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Hackers are hiding virtual credit card skimmers in image file metadata
Sites using WooCommerce are being targeted by hackers as a way to steal credit card information.
Google Photos lets you tell it when your pictures were taken
Google just announced that it has pushed live a host of user-requested features for its Photos service. These include the ability to edit an image's timestamp, rearrange the image order in albums, change an album's cover photo and remove inaccurate results from searches. What's more, the company is also launching an improved community product forum, staffed in part by members of Google's Top Contributors program, that will help confused Photos users better navigate the site.
Pic Navi shows you the 'when' and 'where' of your iPhone photos
Your iPhone tags photos with all sorts of information: your location, the time and date the photo was taken, even exposure information. This tagging function can be turned on or off under Privacy > Location Services in your iPhone settings. Surprisingly, you can't see the tag information on the iPhone itself, but it is available in iPhoto and other applications on a Mac or PC. Pic Navi (free, ad supported) makes it easy to browse the photos on your iDevice and see each photo with a date and time displayed. Tapping the compass button in the app displays a map of the location where the photo was taken and tapping the pin on the map provides directions to get back to that spot. Moving between photos is easy. Just swipe left or right and the metadata is displayed automatically. Pic Navi worked very well. An in-app purchase for US$2.99 gets you the Pro version, which allows you to share the locations by email, Twiiter or Facebook. With the Pro version, you're also allowed to change the font and color of the time and date stamp, and the ads are removed. I was satisfied with the free version and did not find the ads to be intrusive. There are some other apps with similar features, like Photo Investigator (free with in-app purchases), but I like the ease of use of Pic Navi. Pic Navi is a universal app, and it requires iOS 7 or later. It provides a function Apple doesn't on the iPhone, and many photographers will find it useful.
500px photo-sharing app updated with metadata editor and refreshed UI on iOS
If you're more likely to tweak your photos in Light Room than Instagram, you might want to take note of 500px's latest mobile update. The high-end photo-sharing app now lets you edit EXIF metadata, tags and location info for your photos, which should help with organization. Beyond that, its new transition effects and blurred backgrounds match nicely with iOS 7, and there's a fresh intro video and walk through for new users too. We're tempted to say this update has something for everyone, but that doesn't account for the app's Android users. After all, folks updating on Google Play this week were only offered a handful of bug fixes.
Friday Favorite: Exif Everywhere reveals the data that's hidden in photos
Everyone enjoys a good photography-driven website, but folks with a technical eye can't look at an image without wondering what camera took that shot, what settings were used and where it was taken. Exif Everywhere from MyLove Company is a browser extension and desktop app that provides those details and more. Exif Everywhere operates either as a standalone desktop app or a browser extension in Firefox, Safari or Chrome. When browsing, all you have to do is place your cursor over an image and hit the Control key to reveal the EXIF data in another window. It worked with most websites that I tested. The biggest exceptions were the photo hosting websites like Flickr and SmugMug, which hide that information from the browser. The browser extension also shows different information depending on how images were processed. Some images had their EXIF data stripped during post-production and Exif Everywhere showed only the dimensions, file format and the app used in processing. Other images, uploaded with minimal processing, were filled with details like the f-stop, exposure time and the ISO. The OS X app is similar to the browser extension in that it shows you all the EXIF data contained in a photo. These details mirror the information you can see when you select "Get Info" from the contextual menu in Finder. Exif Everywhere not only shows the EXIF information; it also allows you to strip it from your images. With a simple click of a button, you can remove either the EXIF data or the GPS data from your photos. There's no bulk tool built into the app, so you will have strip your photo library one image at a time. Exif Everywhere is a handy utility for users who want to find out more about the images they see on the web or have stored on their hard drive. The app is packaged into a standalone OS X app that is installed separately from the browser extensions. This is useful as customers have the option to install one or both tools. Exif Everywhere is available for US$14.99. You can download it from the app's website or from the Mac App Store. There's also a 20-day free trial so you can try it, before you buy it.
