Adobe Launches Free Photo-Editing Software
Adobe has launched a free web version of Photoshop - its popular photo-editing software - called Photoshop Express. Adobe was expected to make this move and some are saying the software wasn't quite a feature-full as they would have liked but it is still Adobe-powered editing software. There is also concern about the TOS. Photoshop Express will probably get better as time goes by and Adobe adds new features and services.You can see a few reviews of the new software here, here, here, here, here and here. Below is a video from the AP about the launch.
Posted on March 28, 2008
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Panoramic Photo Sharing at ViewAt
A new photo sharing service called ViewAt allows users to share cool panoramic photographs. There are already lots of panoramic photographs on the website you can view. You can find the images by using the interactive map on ViewAt's homepage. You can also find photos by clicking on the author's name. Webware says the service uses the Flash Panorama Player.
The service employs the Flash Panorama Player, which manages to serve up a similar experience to the Quicktime VR functionality of yore, but uses the same plug-in you've got installed to watch YouTube videos. Each of the shots on viewAT is geotagged as well, letting you sort and browse through shots by country. There's also a mini map that opens up below each shot to let you see if there are others nearby. Other users can comment on the shot, as well as read up on the equipment and technique that was used to capture it.If you are interested in creating a panoramic view be sure to read the faq.
Posted on September 29, 2007
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Graphita Photo Bling
A new graphic editing tool called Graphita allows you to add captions, objects, bubbles, words and doodles to photographs. TechCrunch says the website lets people add bling to their photographs.
The company offers a Flash-based application that enables users to upload photos and add a personal touch via an easy to use toolset filled with stamps, text icons, captions, bubbles and more (Bubbleply does much the same for videos). The Graphita rich toolkit is easy to use to add, resize and customize each addition to a photo creation. The product is simplified for the masses and offers users the option of an authenticated or anonymous experience - thus positioning itself for higher adoption rates. Currently, Graphita is in closed beta and does not appear to support the addition of animated icons which might be something worth looking into implementing before its official launch in mid-May.Tools like Graphita should become popular as more people turn to them to add comments and bubbles to photographs they put on their blogs and social network profiles. Social networks will probably also begin to include more and more of these types of editing features. The social network site MyYearBook.com is known for including lots of blingy editing tools and features.
Upon customizing a photo, users can share them via email, print and send them back to their favorite photo sites (Flickr, MySpace, etc.), or even send them to photo pick-up locations (Costco, Walgreens, etc.). In addition, photo creations can be placed directly on consumer products like coffee mugs, tee shirts or other items. Graphita does not appear to offer its own social networking hooks but rather leverages existing products and services. However, registered users have the option to share uploaded photos in the public gallery or keep them private.
Posted on July 29, 2007
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Find Faces on Google Image Search
Google has a secret built in feature that lets you focus on faces when searching images in its Google Image database. Wired Epicenter blog details the find discovered by Google Operating System.A hidden image recognition feature buried in Google's image search function has been discovered. Blogger Ionut Alex Chitu discovered the hidden search feature a few days ago. To try the search feature out, simply go to Google image search, enter a search term, and once you have your results, enter the following at the end of the URL in your browser: "&imgtype=face". Suddenly you'll find a wealth of new images-all faces. I tried the search on PBS television host Charlie Rose, and it worked like a charm.You can find more uses for this secret feature here.
Posted on June 4, 2007
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HP Acquires Tabblo
HP has announced recently they would be acquiring Tabblo, a website that allows people to print graphics and photos off the Internet.
HP plans to leverage Tabblo's technologies to make printing from the web easier and more convenient than it is today. Tabblo's technology allows people to simply and efficiently arrange and print text, graphics and photos from the web. This is made possible by Tabblo's custom template engine, using an AJAX-enriched interface.Tabblo also makes it easier for people to create and print photo-related products such as photo cubes, photo books and posters using their own photographs.
HP plans to make this simple-to-use web-printing experience broadly available to people by working with other companies to integrate the technology into their websites. Together, HP and its partner companies will provide customers with a vastly improved web-based printing experience to meet the ever-growing need for simplified Internet-based printing.
"HP's goal is to make printing content from the web the easiest and best experience possible for people - whether they are printing a simple map or a book of their favorite blogs," said Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president, Imaging and Printing Group, HP. "By acquiring Tabblo's technology and making it available to companies that host popular websites, HP will be firmly on the path to becoming the print engine of the web."
Posted on April 25, 2007
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Polar Rose Combines Image Search and Facial Recognition
A website called PolarRose.com is planning to launch an image search website that combines people's photographs with "face recognition algorithms." This may make it easy to search for a person's name and have the search engine return a bunch of photographs containing that person. Search Engine Watch blogs that the site will also rely on the help of its users to tag names on people.
