Tableau is an open source application that makes building lightbox style photo galleries easy.

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Oh that Flickr, they sure do know how to lure a girl and make her stay in love with them. According to the Flickr blog pro users now have unlimited uploads, free users now have 100MB of uploads per month and gift certificates to new or existing Flickr members are now super simple to buy. Flickr I heart you.

It's now easier than ever to spread joy this holiday season by giving the Gift of Flickr. You can purchase a special activation code that you can give to anyone, whether or not they have an existing Flickr account. We've even created a special Gift Certifcate card that you can print out yourself, fold up and stuff in a stocking, under a tree or hidden away for after the candles are lit (of course, you can also send the gift code in an email).

And it's even better to give the gift of Flickr since now your recipients will get unlimited uploads -- the two gigabyte monthly limit is no more (yep, pro users have no limits on how many photos they can upload)! At the same time, we've upped the limit for free account members as well, from 20MB per month up to 100MB (yep, five times more)!

The Flickr team also wants to take this opportunity to thank you for a wonderful year and wish you and yours all the best of the season. Yay!

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Blogger Chris Heilmann shares his code for creating unobtrusive (meaning not ugly) Dynamic Flickr Badges.

Being bored yesterday night, I thought that it would be really cool to have a flickr badge that can be navigated (x pictures forward and backward), has a preview in middle size mode (lightbox style) and is generally nicely unobtrusive.

Tags: photography, flickr, photo sharing

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Still in beta photo sharing software KoffeePhoto has some interesting features that make it worth a look. It's a combination organizer, backup service and presentation tool. Organize your photos into albums, save them on KoffeePhoto's p2p network, share your albums, present slideshows and receive comments on your photos, and order prints. Unlike many photo sharing apps I've seen this one supports Windows, Mac, and Linux (!).

A word of caution: p2p networks are a little scary to some people and you should make sure you're very comfortable using one (and all your necessary security protocols are in place) before you sign up.

Tags: photography, KoffeePhoto, photo sharing

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JPG Magazine recently turned 2 years old and relaunched. The new 2.0 version of JPG includes much better submision and uploading procedures, more interactivity, payments for contributors and most excitingly a voting system to help choose photos for upcoming issues. They've also included a sweet system for promoting your submissions (cough, cough) on your website.

But not content being just a magazine JPG is expanding its self-definition

JPG is a magazine. It's published 6 times a year by 8020 Publishing. Check out the back issues. The photos in the magazine come from you!

JPG is a website. Here any photographer can join and upload photos to their member page. You can also submit your photos to issues and themes for consideration in the magazine.

JPG is a community. JPG exists because of, and exclusively for, photographers like you. Without you, we're nothing.

Tags: photography, JPG Magazine

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New printing startup MOO is offerning 10 free mini cards to Flickr Pro members as a way of introduction to their new service.

MOO has joined forces with Flickr, the world’s largest online photo sharing community, to offer members a new way to share their Flickr information and photos offline. Hooray!

Flickr MiniCards use MOO’s revolutionary multipack technology to produce sets of small, customised calling cards: each card featuring a different photo from the last.

Flickr Mini Cards

Tags: photo sharing, moo, photography, Flickr

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photofront is a cool online application that takes your Flickr sets and turns them into very slick, flash based galleries. The galleries are beautiful, navigation is easy and intuitive and setup takes less than 2 minutes. You select which Flickr sets get turned into galleries so this application makes it dead simple to create very professional, very good looking photography portfolios or just really cool slideshows, much cooler than the default Flickr ones.

photofront is free but the paid version (one time $10 fee) gives you access to pro features like removing ads from your galleries and allowing you to customize gallery titles and subtitles. Well worth the $10.

Tags: photo sharing, photofront, photography, Flickr

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Last year I abruptly stopped viewing two photoblogs I had previously enjoyed very much. The reason I stopped looking? I was overwhelmed by how cruel people can be. That sounds so naive and childish but it's the truth. In the first instance the photographer had posted a photo of a little girl with a chubby belly in her bathing suit at the beach. The girl was smiling and beautiful. The photographer didn't see so much beauty and instead made a cruel comment about her stomach and weight. Many of the comments on the photo were worse. Much, much worse. Apparently the world really hates fat people, even fat little girls enjoying a day at the beach, and the commentors had no hesitation about spewing extremely cruel comments about a child whose photo had been posted on the internet. I was horrified at the things the people would say and even more so that the photographer seemed to have posted the photo just to get the kind of reaction he got.

The other photoblog I stopped viewing is very popular and I've seen many people admiring the photographer's work. The post that turned me off the photographer was of an older women in summer enjoying an afternoon out. She was wearing quite small, tight clothes and looked as though she'd been drinking quite a bit at the bar. Did the photographer take and post the photo just to elicit cruel comments about the woman? Honestly I don't know but my gut says yes. I think he took and posted the photo to make fun of her and the internet loves nothing more than a pile on.

I myself have taken and posted a photo of people because their appearance made me chuckle. The difference I think is that I was doing it good naturedly. I didn't want people to say mean things about the women in my photo and if anybody had I would have deleted the comment and pointed out that cruelty is not what my photography is about.

I mention this now because there seems to be a semi-common thread in photoblogs and Flickr of posting pictures that are very unflattering to the subjects or that were taken with the express purpose of mean spiritedly making fun of the subject. Or photos are posted and the comments immediately go into disparaging, cruel remarks about the subject and the photographer doesn't intervene and human kindness goes right out the window.

The ease and immediacy of digital cameras and online photo sharing tools seem to allow the lowest common denominator to creep into our photographic endeavors. An easy picture for a quick laugh, or a fast growing cruelty filled comment thread that pulls in traffic are easy enough to accomplish. That doesn't make them right though. I respect the medium of photography and enjoy photoblogging too much to enjoy them become simple tools for cruelty.

