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Data-mined photos document 100 years of (forced) smiling
Here's an odd fact: Turn-of-the-century photographers used to tell subjects to say "prunes" rather than "cheese," so that they would smile less. By studying nearly 38,000 high-school yearbook photos taken since 1905, UC Berkeley researchers have shown just how much smiling, fashion and hairstyles have changed over the years. The goal was not just to track trends, but figure out how to apply modern data-mining techniques and machine learning to a much older medium: photographs. Their research could advance deep-learning algorithms for dating historical photos and help historians study how social norms change over time.
No thanks: JPEG images may soon have copy protection
So much for hopes that the tech industry would back away from copyright protection any time soon. The Joint Photographic Experts Group recently launched a Privacy & Security initiative that potentially brings digital rights management (DRM) to regular JPEG images, not just the specialized JPEG 2000 format. The proposal could protect your privacy by encrypting metadata (such as where you took a photo), but it could also prevent you from copying or opening some pictures. Needless to say, that opens up a can of worms when it comes to fair use rights. If someone slapped DRM on a photo, you couldn't use it for news, research or remixed art -- many of the internet memes you know wouldn't be possible.
Instagram no longer thinks it's hip to be square
Ask any photographer: good composition is essential to capturing a great image. Ask that same photographer the most frustrating thing about Instagram, and they'll probably say "aspect ratio." Since its launch, every image or video uploaded to the service has been restricted to a limited square format, but today that changes. As of right now, you can upload landscape and portrait videos and photos to Instagram.
NASA's iconic images are now easier to find
NASA has just launched a mega photo library that masses more than 70 different collections together, with 138,000-plus images in total. Created by an archiving company called Luna Imaging, it includes plenty of famous photos from sources like Hubble, JPL and the Apollo missions. There are also wonderful and crazy images dating back as far as the early 20th century showing things like early rocketry attempts and pre-Gemini space suits. The whole thing is searchable by archive, year, mission and other keywords.
Internet pictures can hide code that leaves you open to hacks (update: criticism)
You might want to be more cautious the next time you click on an internet image link sent by a stranger -- much like the pirate cat photo you see above, that adorable picture could be hiding something sinister. Security researcher Saumil Shah has developed a security exploit that uses steganography to slip malicious JavaScript code into an image file. If you happen to view the picture in a vulnerable web browser, it opens the door to installing malware or directly hijacking your computer. And this sort of attack is definitely usable in the real world, as Motherboard found out first-hand.
Microsoft's age detection shows up in your Bing image searches
Microsoft's face-based age detection is still a little wonky (I'm thankfully younger than what you see above), but the company is clearly enamored with it -- you'll now find it in Bing image searches. All you have to do is look for a person and, in most cases, roll over the picture to find a #HowOldRobot that will guess how many birthdays the subject has seen. The feature is available in at least North America, so give it a shot... if for no other reason than to giggle at its occasionally harsh appraisals of your looks. Update: Microsoft says the tool is rolling out in Bing over the next week or so.
Wolfram's new website can identify objects in your photos
Wolfram Research can already do some pretty cool things, like answer Twitter questions and spot overhead flights. Now, the maker of the Mathematica programming language and Alpha knowledge engine can perform another trick: figuring out what's in a photo. The Wolfram Language Image Identification Project can make out about 10,000 common things, including animal species, gadgets and household objects. It uses a database of around ten million images to perform the trick, which Stephen Wolfram figures "is comparable to the number of distinct views of objects that humans get in their first couple of years of life."
Flickr lets you turn other people's photos into wall art for your home
Remember that Wall Art service Flickr launched in October that gave you a way to buy big prints of your own snapshots (or, you know, selfies)? Well, now you can also buy wall-size versions of other people's photographs, though, that doesn't mean you can choose random images posted on the website. The only photos you can purchase from the expanded Wall Art service are those that come from Flickr's licensed artists (who also sell their work through the Marketplace) or from the company's hand-selected list of Creative Commons images.
