches the task of colorization.
Although things like RSS feeds and social networks have become primary channels for broadcasting and consuming content these days, some people still enjoy good old fashioned email newsletters. If that describes people in your life whom you'd like to share your latest kid photos with, KidPost is a service that wants to help.
It's an easy way to send out daily newsletters containing the latest photos of your kids without the hassle of maintaining the newsletter itself. All you need to do is share through social networks and include a simple hashtag.
Twenty20 is a new stock photography service that just launched to the public after months of beta testing. It claims to have the world's largest crowdsourced commercial image catalog -- one that contains 45 million photos from 250,000 photographers based in 154 countries.
Family photographs used to be collected in things like photo albums and shoeboxes, but these days digital photographs are scattered across all kinds of devices and services. Bevy is a new device and service that wants to help you and your family cut through the clutter to organize and enjoy the photos you care about.
One of the more impressive services in the world of browser-based photo editing is Polarr, a web app that launched to the public back in September 2014. In just a handful of months, the 3-person startup has developed a service used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
The team tells us that they've just released Version 2.0 of the service in Alpha testing stage. It's an update that delivers a handful of most-requested features submitted by the community.
GuruShots is a newly launched service that turns photography into a game with a real-time online photo competition system. Photographers compete against one another to win contests, increase in level, and earn valuable prizes.
Flickr is rolling out a new feature called Camera Roll that's designed to make it even easier for users to browse, edit, and organize their photos. It's a speedy and intuitive interface that lets you jump around in time and make changes to quickly select multiple photos at once.
After being started back in 2009 as a gift for Reddit users, Imgur has quickly become one of the Web's most dominant forces in image hosting. Yesterday marked the service's sixth year in existence, and to celebrate, Imgur has decided to phase out Pro subscriptions. The benefits of paid membership are now completely free for every user.
Fujifilm has a new website that lets photographers "try" X-Mount lenses to see what they can do. It's a lens simulator of sorts: select the lens, aperture, and focal length you want, and press the shutter button on the page. A sample photo will pop up showing what that combination of gear and settings would produce.
Studio Binder is a new service that's designed to help photographers and filmmakers send and track call times with their cast and crew. The service is designed to take the pain out of making sure everyone shows up at the right time and in the right place for a shoot.
There's a royal rumble going on in the world of cloud storage, and photo storage is one of the battlegrounds upon which the war is being waged. Dropbox launched a photo storage and sharing service in late 2014, and Amazon recently added unlimited photo storage to its Prime membership.
Now Microsoft is getting more serious with photography as well: this past week the company announced updates to its OneDrive service that greatly improve the photo experience.
The National Gallery of Art owns the world's largest collection of photos and materials by renowned American photographer Robert Frank. That collection is also the museum's largest holding of any single photographer.
Late last year, to celebrate Frank's 90th birthday, the collection was opened up in a new way through the launch of an online repository. You can now browse through the 8,000 or so items held by the museum -- some of which had never before seen the light of day.
You may know Gary Fong due to his eponymous line of products for photographers, but pay a visit to his website and you'll find that he has been very active in the world of instruction as well.
Today, Fong launched a new online product that's designed to help camera owners become familiar with their gear in ways that owner's manuals fall short in. It's a new series of virtual cameras for interactive learning.
Launched back in 2013, Unsplash is a site which posts ten handpicked photos every ten days and these photos are absolutely free. By “free” I don’t mean “free to download” — they’re free to use everywhere and in any way you want. Commercially and whatnot.
Which is a great thing, right? Finally, a place with photos hip enough to use on a lifestyle blog or design agency’s website. I’ve seen hundreds of sites using them, including ecommerce. I’ve also seen them used in magazines, on T-shirts, in books and as prints. People are now earning money from unattributed Unsplash photos — everyone, it seems, but the photographers who took them.
Polaroid wants to be a big player in the online photo sharing game. The company has partnered with Blipfoto to rebrand the photo-a-day sharing service as Polaroid Blipfoto.
