photosharing
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Pro photo storage site SmugMug buys Flickr
Long before Minecraft exploded from a development tool to a game purchased by Microsoft for billions of dollars, there was Flickr. The photo-sharing started in 2004 based on tools built for a never-released MMO before being purchased by Yahoo (now a part of Oath, the parent company of Engadget) in 2005 for more than $20 million. Now the service and its 75 million~ accounts have been purchased by SmugMug, a smaller competitor focused on professionals. SmugMug is a similar site that started in 2002, but from the beginning it has focused on serving people willing to pay for its privacy and storage, as opposed to Flickr, where most people are using free accounts. Over the years competition from social networks and newer photo apps like Instagram chewed away at Flickr's active users, and its influence has stagnated. SmugMug claims that together, the two services represent "the world's most influential photographer-centric community" where "perspective is shared, not forced."
Lonely Planet's Trips app is Instagram for travel junkies
If you've ever planned a vacation abroad, you've probably spent some time with Lonely Planet. The company is the largest travel book publisher in the world and offers plenty of free resources on its website and in the Lonely Planet Guides app. The latter provided the inspiration for the latest Lonely Planet project, a new iPhone app called Trips (also coming to Android this fall). At its core, it's a crowdsourced version of the Guides app. But instead of featuring contributions from Lonely Planet experts and contributors, it's all about what regular users have to say and the sights they see on their vacations.
Snapchat Stories come to the browser with Oscars roundup
Snapchat is immensely popular, but at the moment its plentiful Snaps and stitched Stories are trapped inside the mobile app. If you're on a laptop or PC, or want to share a Snap on another social network, there's no obvious way of doing so. That state of affairs started to change last night, however, when Snapchat slapped a live Story up on its website. It meant anyone could get a taste of what people were posting at the event, including, perhaps most importantly, people that aren't already on Snapchat.
Mustbin for iPhone is a secure and private photo-sharing network
There's no question that photo backup and sharing is one of the main problems that technology companies are trying to solve. Facebook, Apple, Google, Dropbox and others have all taken their shot at it, and plenty of startups have as well. Boston-based Mustbin is the latest to shift its focus to photos. The company originally began with an app focused on securely saving your most important documents on your phone, positioning it as a sort of Dropbox competitor. From there, it added secure messaging features, and now the company thinks that mixing group messaging with photo backup will be the formula for success. After seeing that 80 percent of the files stored in Mustbin were photos, the company revamped the app so that its main purpose is to let you securely shoot photos and quickly share them with friends.
Microsoft's Xim app now lets you share smartphone photos on bigger screens
Microsoft Research's Xim app for sharing photos can now beam slideshows on screens bigger than phones and tablets through streaming devices. Just log into the wireless network all your other devices are connected to and it will automatically detect any connected Chromecast, Apple TV, Xbox One or Amazon Fire TV that you can use to broadcast images to your television screen. Even better, if a friend initiates a session and you're paired with one of those streaming devices, he can control the images shown on your display.
Facebook Messenger's new trick brings doodles to your photos
Still looking for a reason to use Facebook's now-unbundled Messenger app? A new feature learns from competition including Snapchat and Facebook's own Slingshot by adding easy annotation on shared photos. Just click the picture icon like you normally do, then hit the edit button instead of send, and you can doodle with your finger (remember Draw Something? Is anyone still playing that?) or just type in some text before sending. Right now the tweak is Android-only, and should already be live if you're running the most recent version of the app.
Daily App: PhotosPro will make you think Apple's iOS photo app is outdated
PhotosPro (US$1.99) is a very appealing app that could teach Apple a few lessons. Think of it as a replacement for Apple's Photos app. It will display your photos in a long list, or let you see what you took on a particular date or within a range of dates. It will show you a map of where your photos were taken, not with a little marker as Apple does, but with the pictures themselves superimposed over the map, which is much more useful. Even better, PhotosPro lets you create what it calls 'stories' so that you can group photos into a particular event and share them with friends via social networks or email. You can also upload to Flickr or Dropbox. When you highlight an image, you can see all the EXIF data as well as a representation of where it was shot on a map. The user interface is smooth and attractive. Using the app to explore my photos I completely fell out of love with Apple's Photos. PhotosPro is just simply so powerful it's hard to go back. A couple of observations. While the app is powerful, it isn't always obvious how to do things. To send a picture to someone, you hold your finger down to bring up the EXIF data and the sharing menu. To create a story, you hold your finger down on each photo you want to add. It's easy enough to do, but people shouldn't have to explore for the method. I think a quick help screen at startup will go a long way. Also, you can't delete photos. It's an Apple issue. Even with the little foibles, PhotosPro is one terrific app. It's a natural way to organize and find your photos. You sign up for an account if you want to upload your stories to the web to share. The account is free, and you can send up to 20 photos in a story. The web display is very nice looking, and you can add an attractive title. It's better than Apple's cloud sharing service. PhotosPro is the kind of app you will use every day. It's reasonably priced, and actually gives you a better way to manage and share your photos. It has my highest recommendation. PhotosPro is universal and requires iOS 6.1 or later.