CERN hopes you know what these things are, cause it has no idea
Scientists, we're told, need to be very good at record keeping in order to make sure that others can follow their logic. It's just a shame that whoever was running the photography archive at CERN wasn't paying attention during that lesson. The European research outfit is digitizing its archive of around 120,000 photos taken between 1955 and 1985. Unfortunately, some of the images aren't labelled, which makes it hard to identify the scientists in the pictures, or the equipment that they're using. That's why CERN is asking that if anyone does know the people or hardware, that they email in and help get the database up to date. In order to help, we've had a go ourselves, although we're sure that you out there can do a much better job. [Image Credit: CERN]
NASA's Messenger captures first photos of ice on Mercury
It's easy to assume, that finding ice on the first rock from the sun, would be like finding a snowflake in a furnace (it can reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit after all). But, you'd be wrong. And NASA's long had radar and photographic proof (just nothing in the visual range) that water ice did exist on the planet. Now, we have the first optical evidence -- after pictures snapped by the NASA's Messenger spacecraft managed to snag enough sunlight inside the 70 mile-wide, permanently-shadowed Prokofiev crater on the north pole of the planet for a photo. The images might not look like much to the untrained eye (though still wonderfully otherworldly), but they provide those that know with enough information to suggest that the ice deposits are relatively recent (and not from when the planet was being formed). No doubt, more revelations will come as the images get scrutinized fruther, and Messenger continues the good work.
Glitch Wizard is a fun way to make glitchy images and animation on your iPhone
Glitch Wizard creates animated or still images based on a series of pre-set "glitches" you can apply to your photos. You've possibly seen "glitch art" popping up around the web lately, with flickering GIFs of colorful digital weirdness warping ordinary photos. While they may be a passing fad like the Harlem Shake, they require a bit of work to create in a program like Photoshop. Enter Glitch Wizard, which is a simple but polished app that takes your photos and adds glitches and allows some basic animation of those glitches as you sequence the effects you add to the photos. The app is nicely designed with three icons at the bottom on launch: the standard camera icon at the bottom of the screen to either take a picture or use one from your photos. The app opens with a list of featured glitch artwork, which I assume is curated by the folks who make the app. You can get to these later by tapping the star icon. I found this interesting on first launch as a sort of example of what the app can do, but ignored it later. Then there's a grid of the glitches you've saved when you tap the grid of squares icon. To create glitches, grab a photo and you're taken to a composition interface, with an area showing each glitch, a playback button, settings and a series of effects each categorized into four groups. I won't go into each group of effects, as part of the fun of Glitch Wizard is seeing what each one does (and it can be wildly different depending on the image you start with). Suffice it to say there are a lot of options for making truly wild images and animations. Some effects allow you to tweak them, but most are simply applied and can be a bit random, as is the nature of glitch art. Also, you can keep adding effects to further glitch your images. The progression is often really fun to see animated. What I enjoyed was playing around with the effects, then seeing how progressing them would make an animation smoother or weirder. In all, it's just a lot of fun. While I'd like more editing options I realize there's little here I couldn't do in Photoshop with filters. But that's not the point -- this is designed to be quick and fun. You can delete individual frames, but I couldn't find a way to re-order them. You can also change the speed from slow to medium to fast, and set the animation to ping-pong back and forth or just loop. Once you're done you have a variety of sharing options, which I found interesting in their end results. On Twitter, for example, you can post a "native GIF" aka a GIF that Twitter has tuned for consumption on Twitter (and is no longer really a GIF). Although Twitter supports animated GIFs, I found it was easier to share them via this app than pulling them from my camera roll because Glitch Wizard doesn't actually save GIFs to your camera roll. Moving on, Instagram and Facebook posts are converted to videos. The thing about glitches and web video, however, is that compression relies upon sameness from frame to frame (generally speaking). My glitches looked really fuzzy if they were really wacky glitchy GIFs to start with. This isn't Glitch Wizard's fault, and frankly I appreciate the fact that it creates a video versus posting some lame link to a page that will inevitably break years later. Kudos on the sharing options for Glitch Wizard, as it's one of the best models I've ever seen in an app. Too bad Facebook compresses them so horribly. I found Instagram posts to have fewer artifacts and hence more clarity. Yes, you can save your creations to your camera roll, among other options (like tumblr, although one of my GIFs didn't post as animated when I tested it, so this could be a buggy area). My only complaint here is it's too easy to lose your creation. If you don't save to your glitches in the app or to your camera roll, however, your creations are lost forever. Also, it's a little odd that the app doesn't actually save a GIF to your camera roll, but rather an .m4v file. If you pull this onto your Mac you'll have to use another application to convert to GIF. If you want the GIF itself, the only option is to email it to yourself. Glitch Wizard is a simple but fun app that creates crazy glitched artwork from your photos. That's really all there is to it, although it's wrapped up in a great design and works very well. It's currently on sale but I'd recommend it at the full US$1.99 if you enjoy making glitch art.
