Reiter's Camera Phone Report has a post covering the MiShow 'mommy-focused' photo/video "biography" sharing site. Basically another photo storage site complete with tags and the like but one aimed specifically at a niche audience.
Covington Innovations has a step-by-step guide to removing haze from Aerial photographs.
Another instance of doctored photos appearing in the mainstream press in this case the Spanish version of the Miami Herald where the printed picture was manipulated to show two Cuban police officers apparently ignoring prostitutes gesturing to a tourist.
Floppy right angled viewfinder on your Nikon DR-4, DR-4, DR-5 and DR-6? Earthbound Light has a fix.
Tourist remover - just released from Swiss software engineering company futureLAB. It's an online tool that removes unwanted moving objects (like tourists or moving vehicles) from photographs. Interesting.
The process is fully automatic but you need 3 to ten photos of the same object taken in succession for the software to churn out a 'cleaned' image at the end. It is packaged with Snapmania - another photo organiser/sharing thingy - but I cannot seem to find any reference to it on the site.
Online photo-sharing service PhotoSite has launched PhotoSafe - a convenient method to securely store digital photos online. [Yep another one].
"Photos are memories and it's extremely important to us to keep those memories safe," said Heidi Gibson, PhotoSite vice president. "Most people keep their digital photos on their computer or on CDs, thinking they're safe, but there are a lot of ways that images stored on a computer or a CD can be inadvertently lost or destroyed. With PhotoSafe, they are stored securely on multiple servers at multiple locations, so they're not only safe, but also available 24 hours a day for viewing or downloading." [And the difference between this and thousands of other internet photo storage sites is??]
PhotoSafe is sold as a standalone product and as a premium feature of PhotoSite's photo sharing services. There are two membership options:
Store 1,000 photos a month for $1.99 per month
Store unlimited photos for $2.99 per month
All existing PhotoSite paid members will be automatically given access to the PhotoSafe feature and all their images on PhotoSite will be backed up on PhotoSafe servers for free.
As with all the other similar storage sites photos can be uploaded to PhotoSafe using the AlbumBuilder software, via easy-to-use Web-based upload tools, by email or with a cellular phone. Prints, mugs etc can be purchased too.
I must say I'm impressed. Liesel Pollvogt opened up a test version of Tabblo for us today; and what fun am I having!
Tabblo aims to be the best place online to put together photos, words, and template-driven customizable design for the purpose of telling stories that can be securely shared, collaborated on, and printed in innovative ways. that's the official version. Basically it can be used as a showcase for images with text accompaniments. Features abound - upload options linking to Flickr and Picassa, various layouts for your display page , colour themes for the same. Print options to EZPrint have been added too. Then you can add text both to individual images and as blocks of text next to images; all managed by drag and drop.
This drag and drop applies to photos too. There is a lightbox for holding images while you arrange them and then there is a marvelous resize corner drag and drop facility. While this is not fully reform, images snap to an underlying grid, it is still very cool. All worked smoothly on my IE7 Beta install. Although I ran into a niggley problem trying to arrange a new image and place it where I wanted. It seems you can only swap images not place them in a new spot. When you do swap any resizing you have imposed holds in the position it was placed in and is not attached to a specific image.
The 'event' section is interesting too. It lets you reserve an email address where anyone can email in pictures and automatically have them populate your photo library and even generate a 'tabblo'. Basically it just makes it really easy to collect pictures from multiple photographers at an event.
The illustration here is of four pictures I uploaded, lightbox to the right, with the St Paul's/Millennium Bridge image resized. The style is Polaroid on a Vendome theme.
Founded in 2005 Tabblo is based in Cambridge, Mass with a spirited team of nine. These new features should be live - as they take off the beta moniker - by the time you read this.
I asked what the future holds for Tabblo. The team tell me that the next major release will be focusing around the 'community aspects' of the site. This will enable users to both pool their content together more easily, and find relevant areas of the site where they can meet other like-minded Tabblo users. On the tool front they will be adding a number of new image effects and template elements, while a new media type is also mooted to be in operation by the end of the year.
Bellamax has released a new workflow application, UpShot, and they've decided to give it away free until July 4th. After that, UpShot will still only be $20, so it's worth a look even if you have plans this weekend. UpShot is a combination gallery, image manipulation, and publication tool that integrates directly with several photo sharing sites and on-line printing sites. Flickr, SnapFish, and Blogger are all supported, among others. Supported formats include RAW. The best way I can think to describe it is Picassa on steroids. The included color correction and retouching tools are intuitive and seem effective in most situations--as you'd expect from a leading supplier of professional lab automation products.