Motorola engineer leaks Droid RAZR HD, could lose his desk
If you spent your weekend scanning Picasa for photos shot on a Motorola Droid RAZR HD smartphone, then ordinarily you'd have wasted your time. No phone by that name officially exists, and the PenTile Super AMOLED displays on both the standard Droid RAZR and the RAZR Maxx are distinctly not high definition. Surprising then, that when Blog of Mobile searched Picasa they discovered an album shot by a Motorola engineer supposedly using a RAZR HD. The photos have since been removed, leaving only the blurry desk image shown above, which is also attributed to a RAZR HD even if we can't be certain who shot it. Fortunately, the EXIF data was grabbed before the wipe, and if you glance past the break you'll see that it mentions a possible 'Vanquish' codename for the phone as a well as ICS build 4.0.3. There, just when you needed yet another reason to love EXIF.
Windows 8 file management: you ask, Microsoft listens
After augmenting Windows 8 with some mobile-friendly features, it looks like file management is next to go under the knife. Not the sexiest part of an OS, granted, but one you'll use almost every day -- a fact not lost on Redmond. Based on newsgroup feedback, Windows 8 will sport a stack of tweaks hoping to make some of the more mundane tasks, well, less mundane. For example, if you copy duplicate files to a directory, it'll make decisions based on size, name and modified date to determine if it's the same file or not. For long copy jobs, error messages will be mercifully left until the end, allowing the rest to complete. Other simple touches include EXIF orientation data, which will be reflected in Explorer's preview, updates to the slightly contentious Ribbon, plus a bunch more user-driven goodies. We're reserving judgement until we get hands-on of course, but if you want to know more, there's a full rundown in the source after the break.
Stolen Camera Finder promises to find your camera with EXIF data, probably won't
Stolen Camera Finder is a site that promises to find missing cameras, as long as they've been stolen by cooperative criminals. All you have to do is drag and drop a JPG photo taken with your lost camera, and Stolen Camera Finder will hunt for any matches on the web, using the image's EXIF data. To find matches, the site consults a database of photos posted on Flickr and elsewhere, though, without only one million images to its name, this database is still very much a work-in-progress (the tests we conducted came up dry). It's a nifty idea, but one that would probably pay dividends only under certain circumstances. For instance, the thief would have to take pictures with the camera (rather than selling it) and post the images online without wiping the EXIF data. In other words, he'd have to be someone willing to steal a camera purely for the sake of sharing undoctored self-shots on Flickr. We're not sure those people exist.
Dear Aunt TUAW: How can I edit my EXIF data?
Dear Aunt TUAW, Help a guy out. How do I edit EXIF data on my Macintosh? I need to know, like, yesterday -- so thanks in advance for a quick answer. Love and hugs, Dave
Camera shots provide more evidence of Nokia E6-00
We've been hearing rumors of a Nokia E6-00 for a few months now, and while details are still scarce, some evidence surfaced recently in the form of a Picasa gallery shock full of pictures taken with the phone. While the gallery was quickly pulled, it was available long enough to reveal some interesting information. From both the shots and the EXIF data, it looks like the E6-00 sports an 8 megapixel EDoF camera with flash similar to what we've already seen on the Nokia C6-01 and Nokia E7. Everything else is pretty much speculation at this point, but but we're hoping for a Nokia E72 successor running Symbian with a touchscreen similar in concept to the Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type. Update: It looks like our hopes have been validated. Mobile Bulgaria reports that the E6-00 will boast a 640 x 480 VGA touchscreen (instead of the usual 640 x 360 nHD Symbian fare) in a QWERTY portrait form factor, and will feature the new web browser (version 7.3).