Twitter to delete photos of deceased upon family request
After saying it would take a more hands-on approach to bullying, Twitter will now remove images of deceased persons upon family request in "certain circumstances." That follows an atrocious instance of harassment, in which several users sent Zelda Williams fake images of a body in a morgue following the death of her father, Robin Williams. After she decided to leave the social network, Twitter said it "(would) not tolerate abuse of this nature." The new policy states that users can request the removal of such images "from when critical injury occurs to the moments before or after death" by emailing privacy@twitter.com. However, Twitter added that it would also consider "public interest factors" and may not accommodate all requests.
How Amiga hackers saved Andy Warhol's digital images
A new documentary from the HIllman Photography Iniative (see the video below) has revealed exactly how those now-famous Andy Warhol Amiga works were extracted from decrepit 3.5-inch floppies. First, researchers had to figure out that the image files were actually saved on the original graphics program diskettes due to quirks in the early Amiga 1000 system. Once the disks were found, Amiga forensics specialists wanted to be the last people to touch them for the sake of their preservation. Since the magnetic material was separating from the substrate, they made sure to read the floppies just once to create a disk image. From there, they used an Amiga emulator to dive into the filesystem, with the "Eureka!" moment coming when they saw filenames like "campbells.pic" and "marilyn1.pic." A quick conversion later, and the images appeared -- as dramatic a moment for the programmers as spotting a Warhold painting at a flea market.
HTC's next One leaks again in all-angle photo shoot
HTC's upcoming successor to the One, codenamed M8, has been a leaky ship while sailing to its March 25th launch. But the latest set of photos from a Chinese Weibo site leave nothing to the imagination, showing a possible China Mobile retail model from nearly all sides. Of interest are the speaker grills, which seem to be coated with a clear layer of material, possibly for protection. The leaker also said that the M8 used a lot of new CNC process tech, resulting in a very tight build on the handset. Otherwise, the gallery confirms details we've already seen, plus several pics with an HTC One Max that show the relative size. To cap it off, @evleaks has shown a possible snappy-looking LED smart cover for the M8. That mimics others we've seen (like on the Alcatel OneTouch Hero), by showing the weather, date and other real-time info. Head after the break to see that image, or for an all-around view of the (alleged) M8, check the gallery below. [Image credit: TD Beta]
Haiku Deck extends on-the-go presentations to iPhone
As noted here on TUAW before, the presentation tool Haiku Deck (available as an iPad app and as a beta web app) makes the chore of building out a visually compelling, effective deck for your product or story as easy as it can be. In fact, Haiku Deck's CEO Adam Tratt told me that the spark for the company's product was struck when he and his co-founder Kevin Leneway (both Microsoft alumni) found that neither one of them wanted to slog through PowerPoint to create a critical investor presentation. Tratt and his team have remained focused on the Haiku Deck mission of "making presentations ten times more beautiful, and making people ten times better at presenting." With the iPad app as a validation of their idea and the beta web tool expanding the possible universe of deck authors, they began to notice the surge in deck views coming from those omnipresent 3" iPhone screens. To meet that viewing demand, today the company launched the iPhone edition of Haiku Deck. Rather than scale down the iPad authoring tools, the first version for iPhone leaves out the editing capability (for now) in favor of a no-compromises viewing and presenting experience. With offline caching of your favorite decks, you've got the perfect elevator pitch tool right in your pocket. Haiku Deck for iPhone allows you to present quickly on the device itself, or extend to VGA, HDMI or AirPlay displays for bigger audiences. You can show in landscape mode for slides-only or in portrait mode so you can read your notes as you go. If you've got an iPad with Haiku Deck installed, the iPhone app can act as a remote control for the iPad's display of the deck. Meanwhile, the iPad and web apps have been souped up with new features, including a slick charting engine and a featured presentation gallery. The iPad app allows you to export presentations in PowerPoint or Keynote formats, and you can now pull in your personal images from Box.com, Facebook or Dropbox while putting together your deck. Haiku Deck for both iPad and iPhone is free in the App Store, with in-app purchases available on the iPad app to expand your authoring options. If you spend any time creating presentations, it's worth a look.