This is definitely a product aimed at the casual photographer, though. If you're getting started with digital photography and don't feel ready to shell out the cash for something like iView Pro, UpShot is well worth a try. It makes things easy, the interface is friendly, it seems reliable, and the photo sharing/printing integration is a nice touch. If you're working with substantial numbers of images or large file sizes, though, performance is an issue. A dump of the a 1GBcard of full-size jpegs from a D70s quickly slowed indexing to a crawl, and opening the images in any of the various tools too upwards of a minute on my test computer, which, while not ideal, is no slouch with a 3.2Ghz P4 with 512MB RAM (the minimum requirement). You probably don't want to run this with less than the recommended 1GB.
Yan Calotychos, founder of iView Multimedia has posted details on their website and mentions that "In my view, this Microsoft acquisition affords us an unprecedented opportunity to be even more responsive to a thriving market and ensure that iView MediaPro continues to perform to its full potential. Our engineering and marketing team here at iView are energized and excited to be joining the Microsoft team, and I personally will continue to be involved in the evolution of the product for years to come." Super.
He continues "What this acquisition will mean for you, our customers, is that together we face a bigger and brighter future in managing your creative workflow. The product that was born on the Mac will remain on the Mac as well as on the Windows operating system. All iView products will continue to be sold on the iView website and through our partners and channel. Bottom line: You all can continue to use and buy iView products knowing that they will be fully supported as Microsoft evolves the products in the future on both the Windows and Mac platforms."
Which is nice to know but some voices are wondering if the MAC version will fade away under pressure from Adobe's Lightroom. The name will obviously change - can't have Microsoft managing an 'i' project now!
Photo Mechanic is an image browser tool for the MAC - a fast and easy-to-use image browser.
Facilities include batch captioning, renaming, speedy browsing, and Photoshop connectivity features. Images are displayed as thumbnails of photos on a camera disk or folder where you can easily rotate, preview, copy, delete, tag, rename, and add caption / keyword information to photos both individually and in batches.
Meta-data is used extensivly - standard image capture data like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and focal length can be accessed through "variables" and tucked-away in any IPTC field such as the caption. You can also use variables representing the current or capture time, date, or frame number, for example, for file renaming purposes. One variable - the sequence variable - can be used for sequential naming or to serialize certain IPTC fields.
The program has been updated to version 4.4.3.1. What I can't find though is a list of improvements over previous versions...
Pickle is in beta, so it's new. If you are interested in signing up, Pickle is offering expanded user limits for the first 25,000 registered users. For the basic free service this means a 200MB monthly up load limit rather than 75MB and a 100MB size limit rather than 10MB. If you go for the paid service the cost is $19.95 rather than $49.95. The advantages of the paid service are unlimited mailboxes, ad-free usage and password protected sharing.
It is the use of email that sets Pickle apart from other services. You or other people can email photos and video clips to a specific email address which then appear on a special project page. This could be cool for joint events music concerts, sports events, weddings and the like. As is the norm images can be tagged.
Pickleboxes are like photo albums for video and photos and can be viewed as a slide-show
You can upload via email or use specific upload tools
Each account has a main address for uploading too via email, but each PickleBox also has its own email address so you can send pictures from your mobile for example.
Picklemails are emails you can send of your images or group of images
Picklescope is a list of your friends and family's shared videos and pictures shown all on one page
The screen-shot is of the upload processes from my test homepage/picklebox. One of the images was sent in via email.
Overall the service works smoothly, seems intuitively designed and dead easy to use.
During the months of July and August anyone visiting the the London Eye will also have the opportunity to look at the winning entries from the 2005 International Travel Photographer of the Year competition.
Google is currently testing a new version of its photo-management app Picasa in private beta that will let users post photo albums on the web via an integrated, Google-hosted service. You can learn some more about the service or put yourself on the beta waiting list at the Picasa Web site. See DownLoad Squad for details.