Using what Tim O'Reilly calls 'bionic software', "Polar Rose relies on a combination of our unique face recognition algorithms and the collective intelligence of our users.Obviously, there are some major privacy concerns here for people who do not want to be found or do not want all their photographs discovered. There could also be concerns if the search engine were to incorrectly label a photograph as being person X when it fact it was not person X. There are also concerns that a search engine like PolarRose.com could one day be expaned and used to identify people using images and video from various public cameras. Polar Rose also offers a blog that will keep you informed of the latest developments with the innovate image search tool.
The face recognition technology used was originally developed by CTO Jan Erik Solem during his M.Sc and Ph.D. stints at the universities of Lund and Malmö in southern Sweden. It's unique in that we are able to extract 3D information from regular 2D images, an approach that radically improves the short-comings of existing face recognition approaches.
However, we don't and can't rely exclusively on face recognition, but also harness the collective intelligence of our users who help train our software and tag names on people we haven't seen before" according to their website.
Posted on January 4, 2007
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Add Moustaches, Santa Hats to Your Picture With PikiPimp
A new free online service called PikiPimp lets you modify a photograph online to add features like bikinis, hats, moustaches and hair styles. Go2Web2 lays out the five easy steps to pimpin your pic.
PikiPimp also has a Christmas category that lets you add antlers and Santa beards to your photograph.Upload your image from your hardrive. Edit your image (just drag&drop objects from the right side bar to your image) Manage your image - Rotate, flip, move, order, delete, etc.. Preview your image to see if you're happy with the results. Save image - You can save the file to your computer or copy an HTML code to use in your site or blog.
Posted on December 15, 2006
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Riya Search Tool Offers Image Queries
Like is a new search tool from Riya Inc. that allows people to query via text and images. TechCrunch calls it the first visual search engine and explains how Riya can be used to find products. One use of Like is to shop for items that are similar to what a celebrity is wearing such as Miriah Carey's boots or Paris Hilton's ring.
The Like.com engine takes both text and images as queries, something no one else does. To return results based on an image query, Like.com compares a "visual signature" for the query image to possible results. The visual signature is simply a mathematical representatioin of the image using 10,000 variables. If enough variables are identical, Like.com decides the images are similar.You can see an example here that lets you search for products that are similar to what Paris is seen wearing in several photos. The results are products that resemble what Paris is wearing. You can then adjust the results by shape, color and pattern.
What this means - If you see an image on the web, like a watch that Paris Hilton is wearing in the picture to the left, and use it as an image query, Like.com will return results showing watches that look very similar.
If you enter a text query, like "brown boots pointed toe," Like.com will convert that query into variables in the visual signature and look for related image results. See screen shot below for the results from this query.
Posted on November 20, 2006
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Zooomr Enters Photo Sharing Marketplace
TechCrunch reports that a new photo sharing website called Zooomr is offering more photo upload and hosting space than Flickr. Zoom's free account has 100 MB of monthly photo uploads to Flickr's 20MB free accounts and Zooomr's pro account has 4 GB to Flickr's 2 GB pro accounts. The TechCrunch post also applauded Zooomr's technology.
We've covered Zooomr since launch but I personally have just recently come to appreciate what they are doing. They offer manual and automatic geotagging, picture in picture zooming, and audio narration attached to files, among other things. The Zooomr interface is localized in 18 different languages - that's a big deal. They are doing a great job of innovating rapidly, extending themselves into the world, offering really good value and an engaging user experience.It is always good to see new websites offering new features for the photo community and trying out new ideas but Zooomr does face a couple obvious challenges. The challenges Zooomr does face are that photo sharing is a crowded market with existing players and they may have trouble with people not typing enough o's.
Posted on November 10, 2006
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Yahoo Integrates Flickr Photos With Yahoo Search
Yahoo bought Flickr last year (see here). Now they have integrated the popular photo sharing website with Yahoo Search results.Now you can find this experience through Yahoo! Search. Try searching for funny photos and you'll find hilarious and wacky Flickr photos of animals, kids, and signs. Searching for things that people think are funny is a good example of a query where combining what the community knows (and tags) with what algorithms can compute can lead to better search results.Yahoo lists a few suggestions to try: Funny Photos, Interesting Photos and Nature Photography. Any search with photos or photography after it will work like Frog Photos and Celebrity Photos.