Adobe's all-in-one photo app Revel arrives on Android
If one of the many, many photo apps on Android isn't doing it for you, Adobe's just added Revel to the fray. Though it's touting features like ease-of-use, automatic syncing, sharing and privacy for the app (which has been on iOS for quite a while), we actually found the built-in Photoshop Express-like features to be the best part. Those include scaling, rotation, brightness, contrast, filters and other handy adjustments, with a much simpler interface than Photoshop Express (thank goodness). If interested, you can upload all the photos and video you want for the first 30 days, then add 50 videos or photos a month for free after that. For unlimited storage, you'll pay $6 per month or $60 per year. A notable oversight is that Creative Cloud subscribers don't get free access, as it would let pros share their portfolios more easily. As far as the privacy, it'll probably take us quite a bit more time to get over some deep trust issues.
WerYoo is a new social photography app with some appealing features
WerYoo ("where you," get it?) is a new free social network and app that lets you add photos to maps, share your photos with friends and get real-time updates on new photos and experiences near you. To get started, you sign up for a free account via Facebook or a separate WerYoo account. After getting an account, you can take photos, add filters and view a live stream of photos taken near you as determined by your iPhone's GPS. Photos can be shared with friends or groups of friends, and photos can be searched by time and/or location. You can comment on photos and read comments people leave on yours. There is also a "hotspot" feature to let you or others comment on some particular part or feature of a photo. Photos are shared via Twitter or Facebook, and photos from others you like can be shared via your camera roll. I gave WerYoo a try and found some photos that had been taken near me. I could search any area to see what others had done, or post my own photos to see if I got some followers or comments. I uploaded some photos from my camera roll after applying filters, and they quickly appeared on the map when I searched that area. All in all, WerYoo is a clever app in a crowded field of social photography apps including Instagram, Yonder, Tweetbot, Twitter, Apple's own Photostream service and many others. Still, WerYoo has some unique features that are worth a try if you are interested in sharing photos in real time with friends and families. It's certainly easy to use. Early reviews of the app are positive, and it just might be something that's worth a look. WerYoo requires iOS 6 or later. It's not a universal app, and it has been optimized for the iPhone 5.
Bump and Flock file sharing apps shut down this month as devs focus on Google projects
Google acquired Bump -- developer of an NFC-like file sharing app with the same name and a photo sharing service called Flock -- back in September, and both projects will shut down January 31st. CEO and cofounder David Lieb announced the discontinuation of both products on the Bump blog, saying his team is "deeply focused on our new projects within Google." That bodes well for their mission of enhancing sharing on mobile devices, but the bad news for Bump and Flock users is that this shut down means everything must go. After January ends the apps will no longer function, they'll disappear from the App Store and Google Play and all stored data will be deleted from servers (locally saved files or photos will remain in place). Any of those millions of users can still keep their data though, just open up the app anytime in the next month, and follow the instructions shown (tap the "i" menu on iOS or "More" on Android). Afterwards, Bump will send over an email with a link to let you download all of your stored data.
Flickr for iOS update brings new filters, camera features and editing tools
Given the stiff competition from other photo editing apps, Yahoo is approaching its Flickr renaissance with steely determination. Today's update to the iOS app introduces a slew of new features designed to give it a fighting chance in a crowded market. Love 'em or hate 'em, filters remain all the rage, and Flickr is rolling out a handful of new ones with suitably hip names to please the masses. Now, users will also have the ability to see a live preview of the filter before they apply it to their photo. Also included in the update are several beefed up -- and free -- editing features, like color balance settings, level adjustments and a sharpening tool. Lastly, the camera function is getting a minor overhaul as well. You can now pinch to zoom, compose a shot with the handy dandy grid and lock your exposure and focus points. To get your hands on the update, head on over to the source link below.
Facebook launches shared albums, officially making Cluster obsolete
Last week I wrote an article about how pointless the recently released photo-sharing app Cluster -- which raised a ridiculous US$1.6 million in funding -- is, given that the vast majority of its features are already mimicked on more popular services, including Facebook. Today, in an interview with Mashable, Facebook's Bob Baldwin underlined my sentiment in the best way he knew how: by announcing that the social network has just launched its own shared photo album feature. Facebook's shared albums work much like the standard albums that you've likely been using for many years now, but with a few key tweaks. The album creator can invite as many as 50 friends to contribute content to the album, which is a large enough number that nobody should realistically be left out. Varying levels of privacy can then be set based on your needs, allowing the photos to be browsed publicly, by friends or by just the contributors. As far as mobile functionality goes, users will be able to contribute to shared albums automatically, but the ability to actually create these social image portals will be added in the near future. For now, the shared album feature has been rolled out to a limited number of English-speaking Facebook users, which will be expanded to all English-speaking users before spreading worldwide.
