The official Flickr app for iPhone and iPod Touch offers search, browse, and upload features.
Better late than never? Following in the footsteps of countless third-party efforts, Flickr has finally made its official debut in the App Store.
The app hits the ground running--make that scrolling--with a slick Ken Burns-style slideshow of hand-picked images from the site.
An initial tap of the Recent, You, or Contacts button along the bottom leads you through a one-time authorization process (which requires a visit to Safari), after which you gain access to the respective user-account features on Flickr.
You can also search for photos and videos, of course, and do all the usual stuff with whatever you find: add to favorites, share via e-mail, leave a comment, etc.
Of course, the main appeal here is uploading: You can snap and upload a photo on the fly or choose an existing snapshot from your library. The app lets you assign the photo to a set, add tags (including a geotag from your current location), and choose a privacy level.
In short, the official Flickr app does just about everything you'd want it to (except batch uploads, that is), and with simplicity and style. It's free, of course, and it works with both free and Pro accounts.
So this begs the question: is there an existing third-party app that "does Flickr" better than Flickr's own app? Share your thoughts in the comments.
The iPhone has risen to prominence on Flickr, rivaling most SLRs in popularity. These statistics from Yahoo cover the last 12 months.
(Credit: Yahoo)
The iPhone is the mobile device of choice these days for doing most things that need a network. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the phone has carved out a prominent place on Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr.
The Flickr Camera Finder, Yahoo's statistical counter of camera use among its members, shows that since the arrival of the iPhone 3G model earlier this year, the phone has vaulted not only over all other camera phones, trouncing the Nokia N95 in second place, but also almost all ordinary cameras.
That's a notable accomplishment. I've been watching the Flickr Camera Finder for two years, and that's the first time I recall a camera phone placing so highly. The top ranks have been dominated by SLRs, the camera of choice for many of Flickr's heaviest users.
With the debut of the 3G model, Apple's iPhone surged to a commanding lead among camera phones used at Flickr. These statistics from Yahoo cover the last 12 months.
(Credit: Yahoo)Right now the iPhone is in a virtual tie with Canon's Rebel XT and Nikon's D80, two SLRs whose popularity is waning with the arrival of newer models from the dominant makers of such cameras. Only Canon's newer Rebel XTi outranks the iPhone.
Though the trajectory is clear, there are caveats. First, Flickr measures popularity on the basis of the number of users who've uploaded a photo on a given day. In other words, the camera used by a person who uploads one photo a day will fare better than one who uploads 100 pictures one day a month. Second, many camera phones don't identify themselves to Flickr, so their use isn't logged. Last, these statistics fluctuate daily, and who knows what kind of anomalous behavior is going on during the holidays.
The total number of photos uploaded from the Rebel XTi is about 51 million, compared with 5.8 million for the iPhone. However, there are nearly 3,000 people uploading daily from their iPhone compared with about 6,500 for the XTi.
My guess is the iPhone's better-than-average network abilities are responsible for the prominence. For the same reason, iPhone users also use Google Maps and other online services more than most mobile device users. The BlackBerry is good at e-mail, but the Internet has other attractions.
What's more interesting is extrapolating from the trend. Certainly the iPhone's image quality doesn't hold a candle to even old point-and-shoots, much less new SLRs, but the phone taps straight into the social features of Flickr--the ability to photographically share with friends and family what's going on in your life, for example. There are innumerable expert photographers at Flickr, but it looks like the yet larger herd of ordinary snapshooters are going to leave them in the dust once liberated with the ability to post pictures at will.
I sent my iPhone photos to Flickr using the site's upload-by-e-mail service (see Yahoo's instructions), but there are several iPhone applications that will do it for you if you prefer. Apple's photo e-mailing software scales photos to 640x480, but I don't mind, given feeble image quality and the unlikelihood that these shots will ever make their way beyond a computer screen.
Photoshop Elements 7 prominently promotes Adobe's Photoshop.com online service.
Adobe Systems has begun shipping its enthusiast-oriented Photoshop Elements 7 image-editing software and Premiere Elements 7 video-editing software--and is offering a promotion to try to lure users to its online Photoshop.com site as well.
The Elements software costs $99.99 each or $149.99 as a bundle. New with this version, Adobe also is offering a $179.99 price that includes a one-year Photoshop.com Plus membership. Ordinarily, a Photoshop.com Plus subscription costs $49.99 a year, so you're basically getting a $20 price break, at least until the time comes to renew for another year.
Photoshop.com offers tutorials, online albums for backing up and sharing your shots, and access to the Photoshop Express online editing tool. The free basic version comes with 2GB of storage, and the Plus level comes with 20GB of storage.
Pricing isn't the only promotion. CNET reviewer Lori Grunin found it annoying how prominently Elements touts the online option in the software itself.
... Read more
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
There are several media-pushing services represented at the opening of the iTunes App Store, each with their own combination of supported sites. ShoZu (covered here) remains the whopper of them all with support for roughly 30 popular social sites and services. There are the major players, of course--Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, Blogger, Picasa, LiveJournal--but ShoZu isn't too high and mighty to upload text and images to some of the more niche guys, like Box.Net qipit, Snapfish, and SmugMug.
