photos

Create complex tiled images to be shared with others

Body Symbol Free: The Romantic Heart Photo Booth is an app that guides you in creating romantic photos. It does this by helping you shape your body into different positions that then are mosaicked into a larger photo of a heart, for example. Body Symbol Free: The Romantic Heart Photo Booth is a free app available from the App Store; it installs quickly.

The intent of Body Symbol Free: The Romantic Heart Photo Booth is to help you position your body by matching an onscreen outline. These images are then combined into a larger tiled image to match a shape … Read more

Flayvr for iOS brings organization to your Camera Roll

Note to Apple: Nice job with the cameras and all, but Camera Roll? Not so great.

See, browsing photos on an iDevice kind of sucks. You're stuck either swiping through tiny, disorganized thumbnails or paging through endless full-screen snapshots to find what you're after.

Flayvr for iOS turns your Camera Roll into nicely organized albums, offering a much cooler way to view and share your snapshots.

When you run the app, it automatically groups your photos by date and presents them in a scrolling list. Each dated group (or "flayvr") consists of a title and four … Read more

Upload a Photo Sphere to Google Maps using Android Jelly Bean

Android 4.2 Jelly Bean includes a new camera feature called Photo Sphere. With the feature, users can take 360-degree panoramic photos in just a few minutes. Creating a sphere is easy: launch the camera app and select the Photo Sphere icon. Your Android device will show you where to point the camera, you hold still for a few seconds and then you move on to the next mark, or dot. It essentially translates into a game of connect the dots, where a photo is taken at each dot. Once you're done, your phone will stitch the photos together … Read more

How to bold comments and captions in Instagram

When leaving a comment on an Instagram photo, especially one with a lot of comments, it can be difficult to ensure that your comment stands out in the crowd. It seems a lot of Instagram users think the best way to gain followers is to leave comments on popular photos. I've always said I'll know I've made it on Instagram when one of my photos contains countless comments full of nothing but Emoji and #teamfollowback tags.

Thanks to a post on Tags For Likes, you can emphasize your point or comment by using a bold font on … Read more

Apple issues Aperture bug fix update

If you use Apple's Aperture professional photo management program for OS X, then a new update is available that addresses a number of bugs with the previous release.

The update focuses around managing content from shared photo streams, including detecting faces, managing where streams are shared, and incorporating more cross-stream content management.

In addition to stream focus, the update fixes a number of problems with metadata management, resolution and use of secondary displays, and color profile management. The full list of addressed features is the following:

Photos received via My Photo Stream or shared streams can now be added … Read more

3D photo booth prints your whole body pose

Flat photos are so last year. What may be the world's first 3D photo booth is about to open in Japan. The Omote 3D photo booth creates action-figure-size versions of posing people.

Unlike an old-fashioned photo booth, you will only get one "photo." This might not be the best way to capture a proposal, for example. You and your soon-to-be-fiance would just be standing there as you wait the 15 minutes it takes for the 3D scanner to capture your image.… Read more

Lightroom 4.3 test version gets partial Retina support

A test version of Adobe Systems' Lightroom 4.3 has added partial support for Apple's Retina displays and other high-resolution screens.

The Lightroom 4.3 release candidate, available on Adobe Labs, shows photos in the develop module so that one pixel in the original photo occupies one pixel on the screen. That means a much sharper and detailed image than with the older Lightroom 4.2, which scales images so that one pixel on the photo occupies four pixels on the screen.

I was worried that Adobe would Retina support for Lightroom 5, which presumably will be a paid … Read more

Say 'Cheep'! Bird Photo Booth for high-tech bird watchers

Wild birds are notoriously fickle photography subjects. Getting up-close pics usually requires an expensive camera, a honking zoom lens, and the ability to hold extremely still for long periods of time.

The $149 Bird Photo Booth on Kickstarter combines a bird-feeding platform with a place to stash a camera for taking avian glamor shots without upsetting the skittish subjects. The device comes with foam insert adapters for iPhone, iPod Touch, and GoPro cameras. A universal Android insert is under development.… Read more

Facebook pushes you to vote

Monday's CNET Update has the power:

The CNET New York office has reopened, and it's great to be back to give you today's tech news roundup:

- Apple sold 3 million iPads in the three days since new models went on sale. That number includes the sales of two models: the iPad Mini fourth-generation iPad. But the bulk of the sales are estimated to be for the smaller tablet.

- Tuesday is election day in the U.S., so prepare to be bombarded with voting reminders and peer pressure on social media. Facebook is making a big push … Read more

Beyond hashtags: Instagram's next challenge is tackling big data

SAN FRANCISCO -- Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said his company's big hurdle is knowing how to mine the constant stream of photos being uploaded each day to the popular network.

"Instagram isn't necessarily a photo company, or a communications company as I like to say, we're also going to be a big data company," he said today at the GigaOm Road Map conference in San Francisco.

Systrom said the company, recently purchased by Facebook, needs to find better ways to organize the billions of photos shared on Instagram. That means looking beyond hashtags for looking … Read more