Underexposed

I use and enjoy Flickr. But with each passing month it worries me more that when I visit a photo page on the Yahoo photo-sharing site, it looks essentially identical to when I first started using it four years ago.

Flickr has typical online photo site abilities to upload, share, and print photos. What sets it apart, though, are features that make Flickr a community: discussions in comments below photos, groups for like-minded photographers to share their work, and social networking attributes that let people stay on top of their contacts' doings.

Flickr revamped members' home pages starting last September, drawing more attention to recent activity such as people who added you as a contact or who commented on your photos. The change was smart: Flickr was a socially wired site before social networking became all the rage, and photography is a great way for people to stay engaged with their friends and relations.

But now it's time for the rest of the upgrade. Here's what pains me most:

• The photo page. With Flickr, you can have large photos or you can have comments and navigation, but you can't have both. Photos are best viewed larger than Flickr's default 500-pixels width. Clicking "all sizes" to see lavishly large views sends you down browser dead end: you'll have to click the back button when it's time to add comments or navigate to the next photo.

• The photostream page. Flickr organizes your photos as one giant filmstrip called the photostream. But viewing somebody's most recent shots on the photostream page again forces you back into the small-monitor past. The default view for me shows 18 small photos, 10 sets, and an ocean of white space even on my laptop.

• The profile page. I rarely look at people's profile pages unless I'm trying to contact them or figure out who's behind a cryptic username. But there should be a way to make the profile page the anchor of a Flickr user's online identity, the public face presented to Flickr users. People judge others by their photostreams, which in my case these days is more about family photos than works of art or moving photojournalism, so I'd like to show them an automatically updated page of my top picks instead.

Fortunately, Flickr is working on several improvements detailed below by product strategy chief Matthew Rothenberg. But he kept mum about timing: "We're planning to be progressively rolling out enhancements over time," he said.

Show 'em how it's done
"Innovation happens elsewhere" is a worn-out Silicon Valley business cliche, but there's some truth to it. It's especially appropriate for Flickr, because the site lets others built atop it using Flickr's API, or application programming interface. Tasks such as flipping through a person's photos, adding comments, looking up interesting shots, and uploading photos all can be done without having to touch Flickr directly.

The Flickroom beta software presents a new face on Yahoo's photo-sharing site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The power of the Flickr API was shown most clearly to me a year and a half ago, when I tried Photophlow, a site that makes Flickr into a photo-centric chat room. Photophlow lets people collectively breeze through photos, marking photos as favorites and leaving comments as they go

Now there's a new kid in town with some other ideas, a beta application called Flickroom. It's built atop Adobe Systems' AIR foundation and presents a fashionably dark background for viewing pictures. There are plenty of icons and control panels to traverse photos, search photos, join a chat room, and see what your contacts are up to.

Flickroom has some bugs and idiosyncrasies, and fundamentally it's not shifting any Flickr paradigms beyond the user interface. But it does manage to illustrate what can be done with Flickr's raw material. I especially liked the flip through the large sizes of a user's photos.

Another good example of what can be done with Flickr's API is Darckr, which shows what Flickr (not entirely badly) believes to be your most interesting shots set off against a black background. I'm not going to be showing my photostream as my portfolio, but my interesting shots on Darckr aren't so mundane.

There are plenty more. Photoshop.com from Adobe, for example, not only gives a new interface to Flickr but lets you edit your photos, too.

Google's Picasa Web Albums is set up more for showing family pictures than for spawning a community of macro or Holga photography, but it can teach Flickr a thing or two. Google boasted in June of a revamp that makes photos load much faster, even at full-screen size, and it wasn't idle boasting. And even if Picasa photos are framed by more clutter than Flickr's photos, at least the photos can be viewed larger.

Photoshop.com offers online image editing and sharing.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The good news
Flickr may not be moving fast enough for me, but happily, it's not standing still, either.

"The core photo-sharing experience on Flickr is the area we want to spend most of our time on now," Rothenberg said. He pointed toward "the photo page in particular, the photostream, photos from your contacts--all aspects of site core to the photo-sharing mission of Flickr but that haven't really been brought in line."

Also, probably not just to throw me a bone because I'm a fan of location tags in photos, he added, "Even geotagging, (we'd like) to bring it more into the core experience."

He couldn't comment on my specific gripes about wasted screen real estate, though he did mount a bit defense of white space. However, it's clear Flickr understands the issue, because he did take pains to mention Flickr's new search tool launched Tuesday. It can take advantage of available screen size.

Photophlow, though its development is dormant for now, can make it fun for groups to browse and comment on Flickr pictures.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Flickr's absolute priority is a page on which the photo looks good, but the site must also balance that with social and navigational features. "There's a large amount of information we store and display and allow people to interact with--sizes, licensing, location information, comments, favoriting," he said. "We want to make all those options as easy and efficient as possible."