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Even though I do think the photo sharing market is getting crowded with Flickr clones, wannabes and also rans I try to check out all the new ones I find just in case something really is groundbreaking and cool. It's not often I find something that meets those criteria but Tabblo does. Tabblo is billed as "a brand new way to tell a story with your photos." The Wall Street Journal says "If you want people to see your photos in a more-personalized way, Tabblo is a good service that will change the way you look at online photo sharing."

Tabblo is Web 2.0 and ajaxified to the core and I mean that in a good way. It's extremely intuitive and easy to accomplish the main site objective which is to share photos in a different way. That different way is by arranging photos into tabblos or collages and photo essays with text. The mechanism behind building displays is incredibly easy and powerful. You can choose background colors, layouts, rotate images, do minor image effects (convert to sepia for example). A great example of the flexibility tabblos offer is Title IX from a photographer who was working for the Orlando Sentinel. Title IX is his photo essay representing "a year long personal project" commemorating the anniversary of Title IX. The obvious advantage to this method of display instead of say a Flickr set slide show is the extreme flexibility in layout and design and the option of adding text among images.

In addition to the cool factor of the photo displays themselves it's extremely simple in Tabblo to set privacy controls, integrate your photos from Flickr, upload pictures from popular photo apps like Picasa, tag and search images and all the other things you'd expect from a next generation photo sharing service, like the ability to order prints. In the short time I've played with the service all of the options and tool integrate seamlessly and provide a really great user experience.

Though it's probably not going to replace Flickr as my go-to photo sharing service Tabblo is on my list of useful tools. When I want the creative flexibility to very easily create photo essays and collages (a post-family Christmas photo collage from which family members can order their own prints comes to mind) Tabblo is definitely where I'll turn.

Tags: photo sharing, tabblo, photography

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Photo sharing site Fotki describes itself thusly "Fotki is a media social network and a top-five photo-sharing site in the world by the number of registered users, traffic and number of stored pictures, according to Google and Alexa." Um, ok. Features listed include unlimited photo-storage space, cheapest photo printing, create albums, store videos, keep blogs, participate in photo contests. There is a free and a paid account level but I couldn't find a listing of the differences between the two or the price of the paid membership. I find the interface muddled and the whole service unclear but there seems to be a loyal membership that enjoys the site. Perhaps it's the flexibility of look and design for photo and album displays they like.

Tags: photo sharing, photography, fotki

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Flickrshow creates simple javascript slideshows of your Flickr sets. Simply put in the id number for the set (found at the end of the set's url), choose a couple of details and flickrshow spits out the necessary code and tells you were to put it within your site's html. Very simple, very cool and very useful.

Tags: flickr, photogrpahy, slideshow, flickrshow

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Google has just launched a beta version of Picasa Web Albums. By invitation only so far, the service gives users 250MB of online storage for web photo albums created by Picasa, Google's desktop photo application.

Sign up to request an invitation to the beta trial at the Picasa Web Albums site.

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The changes to Flickr's navigation announced last week have gone live. I'm not sure how I feel about the navigation changes but I love the new Organizr.

And finally Flickr has lost the beta label that's been a constant presence since public launch. Now...it's gamma. I don't think I've ever been involved with gamma software before so I had to check Wikipedia for a definition:

To many software testers, Gamma testing is an informal phrase that refers derisively to the release of "buggy" or defect-ridden products. It is not a term of art among testers, but rather an example of referential humor.) Gamma, delta, and omega are, respectively, the third, fourth, and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Some users disparagingly refer to release candidates and even final "point oh" releases as "gamma test" software, suggesting that the developer has chosen to use its customers to test software that is not truly ready for general release.

Hmmm.

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In the pointless yet entertaining category you can insert your photos into the Kodak museum commercial. It's not as impressive as you might hope but the last shot is pretty cool with your "most dramatic image."

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On the FlickrBlog today George said changes to the navigation and user interface were needed because "As Flickr grew organically, the site became a little, well ... "rambly" over the years." So the rambly-ness is being addressed and changes are coming. And in a completely grown up responsibility vein Flickr is giving advanced warning about the changes.

Continue reading "Flickr Grows Up: Navigation and UI Changes Coming Next Week" »

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For Christmas a couple years ago I used MyPublisher to make a book of family photographs for my grandmother. She was overwhelmed by it, even if I wasn't. The layout was fine, the quality of the pages and the cover was fine. It was all just fine. Not really great or spectacular but fine. Fine wasn't really what I want in a book of my photography so I've never printed another book with MyPublisher. I've checked out the Flickr option through Qoop but it seems a bit limiting (though the mini books look tasty) so I haven't actually spent money trying it. And since I don't have iPhoto, book publishing for me has been on the back burner.

Continue reading "Blurb Books; iPhoto and MyPublisher Alternative" »

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Flickr gives you the option of sharing detailed technical information about images by displaying Exif data. When this option is enabled by a photographer you're able to follow the "more properties" link (found under the Additional Information heading for each photo) and get a wealth of information about aperture, shutter speed, focal length, iso settings and camera model.

Most of the time this is more than enough information to figure out what you want to know. But what if you're aren't familir with the camera model? Maybe you want to know if it is a point and shoot, or dslr, or something else? If you're in the market for a new camera and you're impressed with the image quality you've just seen then you you might want to know how big is it physically and what resolution it's capable of. You can find all that info of course through google but easier is better right?

Continue reading "Show Me That Camera: Improving Flickr's More Properties Page" »

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FilmLoop is free, downloadable program the creates and runs a stock ticker like photo strip across your desktop. Loops you create are automatically uploaded to the FilmLoop Network so you can share your loop with others. Or you can upload loops to your blog.

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