Category: Photo

If you're a blogger, a designer, or just someone who uses a lot of images from Flickr, you might want to check out ViewFinder. ViewFinder is a Mac app that offers speedy searches of Flickr, using tags, titles and descriptions. It even lets you limit your search to Creative Commons-licensed images, and automatically generates attributions for you, so you can properly credit the work you download. ...

Flickr, like all social networks, can be gamed. Yes, you can simply upload photos to share them with friends and family, but for many users -- the Flickrites -- there's a whole lot more to it than that. For the elite few -- the Flickr version of 'social media experts' -- it's all about garnering exposure, and thus accruing views and comments. Ultimately, I guess there are dreams and delusions of ...

Apple recently let loose an update for iPhoto '11, which should prevent the database corruption bug that a few vocal users experienced upon firing up the new version for the first time. It's a pretty serious error if you happen to lose your entire photo library just because iPhoto has to "upgrade your library," so let's hope Apple's put this one to bed. Still, if you haven't upgraded yet, it ...

Starting today, signing up for Flickr is possible using Google accounts. This feature is rolling out as part of a new push from Flickr to support OpenID. Google is the first partner, but support for more services is expected in the future. Up until now, Yahoo-owned Flickr required a Yahoo ID to use. As you can see in the screenshot to the right, this is now also possible using an existing ...

Flickriver was briefly mentioned on Download Squad back in 2007, but it really deserves its own post. It's a very simple interface for browsing Flickr photos which displays a bunch of photos on the page, and you scroll down to view them. As you near the bottom, more photos are loaded so that you can just keep scrolling. This is by no means a new trick, but I find it very convenient and easy to ...

Blurb, the king of self-published coffee table books, has just launched a new Web-based tool: Bookify. The downloadable desktop app Blurb BookSmart still exists -- and it's still the preferred tool for complex book layouts -- but for speed, ease of use and convenience, Bookify is now the thing to use. The road to glossy, self-published narcissism begins by simply selecting the size and shape ...

There are two things I've always wanted to try, but never had the guts to actually do: cut my hair short and get a tattoo. I also want to bungee jump, but that's not something that computers can really help with, so let's stick to hair and tattoos... It's the permanence of it all. Sure, hair might grow back -- and you can remove tattoos with lasers -- but you're still looking at weeks or months ...

Min.us does one thing, and it does it surprisingly well: it shares images. Via the magic of HTML5 -- as long as you're using Firefox 3.6, Google Chrome, or Internet Explorer 9 -- you can simply drag and drop images into Min.us. Other than watch your gallery take shape (here's mine), there isn't much else you can do. You can rename your gallery and change the order of the images ... but that's ...

Here at Download Squad, we're always on the lookout for cool little mobile apps that are both fun to use and useful. Sometimes that involves tickling our creative side and that's where Instagram comes in. Instagram, like many other apps available on the iPhone, allows you to take an image and apply effect filters to it. Some like 'Lord Kelvin" age your photo, others such as "Inkwell" desaturate ...

Google recently announced the WebP image format boasting 40% greater image compression over JPEG and JPEG2000, and just this morning we covered a plug-in that brings browser support for the fledgling standard. Now Pixelmator, the slick Mac image editing suite that we've covered several times before, has added "the world's first" WebP compatibility into its armory. In the words of the Pixelmator ...

Picnik, a Web-based photo manipulation service that Google acquired back in March, has just received a bunch of new Halloweenesque effects, stickers, fonts. After uploading a photo, you can now add such fantastic effects as 'vampire eyes', 'draculan dermis', fangs or 'zombify 2.0'. As you can see above, you can create some pretty scary results! Admittedly my face doesn't require much help to ...

I'm a big fan of Gmail's HTML5-powered drag-and-drop attachment feature, and I've been waiting to see it pop up in other Web apps. Thanks to Ryan Wagner over at CyberNet, I discovered DropMocks -- an amazingly simple little photo sharing site that offers the same functionality. Open your pictures folder, select a few images, and drag them onto a DropMocks tab in a supported browser (Firefox ...

If you've ever taken a blurry photo and wished you had focused it differently, Adobe's new Plenoptic technology could be just what you need. It combines a custom lens for your camera and a software component for your Mac or PC, and allows you to focus on anything you want, after you've shot the photo. I'm not clear on all the technical details, but the basic idea is that Plenoptic captures ...

Originally launched back in August (yes, we missed it!), the Bing Dynamic theme pack is a quick and easy way to get the latest and greatest Bing photos pasted all over your Windows 7 desktop wallpaper. Four new images were added to the rotation today, but I honestly have no idea how many images are actually part of the pack. Apparently two new images are added every week -- it uses an RSS feed ...

At a rather awesome price of $149 (or $119 after mail-in rebate!!!), the latest cut-down versions of Photoshop and Premiere are now available for both Windows and Mac as a bundle. Individually, each app costs $99. Photoshop Elements 9 is adapted from Photoshop CS5, and it features the delicious 'Content Aware' Fill and Spot Healing that photographers the world over have no doubt been waiting ...