Flickr also wants to improve navigation and organization, two areas that I believe the computer industry always will face. Rothenberg

Lowered expectations
Rothenberg lowered my hopes regarding a handful of other areas I could see improved.

• Threaded comments: I find it hard to traverse longer discussions, in which people sometimes try to address each other with the @username convention, but Rothenberg pointed out fairly that most photos don't have such complicated discussions. "For most people it's question of whether getting any comments on the photo," he said. "We want to make that social aspect of photos matter to members more than it does today."

• Beefed-up Flickrmail: Flickr isn't designed to replace Yahoo Mail or Gmail, he said, but that doesn't mean e-mail and photos don't go together (as Yahoo's acquisition of Xoopit indicates). Rothenberg hinted at future integration: "For a large percentage of people on the Internet, the way they share photos is through e-mail. For Flickr to be the most useful site for our members, it needs to work well with all the ways they share photos."

• Face recognition: A Google-like approach to face recognition doesn't look likely, either. Facebook's social approach to getting people identified in photos is more in keeping with Flickr's style than Google's computer-based method. "We try to optimize toward social interactions rather than algorithms," he said.

• Longer video: Flickr is happy with its 90-second video limit, which was set not because of any hardware limits at Yahoo but because of an aesthetic liking for what Rothenberg terms "moving photos."

• Tags drawn from metadata: I'd love to sift images by camera, lens, shutter speed, and the like, which is information Flickr extracts from data cameras automatically embed in most photos. That's a technical matter Flickr has pondered, but "we don't have any immediate plans," Rothenberg said. "In general we want to make it easier to find the photos most important to you on Flickr. There are other areas we can improve on more immediately."

None of these are really grating issues for me, though, and I can see Rothenberg's point of view. So I'll willingly cut Flickr slack here.

As for the other fixes, I'll console myself that Rothenberg and I see eye to eye when it comes to the site's vision and priority: "Flickr needs to be the best place to be a photo if you're a photo."

This cross section shows two rings of light-sensitive semiconductor material in the fiber. The eight thicker parts are electrodes to carry signals.

(Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

And you thought it was a problem when folks went into the locker room toting cell phones with cameras.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh.

"This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or 'fabric,' can collect images just like a camera but without a lens," said Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science, who along with colleagues described the approach in a the journal Nano Letters.

MIT suggested that the technology, if developed further, could give a soldier a uniform that would help him see threats in all directions. Optical fiber webs, by distributing the chore across a large area, would be less susceptible to damage in one area.

The technology uses fibers less than a millimeter in diameter, stretched into thin form from a thicker cylinder. Within the fibers are two cylindrical shells of semiconductor material, each connected to the outside world with four built-in metal electrodes.

MotionDSP, the company that offered a novel approach to improving photos and video through its now-discontinued FixMyMovie Web site, plans to release a promised version of its software for personal computers.

MotionDSP's vReveal software can extract higher quality from videos by drawing on the data in multiple frames showing the same scene.

(Credit: MotionDSP)

The $49.99 software program, called vReveal, analyzes a video's adjacent frames and combines the data to create a higher-quality version. This can bring out details in dim areas, correct camera shake, and remove noise and blocky compression artifacts, the company said. The software also can rotate videos, increase video resolution, and extract still images.

In addition, the company said the software can employ the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology from graphics chipmaker Nvidia, enabling PCs with appropriate video cards to accelerate the processing-intensive task. The technology doesn't work with all Nvidia graphics processing units, but it works on systems without a compatible video card, the company said.

"It can run up to five times faster when you have a CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPU in your system," said vReveal product manager Mike Sonders. "This multiframe analysis is incredibly hardware intensive."

CUDA offloads some processing to an Nvidia graphics chip, but software must be specially adapted to take advantage of the extra horsepower.

Google's Street View now is augmented by photos supplied by contributors to the company's Panoramio service. This shot of the St. Louis courthouse is more scenic than the official Street View version. Note also the advertisement below the photo. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google Maps' Street View feature uses imagery collected by cameras mounted to Google cars, but now the company is blending in photos taken by the public as well.

Panoramio, which Google acquired in 2007, lets people share photos that have been geotagged with location data so they can be shown on a map. Those Panoramio photos already were available in Google Earth and Google Maps, but now they can show on the more personal Street View as well, Google programmer Frederik Schaffalitzky said in a blog post Wednesday.

Potential advantages of checking the photos on Street View include views at a higher resolution view or during a different time of day, which could be handy for the occasions when Google's Street View camera was shooting into the sun and didn't produce much of an image.

And of course a disadvantage is that the Street View intrusiveness to which some people object is amplified.

When a view can be shown with Panoramio images, a "user photos" icon shows in the upper-right corner of Street View. Clicking it shows an array of local photo thumbnails, and clicking one of those thumbnails loads that image. Above it is a link to the Panoramio page of the person who added the photo.