Posted on August 24, 2006
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Riya Plans Sophisticated Image Search Engine
ZDNet reports that Riya, a photo sharing and tagging tool, is planning to add complex search tools, including similarity searches, in the future.
Based on some recent insights, Shah said that Riya is building a new type of photo search engine, one that finds similarities among images. "Riya started with facial recognition, but we will deliver public image search and do similarity, such as finding images similar to your location or girl friend," Shah said. "Click on any photo of any person and get similar results. You could have a picture of a car and find things that look like cars."These sounds like very interesting tools. The article also says that Riya will soon be hitting the 10 million photo mark. By comparison, Flickr, the largest photo sharing site, has over 100 million photos.
Similarity searches could be applied to dating sites or for finding similar images, such as a particular landmark, without explicit tagging. "The only technique today is linguistic query, and many things are hard to describe linguistically, such as a person. That's the challenge. It's easier to say 'more like this,' 'less like this,' and that's the direction we are heading," Shah said.
He doesn't expect to have his crawler and public search available any time soon, however. "There is core science to crack to actually run similarity across billions of photos and have any semblance of accuracy and speed," Shah said. But he doesn't expect his company's technology (he has filed some patents) to reach a level of accuracy that would be appealing to national security agencies. "The level of accuracy and scoping will only be useful to consumers," he said.
Posted on May 23, 2006
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Website Gathers P-to-P Photos
Infoworld has an article about a website called Fitography.com that may be grabbing and showcasing some photos that people don't want seen. Fitography grabs photograph files from shared files used by P-to-P programs.Fitography.com is perhaps another example of how the Internet can be both prying and surprising. Since it started Dec. 30, reams of searchable photos have been posted, running the gamut from the mundane to the eccentric to the slightly disturbing: an outdoor barbecue, a crowd at a Pearl Jam concert; a group of U.S. Army soldiers posing with actor Denzel Washington, a woman giving birth in an operating room.So far Fitography.com doesn't appear to have nearly as many images as some of the popular photo sharing website likes Flickr and Buzznet.
In a Thursday news release announcing the site's launch, the webmaster is identified as Brad Gosse of Yourbrain Media Inc., a company based in Orangeville, Ontario. Gosse is quoted in the release as warning users of P-to-P networks such as Limewire and Kazaa to be careful what photos they place in the shared folders of those applications. P-to-P programs typically have a folder that allow remote users to access and download that content, but users can turn off the file-sharing feature.
If photos are in the shared folder "we will probably have them on our site sooner or later," he said in the release, which goes on to say that if someone finds a photo they do not want on fitography.com, it will be removed.
Posted on January 5, 2006
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Do It All With Glide Effortless
PC World has an article about Glide Effortless, a new multi-purpose publishing and storage web tool.
If there was an award for "Most Ambitious New Web Service of 2005," it might well go to Glide Effortless, which a startup called TransMedia launched on Wednesday. Glide aims to let you manage and share music, videos, photos, presentations, and other items online, transcoding them on the fly so you don't, in theory, have to worry about file formats. It's an e-mail program, a contact database, an RSS reader, a photo-printing service, a blogging tool, and a Web site builder, too. And it says it'll soon be a photo editor, a music store, a ringtone vendor, a videoconferencing system, and a whole lot more. Did I mention that it also plans to sell French chocolates? (Note: The last sentence was a statement of fact, not playful hyperbole.)Glide Effortless looks like a combination of a purplish desktop with some of the Web 2.0 launches we have seen lately -- but we agree with PC World that it is difficult to describe. PC World suggests trying the free version and avoiding the fee-based services for now.
Describing Glide briefly is practically impossible. To use the service, you upload documents and media files from your PC; a free version of the service gives you 100MB of space, and you can get a lot more by springing for fee-based options. Once files live within Glide, you can get to them from any PC, use them to construct Web sites, and share them. (Sharing can be done with folks who don't have Glide accounts, and it's done through transcoded, streamed versions of files; among other things, this means that you can distribute them via e-mail, but yank them back after a certain number of viewings or a set timeframe.)
Posted on December 2, 2005
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AOL Upgrades You've Got Pictures
Publish.com reports that AOL has upgraded its You've Got Picture service into a free online photo sharing tool called AOL Pictures.
America Online, Inc. announced today the launch of AOL Pictures, a free photo sharing Web site with unlimited online digital storage in original resolutions, photo sharing and printing.Photo sharing and printing are good features but to compete with Flickr the service also needs features like tagging and interestingness.
"Available for free to anyone on the Web at AOL.com, AOL Pictures gives consumers a complete digital photo experience with benefits like unlimited, free photo storage and integration with the AIM service and our blogging tools," David Liu, General Manager and Vice President, AOL.com said in a statement Thursday.