Do we really need yet another photo sharing app? No, we do not
Yesterday, photo-sharing app Cluster announced it had scored US$1.6 million in seed funding from a variety of parties, including Instagram investor Steve Anderson. Cluster v1.0 also hit the App Store yesterday, and as it swims in a sea of "me too" photography apps, you have to ask yourself: What's the point? Cluster claims to specialize in one very specific area: Helping people collect photos from events they may or may not have attended. The app's website presents scenarios like "Brenden, Rizwan, & Taylor collected 1,500 photos from their trip to Europe," and "7 friends created an album from their 250 music festival photos," suggesting that Cluster is the easiest way to collect the visual evidence of each event. You upload photos to a "cluster," invite friends either via email, Facebook or by handing out a special invitation code, and let the rest of the group populate the cluster with their own snapshots. You can comment on photos, tag favorites and share your favorites with Twitter, etc. In short, it's the photo section of your Facebook account, with fewer features. Let me say, for the record, that Cluster is a beautifully designed app and nails the aesthetics of what a semi-social photo app should be. That said, there's virtually no reason why this app should even exist. It's a classic case of a product in search of a problem to solve, and launching exclusively on the iPhone (web and Android versions are on the way) makes its existence even more puzzling. First, let's tackle the Facebook argument. Facebook is already the most widely used way to share photos with friends, and it's still the easiest. You can share photos in a very basic fashion or organize them into albums and then tag the individuals that the pictures will interest. So, say you take a hike with a pair of friends and want to share the photos. Would it be easier to grab each of those friends in the Cluster app, create a cluster, force everyone to download the images separately and then re-share them with the social circle of your choosing, or upload the photos to Facebook, tag your friends in the album and -- oh, wait, that's it. Go make yourself a drink. But maybe you don't want to share the photos on Facebook. Maybe you just want to have the photos yourself. You want to collect all of them to hold close to your heart forever. Fair enough. You know what's great for that? Almost every other photo-sharing app that has ever been released. But even if the iPhone didn't already have Bump, Shutterfly, Path, Flickr and a litany of other photo-sharing options available, there's Photo Stream. This is where the whole iPhone-exclusive launch part makes me scratch my head. Using Photo Stream -- which is built into both iOS 6 and Mountain Lion -- you can set up a cloud-based album where you can upload photos, invite others to view them and notify them when photos have been added to the stream. You can favorite, comment and share photos there as well. Sound familiar? It should, because it's exactly what Cluster does, only it's already been included in Apple's mobile and desktop operating systems. Oh, and if you happen to have already filled up your iCloud storage space, it's fine, because shared Photo Streams don't count against your storage limit. Nifty, huh? [Note: iOS 7 updates Photo Stream to allow multiple users to push content to a single album, including video, which will only further trivialize the need for third-party apps such as this.] This isn't just a problem with Cluster, of course, and it seems like a new half-baked social network or photo-sharing app comes out every week, but at some point developers are going to have to stop seeing opportunities where none exist.
Aviary for iOS update adds Instagram and email sharing options, extra magic
Aviary has certainly been busy over the past couple of months, having recently overhauled its photo-editing app for Android, as well as launching on Windows Phone 8. Fortunately, the industrious company has also found time to work on its iOS app, which has just been updated to allow picture sharing via Instagram and good old-fashioned email. The sharing menu now features two new buttons that'll push the selected image into Instagram's own app, or launch Mail and add it to the body of an email. According to the update changelog, the new version also has "a bonus extra dose of magic added." We asked the folks at Aviary exactly how they implemented this exciting feature, but frustratingly, they wouldn't tell us.
Secret.li iOS app makes Facebook photos self-destruct after a set period of time
If you often partake in social activities -- particularly those involving alcohol -- you may have a horror story about compromising Facebook photos. A new iOS app, Secret.li, sets out to limit the lifespan of those sensitive images, letting you delete the evidence before your boss (or parents) finds out. Hoping to capitalize on Facebook privacy concerns, the team behind Secret.li has taken a page out of Snapchat's book with selectively shared "timebombed" photos. After choosing your security filter and time limit, Secret.li will ping your friends via Facebook with a short-lived photo without storing the image or associated metadata to its servers. (It's worth nothing that there's nothing stopping your friends from capturing your photos and saving them for future blackmail, though.) You can check out the full press release after the break or download the free app at the source link below.