Wired News is running an interesting piece about Flickr's policy which excludes images from being displayed in public areas of the site or global search results if more than half of the uploader's images are "non-photographic images." The rationale seems to be that when people come to Flickr they're looking for photos, not screenshots or other images. (also via Download Squad)
Flock is now in beta mode. Lots of new features for photo management, feed-reading, search, favorites, and blogging. Take a look at the Flock blog for lots of juicy details, or hit the download site to grab Flock for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.
Superb stop-motion tour of the Pyrimids over on Yakkr.com. (found via Gadling)
Don't know quite why you would want to but the Digital Photography School shows how to get your images to look like Lomo photos. A Lomo is a Russian manufactured camera. It is poorly made and known for its less than perfect image quality.
"So far, it's truely impressive. The new Y! Photos is smartly designed for the family user who wants to collect their photos, print them occasionaly at Target and on coffee mugs. They want to give their friends access and to view photos their friends want to share but they are not trying to reveal their photo collection to the world. And that is the principal difference between those who will like Flickr (global exposure/RSS feeds) and those who will like Y! Photos (sharing with friends and family)."
Techcrunch has some thoughts too. While at Techcrunch have a read of new service Umondo "allows users to share photos and video captured on mobile phones without the need to set up an account. By entering a phone number or email, anyone can subscribe to a feed in a number of online readers or in iTunes. Code is also available to display video on MySpace pages."
Yet another photo sharing site has hit the web looking for a slice of the Flickr pie. Most of the time, I just ignore them any more, but tabblo has a few features that really set it apart from the rest of the crowd. First are its eponymous tabblos (a play on "tableau"). Unlike most sharing services where the display of your images is governed by the site's theme, Tabblo offers you a range of layout options for displaying your images, rnging from standard gallery type layouts to layouts with text and even Polaroidish frames. In the beta, at least, there are no bandwidth or storage limits--they plan to make their money off of print orders--or ads. And here's possibly the best part: you can import your entire Flickr photo stream if you're thinking about giving it a whirl. Personally, I think this is a smart move. As social photo networks grow, more and more pople are going to have connections to more than one, and making users choose just one doesn't make sense.
Are they boasting? Bubblesnaps dropped us an email highlighting their
'throwaway fun' in the form of Bubblesnaps. They finished the note with the claim that they do "animated
speechbubbles captions really well".
So what is Bubblesnaps? You upload a photo, add
speechbubbles and send these as ecards. My own reservations over ecards aside Bubblesnaps seems to accompllish their
limited objective well. I can't see what the storage limitations are but the facility to retain your incredibly funny captions online is a good touch. All I would want
is to display them on another website or blog...
With such a simplistic site there is little that can really be said
of Picupine.
Described as the anti-dote to flickr, which despite some failings, is a hugely popular photo storage/sharing
facility, Picupine has little 'design' to comment on and little in the way of functionality. What it does do though is
offer a simple and quick way to share photographs. You upload a few to a named page and are given a link to publicise
the page. The link remains active for a week. Then the photos and the link are deleted.
A new version of Web Gallery Wizard has been released. Version 1.5 builds on the last
release and adds several welcome functions.
Users can now pick which images play in the flash
animation intro
Customizable links can be added to the top menu
In the pro version improved
FTP support
Using Web Gallery Wizard allows the the user to create the galleries on
their computer. Users have complete control of their Web Gallery files, site design and their choice of Web
host. A free update is available to the latest version.
Photo store and
sharing site BubbleShare has added a zoom feature. Click on the button and a
giant magnifying glass appears. Move it around and see an enlarged section of the image. The area enhanced is 3x in
size; it is very well implemented but how useful?
Reiter's Camera Phone Report has a post covering the MiShow 'mommy-focused' photo/video "biography" sharing site. Basically another photo storage site complete with tags and the like but one aimed specifically at a niche audience.
Online photo-sharing service PhotoSite has launched 
IView recently received an update to version 3.1
Photo sharing... blah blah... photo storage service... blah blah blah... yawn.
During the months of July and August anyone visiting the the London Eye will also have the opportunity to look at the winning entries from the 2005 International 
I was waiting to see the reaction on yesterdays 
Yet another photo sharing site has hit the web looking for a slice of the Flickr pie. Most of the time, I just ignore them any more, but 
Are they boasting? Bubblesnaps dropped us an email highlighting their
'throwaway fun' in the form of Bubblesnaps. They finished the note with the claim that they do "animated
speechbubbles captions really well".
With such a simplistic site there is little that can really be said
of 