How to craft the perfect parallax wallpaper for your iPhone and iPad
Sick of stretched, blurry or otherwise lame wallpapers on your iPhone or iPad? Apple's decision to make your background come alive with the parallax effect in iOS 7 means that using your standard wallpapers ends up giving you some not-so-sharp effects. But fear not: You can create a wallpaper of your own using any high-resolution photos you can find online. Below, you'll find the perfect resolutions for both static and parallax wallpapers as well as some tips on how to create the perfect background image for your device. iPhone 4s Static: 960 x 640 Parallax: 1,196 x 740 iPhone 5/5s/5c Static: 1,136 x 640 Parallax: 1,392 x 744 iPad 2/iPad mini Static: 1,024 x 1,024 Parallax: 1,262 x 1,262 iPad 3/4/Air/mini 2 Static: 2,048 x 2,048 Parallax: 2,524 x 2,524 Once you've found an image that fits your needs, it's time to cut it to the perfect size. There are plenty of free tools available to help you tweak it: Preview -- The Preview application on OS X lets you crop and resize images without a hassle, and there's even a handy formatting tool to resize images based on several iPhone and iPad resolutions. Unfortunately, it doesn't take the parallax effect into account. Paint -- If you don't have a Mac handy, you can always use this free Windows tool to slice up your images. Gimp -- For a little more control over your image editing, Gimp is a great solution. It's free, powerful and works on OS X, Windows and Linux. Snapseed or Skitch -- On iOS, either of these will allow you to crop, straighten or add effects to an image. A few things to keep in mind: iOS 7 will do its best to add contrast to the lock screen text and status bar, but it's not perfect. Make sure your wallpaper doesn't leave your clock or battery bar unreadable. If you use a static, screen-sized image with the parallax effect, it will automatically apply a bit of zoom to it, leaving it blurry. iPad wallpapers need to be square to account for the tablet's screen orientation. If you choose a non-square image, you'll likely be left with a stretched image once you turn your screen.
Latest Gmail tweak lets images display in your email automatically
There are bad people out there in the world; bad people that look for backdoors in email image attachments to load up with malware. Google knows this and Google wants you to know it has your back. So with the company's latest Gmail update, it's re-routing images served from external servers to its own "secure proxy servers" for automatic display in your email. The benefit of which means you won't have to click to accept image downloads anymore -- they'll just be there as soon as you open your email. If you're a privacy nut (and why shouldn't you be?), you can still set Gmail to ask before downloading images. And if you've previously set that as default in settings, the good news is that preference will still remain default. This Gmail update's initially targeted for roll out to the desktop, but Google plans to implement the image server change across mobile sometime next year.
Twitter streams flooded with media in wake of latest iOS, Android and web update
Perhaps you've seen a few more images and Vines populating your Twitter feed this afternoon? That's because the web version of Twitter reflects the service's latest update: image and Vine previews below related tweets. Both the iOS and Android versions of Twitter also get the update today. The update is certain to change the Twitter experience, as our feeds are already bursting with images and Vine previews (as adorably demonstrated above). On mobile, the update also makes replies, retweets and favorites available right from your timeline -- one more shortcut to retweeting those cat pictures.
Latest Skitch update for Mac brings new toolbar, Mavericks performance boosts
It's been about three weeks since Apple released the Mavericks gold master to developers, and we're starting to see the first apps fine-tuned for Cupertino's latest OS in the App Store. Skitch is one such example, with a new streamlined toolbar and footer pane tweaked to make changing the file type, name and size of what your viewing easier. The app's new icon is migrating over from iOS too, and the company also said that screenshots across multiple monitors and power management have been improved. These aren't huge changes by any means, but they're still better than sandboxing a browser plugin, right?
Google+ introduces better RAW-to-JPEG conversion for over 70 cameras
If you've been paying much attention to Google+, you already know that the social network is doing its damnedest to become the go-to destination for photographers. Accordingly, it's attracted a number of RAW format enthusiasts -- thanks to the ability to store full-size photos -- and to make their lives a little better, Google+ is introducing a new RAW-to-JPEG conversion method that offers noticeably better results. Over 70 cameras from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic and Sony are supported as of today, and Google says that it'll add additional models over time. Since Google+ automatically converts RAW photos to JPEG for viewing purposes (while retaining the original), the new conversion method should be readily apparent. You can view the complete list of supported cameras after the break, and as for the improved quality of conversions, go ahead and have a look for yourself. Hopefully your eyes agree with Google's claim.