Additional features of the new AOL Photo include an improved uploading tool with drag and drop functionality, mobile phone access to stored photos, an online print store, and slideshow and album-creation functions, as well as a sleek interface based on development platform AJAX.
Posted on November 17, 2005
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Web Surfers Are Building the New Web
BusinessWeek has an interesting article that says the new web is being built by you -- the web surfer. The article talks about websites that are powered by users like MySpace.com, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Meetup and Wikipedia.And this time, it's Your Web. No longer content to be merely viewers and consumers, people increasingly are taking an active part in creating their online lives. With its longtime tagline, "The network is the computer," Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) made the case that computing transcended hardware. Sun President Jonathan Schwartz thinks another crucial shift is under way: "The network is now your computer."The article also says that the web will continue to develop more services like the ones mentioned above and new programming tools will make the web even more user-friendly and customizable.
At many new Web sites and services, the creative energy of countless souls virtually crackles off the screen. They're cobbling together their own services from customizable Web sites and Lego-style pieces of Web software. By the millions, they're gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized article and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search for on the Web site del.icio.us. They're producing their own entertainment on video, social-networking, game, and photo-sharing sites such as Yahoo's Flickr. At MySpace.com, some 21 million monthly visitors spend up to several hours a day sharing their thoughts, photos, and music with friends on personalized home pages. Ditto at Cyworld, which claims almost a third of South Korea's 48 million people as members.
"The Web isn't so much a place anymore," explains Ross Mayfield, CEO of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based startup Socialtext Inc., which offers services to create collaborative Web sites called wikis. It's more of a doorway into services, from the user-written reference site Wikipedia to the community organizing service Meetup to the folksy classifieds site Craigslist. As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, "They Google (GOOG ), Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share. In other words, the Web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs."
Posted on September 19, 2005
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PayPal Founder Developing Photo-Sharing Service
ZDNet reports that PayPal co-founder Max Levchin is now developing a new photo-sharing service called Slide. Slide is entering a crowded field that includes leaders like Flickr, Webshots and Snapfish. ZDNet says Slide will offer some unique features to distinguish themselves from the crowd such as the "playback" slide show feature.
Slide's "playback," or slide show, feature is unique too, Levchin said. The desktop toolbar looks like a strip of film with different photos in each frame, and it continually scrolls through a trove of stored images that people would probably rarely view otherwise. When consumers mouse over a particular shot, the slide show pauses and enlarges the image. The program gives people the option of e-mailing the photo from there.
The company plans to let members incorporate video, text and news headlines with photos too, creating multimedia "channels."
"I want it to be the preferred way people share digital media with each other," Levchin said, describing his vision for Slide.
For now, Slide works only on Windows computers, but the company is working on versions for the Macintosh.
Posted on August 29, 2005
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Shutterfly to Offer Members Free Photo Sharing Webpages
EcommerceTimes.com reports that Shutterfly is going to offer its members free webpages where they can display their photos. This will place Shutterfly in competition with popular photo sharing tools like Flickr, Shoebox and SmugMug.com.
Shutterfly Collections, as the service is known, enables users to create their own Web addresses where they can store digital pictures and invite friends, relatives and others to view them. The company had previously offered a single photo album, but now will let users create two personalized Web URLs where they can store and share an unlimited number of virtual photo albums.
Shutterfly customers can choose to control access by setting password requirements to enable viewing of some photographs. They can also enable others to add photographs or comments to their online albums.
Posted on August 2, 2005
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Webshots Launches Community Photo Sharing Service
Webshots, a popular online photo storage tool now owned by CNET, has launched Shoebox, a photo community and online photo sharing tool. The service also allows users to tag photographs like Flickr. This page lists some of the most recent Shoebox photographs and tags. (Via Camera2Web.com)
Posted on July 17, 2005
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Tickle Launches Ringo Photo-Sharing Tool
Tickle Inc. has announced the launch of Ringo, which helps friends and family connect online. The utility offers secure address book and photo-sharing features that regularly updates friends, family and co-workers when an addition is made to their contact information or photos. Tickle Inc. also offers Tickle.com, a matchmaking and social networking service.Posted on April 11, 2005
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New Media Storage Website Launches
Ourmedia.org has launched as a provider of free storage and free bandwidth for videos, audio files, photos, text and software. Visitors to the site can also browse the available media. The site's developers have an interesting strategy for developing the website: "Instead of taking a year or more to produce a polished site, we decided to plant a flag in the ground, open our doors and say: Come help us build it."Posted on March 28, 2005
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