With so many services ready to cram into an app interface, things could get tangled up fast. But they don't, partly due to the iPhone's nice big screen and partly due to a structure designed to keep order. Frequent uploaders can automate multi-platform-pushing by going online and adding up to 10 child services to be copied each time media is posted to the parent service.
My biggest gripe? That while you can sign up for a ShoZu account from the iPhone itself, you have to visit the Web site to arrange for multi-pinging. It's the glue that ties ShoZu together for many users, and is something they'll need to add to truly be a standalone app on the iPhone.
The complete package
(Credit: Tuvie.com)The Jive was created by Ben Arent, a college student, over a six-month period as part of his product design degree. The concept was designed to get elderly technophobes connected to their friends and family without feeling overwhelmed of learning how to use social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. It would essentially be their own type of social networking.
The unit itself is referred to as "Betty"--a steel-cased monitor with three magnetic sensors, to help recognize the events in the program, making it a tangible interface. The internal hardware is a stripped-down Dell Latitude laptop. Getting online is made simple with a one-plug router that has a preloaded ISP setting, for a true plug-and-play experience.
On the bottom of the monitor are 11 available slots used to store a person's "friend passes." Each friend pass is embedded with a radio frequency identity tag used to link a persons digital life to a physical object. The current development of Betty has to have a separate RFID reader, but future generations would have these RFID antennas built into the monitor. A mouse isn't needed for this to work. When the friend pass is placed onto Betty's display, the screen will automatically know who that person is and upload updates about that person.
Apparently, geriatric1927 (of YouTube fame), was used as the first official elderly product tester for Jive, according to Arent. One can only wonder if this will roll over to the kid market in the future. Dress it up as SpongeBob Squarepants, and, chances are, they'll eat it up.
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 albums will now be able to create multiple versions of a given image, a much-requested feature, according to Adobe.
Those announcements probably didn't feel Flash-y enough for the company, though, so Adobe simultaneously announced an embeddable player for virally marketing Photoshop Express posting your photos to home pages and blogs in glitzy slide shows. Given the relative simplicity of the application and broad appeal of photo sharing, this capability also sounds like a natural springboard for companies looking to dip their toes into Open Screen Project development--once Adobe releases the relevant API information, of course.
(Credit:
SA Steve)
While studying abroad in Europe several years ago, one of my favorite things to photograph were warning signs with stick figures. For some reason they're a lot more prominent outside of the United States, and in many cases, warnings of death, dismemberment, or other forms of bodily harm are made amusing when presented in the form of faceless figures. A Flickr group for such signs has been knocking about since 2004. It's accumulated nearly 14,000 shots, many of which are outlandish or otherwise far funnier than they should be given the intended warning.
Up until today, only Windows Mobile 5 and 6 and BlackBerry users could take CellSpin's mobile blogging and media-sharing platform for, well, a spin. On Thursday the San Jose, Calif. company announced a big addition to the family: phones on the Symbian platform.
Adding Symbian cell phones, many of them high-end, brings CellSpin's free beta service to over 300 handsets and over 30 carriers worldwide.
CellSpinners can quickly share photos, video, text, and audio to Blogger, eBay, Facebook, YouTube, Picasa, LiveJournal, Flickr, and Windows Live Spaces, with more partnerships on the way. Of course, there are a few limitations brought on by the partner sites. YouTube only accepts video submissions, for example, and photos are the only media that can be uploaded to Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook. The blogging sites and eBay accept all four media types.
Flickr has temporarily disabled PhotoShelter's Flickr import tool until it fully complies with its API usage guidelines.
(Credit: PhotoShelter)Earlier today I wrote about a new tool that PhotoShelter announced to let its customers migrate images from Flickr accounts to their PhotoShelter Personal Archives. Since then, Flickr has disabled the tool. A company spokesperson for Flickr said, "Photoshelter did not follow the guidelines outlined by Flickr around API usage. We are currently working with them to correct the issue."
My contact at PhotoShelter said that the company is working on the problem and a message on the new tool's page notes that, "Flickr has temporarily disabled this feature. We are working to address it and apologize for the outage." In my previous post I said that it was great to see two photo sharing services find a way to play nicely together. I guess we'll just have to be patient while they synchronize their playbooks.
A vintage picture of yours truly from back in the moustache era and given the Warholizer treatment.
(Credit: Warholizer)Chances are you're not going to match the influence over the art world that Andy Warhol did with his pop-art pictures of Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, but at least you can have some of the fun.
BigHugeLabs has added a "Warholizer" tool that lets you upload a photo or modify one hosted at Flickr or Photobucket so it becomes a tribute to Warhol's bright, posterized art.
BigHugeLabs already offers a large collection of entertaining photo-effect tools. Along with the Warholizer, my favorites include the mock motivational poster maker, the ID badge maker, the palette generator (is there a way to feed this into Adobe Systems' Kuler?), and the picture cube creator.
