photo-sharing

Google has announced the shutdown of Hello, a sort of photo-messaging service that became part of the Mountain View family when Google acquired Picasa in 2004.

"All good things come to an end," a placeholder on the Hello.com home page says. "So it is with sadness that we say goodbye to Hello." Guess they weren't so sad that they felt the need to steer clear of goofy plays on words. Hello will fade away on May 15, though Google's photo-sharing service Picasa remains otherwise intact.

"We originally embarked on a mission to … Read more

Update: Adobe has informed us that while the new Flickr connection isn't live yet, it will be very soon. We will provide another update when we have confirmed that it is live.

When Adobe launched Photoshop Express at the end of March, it indicated that Flickr support would be next on the agenda, and today the company can cross that item off its to-do list. With the capability to round-trip photos into PSE for editing and back out to its site, Flickr joins Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa in the ranks of Photoshop Express supporters. Additionally, users of Photoshop Express … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In return for the huge amount of work Flickr users do to tag photos on the popular photo-sharing site, they should get the benefit of the algorithms the service uses to bring meaning to the data.

That's how at least some at Flickr feel, according to Kakul Srivastava, the service's director of product management said in her talk, "The next generation of tagging: Searching and discovering a better user experience," at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday.

The idea behind that theory is that as Flickr users proactively add tags to countless millions of … Read more

Oosah is a solid Flash-based media manager that lets you create little slide shows and share pictures with your friends. It competes with some pretty good applications, such as Flektor, Slide, and Splashcast, though, and isn't likely to rocket to superstardom as just another media destination site.

But a new feature, being introduced today, takes Oosah to a whole different place: It lets you drag images between your PC and online accounts, such as Flickr and Facebook, or even directly between your online accounts, avoiding your PC and your Oosah storage allotment. That's not just new and cool, … Read more

Flickr announced today that they now support video sharing to go along with their popular photo sharing services. The option is only available to "Pro" accounts, however, so those using the service on the free level will not have the option. Adding video support not only encourages the upgrade to the pro account, but it also takes an obvious swipe at YouTube.

Says the announcement on the Flickr Blog, "If you're a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream...90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary … Read more

I'm always on the lookout for new ways to host images for quick and dirty sharing. Worth checking out is Photie, which is an incredibly simple photo host. It's light on features, but offers unlimited storage and file sizes (great for people with 14 megapixel SLRs), along with generous sharing options both for downloading shots and hosting on external sites and social networks.

What might be its killer feature, however, is that it gives you a detailed listing of when and where your photos have been viewed. It's something you find on YouTube and Viddler for videos, … Read more

Tiny Pictures, a company that operates a mobile media-sharing site called Radar, announced on Monday that it has pulled in $7.2 million in Series B funding. The funding round was led by Valley stalwart Draper Fisher Jurvetson; previous investor Mohr Davidow Ventures also contributed.

Radar's service lets users shoot mobile photos and videos to its site through e-mail and mobile messaging. All photos on Radar are automatically friends-only; members of a user's friends list can instantly see uploaded content and comment on it from their PCs or mobile phones.

It looks as if Radar has some fairly … Read more

Do we really need another outlet for photo sharing? Shutterfly thinks so.

The photo-printing service, best known for publishing custom calendars, albums, posters, and other photography-infused goods, announced on Wednesday the launch of "Shutterfly Gallery," a social network that is sort of like a Flickr for the scrapbooking set.

Shutterfly Gallery is the first major project launched since the publicly traded company acquired Nexo Systems, a Web site personalization start-up. Nexo's technology has provided the technology for the new social-networking arm of Shutterfly.

Shutterfly Gallery encourages "storytelling" (see, I told you it would appeal to … Read more

Nokia announced a new feature to its Ovi service at GSMA. Besides the existing Nokia Music Store and the N-Gage gaming service, Ovi now allows you to upload photos from your camera phone or a PC to an online community. Similar to services like Flickr, Ovi will allow users to interact with each other and share shots. Ovi will support more than 100 media types, and users will be offered unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth for uploads. The only catch is that you'll need a Series 60, third-edition Nokia phone. Check out the Ovi Web site for more details. … Read more