Pro HDR adds geotagging
I've liked Pro HDR since it was first released. The HDR technique blends two or more exposures to capture better dynamic range in difficult lighting conditions. Apple provided some competition by building in HDR with the release of the iPhone 4 and iOS 4.1, but I still like the control that Pro HDR gives me both before and after the pictures are taken. One of the big drawbacks to Pro HDR is that the location metadata and other picture information was not saved in the combined image, so location and other EXIF data was not available. That meant the 'Places' feature from Apple wouldn't work. Now that's fixed. It was the biggest single complaint that users of the app had. Another advantage to PRO HDR is that it works on the iPhone 3GS and the 4th generation iPod touch, as well as the iPhone 4. It means owners of the 3GS haven't been orphaned when it comes to shooting great HDR pictures. HDR works best for stationary objects like landscapes or posed photos. If there is movement in the frame between the two images, the process will fail. HDR isn't for everyone, or for every situation, but used wisely, it can create dynamic photos that would be difficult to get without some help from the HDR process.
OK Cupid advises Panasonic cameras, iPhones for lonely nerds
While the kids at MySpace are hiding out in their top secret lab, hard at work on that portable media player, and the Facebook gang is busy looking for ways to make easy money off your personal data, the oft-maligned OK Cupid organization has one goal and one goal only -- to help bitter singles find love. It's a noble mission, and a daunting task, to which end they've pored through the EXIF data of over 500,000 of their user profile pics and came to a number of conclusions, including: Panasonic camera users are "hotties," while Nikon users are "notties" iPhone users are "doin' it" around twice as often as Android users Using a camera flash adds seven years to your picture There's more to the survey, and we definitely have our doubts as to the veracity of its conclusions, but we think we can all agree on one thing: make sure you remove the EXIF data from your pics before you go looking for a mate in cyberspace.
RapidoMap: slick geocoding for free
We've previously covered quite a few different applications to geocode your photos. Geocoding or geotagging is the process of adding location information (latitude and longitude) to the EXIF metadata of your photos, so you can see where they were taken. RapidoMap is one of the newest of these tools and looks to have a couple of particularly nice features. The application integrates a browser for Yahoo Maps which is how you actually locate your photos on the globe. It has an iLife media browser that makes it easy to get your photos in, and a built-in Flickr uploader.Best of all, RapidoMap is a free download from app4mac (points off to them, however, for using an installer package).[via Macworld]
HoudahGeo geocoding with Google Earth integration
We have posted about several differing geocoding solutions for the Mac. All of these programs allow you to embed location information in the EXIF data of your photographs, thus specifying where the photo was taken as well as the time, date, etc. The newest entry into the Mac geocoding sweepstakes is HoudaGeo, which has just been released as a public beta. Like some of the others, it allows you to tag your photos either by importing tracking data from a GPS device (syncing using the time stamps) or by using an interface with Google Maps. Once the photos have been tagged you can export them to Google Earth with a single click:HoudaGeo is a free download while it's in beta but will eventually be shareware.
PhotoInfoEditor: Geocode Your Photos
It's becoming increasingly common for people to want to include meta-data with their photos about where they were taken. Geocoding is the process of adding location information to the meta-data of digital photos, similar to the Exif meta-data that nearly all digital cameras add with date, time, exposure settings, etc. There are even few digital cameras out there with built-in GPS to facilitate this. PhotoInfoEditor is a nice little utility that allows you to geocode your existing photos, either by just typing in the latitude and longitude, or even better, by marking the location on the built-in Google Map. As you can see from the screen capture above, you select the photo you want to geocode and then simply zoom into the location on the Google Map to mark it. Very slick.PhotoInfoEditor is still a little touchy (sometimes the Google Maps don't draw correctly), but it's a nice idea, and best of all it's free (donations requested). Obviously, you have to have an active internet connection for this to work, but you can mark locations anywhere in the world.[Via FreeMacWare]
Timeature
Apple must be pleased with the Aperture ecosystem that seems to be starting up. People are creating apps that enhance or complement Aperture, which is always a sign of interest in a product.The latest entrant into this market is Timeature. This simple app allows you to edit the date that is associated with a picture in Aperture, a field that is not user editable. Why would you need this? Aperture fills in this field with data for the EXIF information including in the picture it is importing. If the picture doesn't have this information it uses the date of the import, so you can see that some pictures might be incorrectly marked.Timeature is shareware, so if you find it useful cough up some dough.