Imgur CEO hopes official iPhone app will launch in a few weeks
Chances are that you've stumbled upon photos on Imgur before, even if you're not familiar with the site itself. Imgur is an extremely popular and free photo-sharing site that quickly grew in popularity thanks to social media sites like Reddit. It also helps that the site, which now generates upwards of 4 billion pageviews a month, requires no cumbersome user registration process. Yesterday, Imgur finally launched its official mobile app for Android. An official iPhone app, however, remains non-existent. Don't worry folks. We're not entering a world where iPhone development is taking a backseat to Android development. Speaking to VentureBeat, Imgur CEO Alan Schaaf explained that the iPhone holdup is the result of Apple's sometimes nitpicky application approval process. While the launch of the Android app is a big step for the service, Imgur initially planned to release both Android and iPhone versions of the app together. But Schaaf said Apple has routinely rejected the iPhone application it built on grounds of copyright infringement and inappropriate content. Schaaf said Imgur has submitted the app for approval from Apple several times. He said Apple first knocked the organization for having too much content sourced from copyrighted materials. But Imgur explained to Apple that it is DMCA compliant and removes any infringing images when it is notified. Then Apple didn't like how easy it was to access adult-focused content. This, of course, isn't the first time an app with user-generated content has run into trouble with Apple's app review team. You might recall that, a few months back, Apple had removed the popular photo-sharing app 500px from the App Store after deeming it too easy for users to access nude, albeit artistic, photos. The app was subsequently allowed back in the App Store with a new feature that enables users to quickly flag and report inappropriate content. The content on Imgur is a free-for-all in many respects, and it certainly lacks the artistic bent that 500px has. Nonetheless, Imgur's Schaaf relayed that the company has "made it harder to find crude content" and that the site's official iPhone app will hopefully launch in just a "few weeks."
Snapjoy photo sharing service shut down following Dropbox aquisition
Snapjoy has announced that it'll be shuttering all of its services a mere six months after being acquired by cloud colossus Dropbox. In a blog post, the company said photos can no longer be imported into Snapjoy and the iPhone app is henceforth unavailable. If you've got images stored on the site, you'll have exactly a month to get them downloaded, since after July 24th, "all photos and data will be permanently deleted." The same thing happened to Audiogalaxy shortly after its acquisition by Dropbox, and of course other big fish like Google and Twitter are well known for similar behavior after eating smaller fish -- though at least we saw the #Music fruits of Twitter's buyout shortly after it happened. On the other hand, we've yet to see Dropbox do anything with Audiogalaxy, so we hope the defunct apps will be resurrected in some form soon.
Hipstamatic Oggl app coming to Windows Phone 8, launching with Nokia's Lumia 925
Hipstamatic's Oggl app and sharing service is coming to Windows Phone 8, we learned at Nokia's Lumia 925 launch event. We didn't get to play around in the app -- the WP8 UI we saw on stage was but a preview, as the native app (read: not a port) is still in development. We're assured Oggl will be ready by the time the new Lumia launches, but it won't be a Nokia exclusive, so anyone with a WP8 handset will be able to use the food filter and (over)share their lunch choice on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram. We don't know whether the regular dollar-per-month (or $10 per year) service fee will apply, but we're told you'll be able to swap cash for more filters and effects on top of the base selection.
Hipstamatic launches Oggl, an all new photo app with subscription model
The folks at Hipstamatic know better than to mess with success. Their flagship photo filter app will continue to evolve, albeit slowly. More dramatic experiments in business model and UI design will instead show up in Oggl, the company's newest app that doesn't stray too far from the mold. The basic functionality is the same: snap a pic, edit it then post it for others to see. There are some key differences, however, besides the obvious aesthetic ones. Perhaps the most striking is the new business model, where users are charged $0.99 a month or $9.99 a year for full access to the library of Hipstamatic photo effects. There's also a focus on building a photo-sharing community around Oggl, much in the way Instagram has. The app is invite only (and we're still waiting for ours), but when it launches later this week the crowded high-brow photo sharing space will have yet another competitor.
Flickr for iOS now lets you tag friends, save shots to camera roll and upload photos faster
It was late last year that Flickr for iOS underwent a major makeover as part of Marissa Mayer's vision to revitalize Yahoo products, and today the app's on the receiving end of what's perhaps its most notable update since. The refreshed application will now let iDevice owners easily mention Flickr friends by way of -- you guessed it -- that ubiquitous "@," while the new version also brings speedier photo uploads, an option to save shots from your own Photostream to the iOS camera roll and the ability to quickly snap a picture using the volume button. In addition to that, the Flickr app now also allows users to gawk at higher-res pics in the Lightbox View, which should be a feature nicely welcomed by those who like to call themselves pixel buffs. Version 2.10.803, as it's more formally known, is now live in the App Store, so head on to Cupertino's shop if you're eager to try out the free goods.