The Thomas Walther Collection at the Museum of Modern Art is a set of 341 photographs by 150 artists captured from between 1909 and 1949 -- a period in which photography "came of age."
If you'd like to explore this collection of images on a deeper level, the museum has created a fantastic new tool for doing so that's "unprecedented in its functionality". It's called "Object:Photo," and is a special website loaded with information, images, and interactive visualizations.
Photos for Life is a "charity photo bank" where all the stock photos are created by cancer patients and survivors and for other cancer patients. Each of the models you see in the images was personally affected by cancer in their own lives. "They love their lives and want to show it to the world!" the website says.
Joel Snow was visiting a flea market in Colorado this past October when he came across a box with several packets of old negatives at the bottom. After digitizing them, Snow realized that it was a fascinating collection of old photos from the early part of the 20th century.
Aerial Wallpapers is a website filled with beautiful wallpapers for your mobile device. Each of the images is a 1242×2208 pixel crop of a beautiful satellite photograph.
The project is curated by João Paulo Bernardes, who searches through the Creative Commons archives of NASA and the Airbus Defense and Space.
Have a ton of old prints lying around but not enough time or energy to scan them? Since 1990, Southern California-based ScanMyPhotos has helped customers scan over 250 million physical prints. As digitizing old family photos is catching on as a trend, the company's most popular service is something it pioneered: the USPS prepaid box deal.
It's a flat rate option for scanning large quantities of photos. Pack as many photos as you can into it, send it in, and receive digital versions of every photo.
Here's a new idea that's quite a bit off the beaten path: RoboStage is a new online studio that lets photographers conduct a photo shoot through their browser. We're not talking about some kind of faked virtual environment, but an actual photo shoot done in an actual location, controlled through your browser.
"AirBnB for cameras." That's how ShareGrid describes itself. The young startup company is trying to do for camera rentals what AirBnB did for vacation rentals, and if the idea catches on, camera gear rental companies may have some stiff competition to deal with in the years ahead.
More than 1.4 million photos of Earth have been captured from the International Space Station over the course of 41 expeditions. San Francisco-based developer Callum Prentice wanted a better way to browse the images and the locations they were captured over, so he created a nifty 3D web app called the ISS Photo Viewer.
A little over a month ago, Yahoo! revealed Flickr Wall Art, a service that lets you turn your images into beautiful prints to hang... well... wherever you want them. Today, they're kicking that service up a notch by removing that pesky need for these photos to be yours.
No, you can't steal other people's photos and use them, but Flickr is opening up its entire Creative Commons library and some hand-selected collections from its licensed artists for your wall-hanging pleasure.
If you do a lot of photo editing, you've likely gotten pretty used to making estimates of pixel dimensions. But how good are you, exactly?
A new browser-based game called Pixact.ly wants to help you answer that question. It's based around the simple idea of drawing a box with specific pixel dimensions.
Swift Galleries is an upcoming platform whose goal is to get your photography work on your clients' walls and, in turn, bring in some extra profit for you.
By leveraging a simple drag-and-drop web app, Swift Galleries makes it easy for you to customize and show off how your photographs would look in your clients' homes, with little to no effort on your behalf.
When you’re looking to get out and grab some landscape or sunset photography, getting the perfect light is usually a game of chance, but a new web app called Skyfire is looking to change that. By using a proprietary algorithm, Skyfire creates a heat map of light quality, ranked on a scale of 1 to 5, across the United States so you can find the perfect spot and plan your trip ahead of time.
Want to see what one of your photos would look like as wall art in a living space? WallApp can show you. It's a new browser-based tool that lets you see your photos in the context of a room without having to create a mockup yourself in Photoshop.
The website Insecam claims it's providing a public service announcement of sorts... the trouble is, that announcement seems to be: change your security camera password or we'll broadcast your bedroom or living room publicly for all to see... and make a profit doing it.
It might not be the most useful website ever designed, but Flickr's new Park or Bird microsite serves a purpose: namely, it's the Flickr Vision team's response to a challenge by the popular webcomic XKCD.