Not every Panoramio image is included. Once you've contributed geotagged photos to Panoramio, "Google's image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location," Schaffalitzky said.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--iStockphoto, which helped pioneer the "microstock" market for inexpensive, royalty-free imagery, plans to launch an audio-licensing business Wednesday.

The Getty Images subsidiary already offers photography, illustrations, Flash animations, and video. iStockaudio was a natural extension--one the company's customers had sought, iStock Chief Executive Bruce Livingstone said in a speech here at the User-Generated Content Conference and Expo.

iStockphoto CEO and founder Bruce Livingstone

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

"We're introducing iStockaudio on Wednesday this week," Livingstone said. The company announced the iStockaudio plan last May, but the actual arrival was delayed by a suddenly necessary overhaul to the site's search system, he said.

Initially, the audio service--think background music or the sound of a shattering window--will be available through public beta testing. Interface changes are possible before the final launch, scheduled for the South by Southwest conference that begins March 13.

So far, there are about 10,000 audio clips at the site, Chief Operating Officer Kelly Thompson said in an interview. "There's a lot of pent-up demand," he added.

Disruptive
iStockphoto, and the microstock industry in general, is an example of what can be done to harness the power of large numbers of people. Many in the traditional stock art business have been displeased that a bunch of amateurs willing to see their work sold for less than $1 a pop are eroding their business. But the hard economic reality is that microstock companies have put images on the market from photographers who are good enough to sell a few images now and again, even if not good enough--or devoted enough--to quit their day jobs.

iStockphoto now has about 65,000 photographers contributing to the site. Because Getty Images went private last year, the company won't reveal its 2008 financial results. The results were better, though, than in 2007, when the company garnered $71 million in revenue and paid contributors more than $21 million for their work.

The company is, of course, a technological phenomenon. It uses the Internet not only to connect large numbers of buyers and sellers, but also to help them view and distribute digital photography. "When iStock really started to take off is when the Canon Rebel came out," making it "affordable to shoot really good digital," Livingstone said.

Getty Images, which has a more traditional rights-managed image-licensing business, has a program to try to recruit new photographers from Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site, a partnership Livingstone helped set up.

Ups and downs
Thompson and Livingstone shared some of the ups and downs of their business' history at the conference. The lesson for companies such as iStockphoto that rely on user-generated content: pay close attention to what users and customers are asking for. They were asking for video, for example, and that now accounts for 10 percent of the subsidiary's revenue.

iStockphoto plans to launch its new audio clip-licensing site Wednesday.

(Credit: iStockphoto)

The flip side is launching something people haven't asked for. Livingstone had the iStock Forumeter idea, for example. It let people label forum contributors as grouchy crabs, helpful superheroes, comedic clowns, and unconstructive trolls.

"The problem with this is, the community didn't ask for it, didn't want it, and it was too accurate," Livingstone said. "People didn't really want to know how they were seen in the forums. It was a flop. We got rid of it in about 30 days."

Another bad idea: the Buy Request program for setting up custom photography shoots. In the company's core business, "99.99 percent of our sales are done unassisted. This little brainchild was the exact opposite. We had to help customers 99.99 percent of the time. It just didn't work," Thompson said.

The company also has struggled to keep up with growth of its computing infrastructure.

"It's important to be wrong as often as you are right, as long as you learn from the mistakes," Livingstone said. And when things go wrong, it's important to tell your users you're sorry. "Sometimes, the community needs to hear you acknowledge that there was a problem and apologize for it."

Once, the site went down after a truck cut the fiber line to the company's headquarters in Calgary, Alberta. "We did manage to get a check out of the company that supplied the fiber optics. Instead of keeping it, we decided to disburse to the community--the people who would have sold photos. It wasn't a lot--maybe $45,000--but I think people really appreciated the gesture," Livingstone said.

Growth strains
"Mostly, we plan for a reasonable amount of growth. Too much bandwidth is costly, but not enough is a disaster, and we know," Thompson said. "Early in our life, we got a bit behind the curve, and it was tough to catch up."

The company pushes what the MySQL database software can do, but this year, it concluded that it just couldn't handle the site's search operation. So in what was something of an emergency, it rewrote it in the C programming language.

"Our search was failing. We had to put everything on hold, surgically extract search from our Web site, and put it back in," Livingstone said.

Now, though, instead of 30 overtaxed search servers, the company has a single machine handling the chore, with four backup machines to handle potential problems.

The company hopes that new software called Dexter, which lets customers license images directly without using the Web site, will offer further help. A Mac OS X version is in private testing with people who license many images now, and a version running on Adobe's AIR software foundation is under development.

Apparently, it wasn't as easy to launch a microstock site for lower-cost photography sales as Corbis thought it would be.

Corbis, one of the established powers in licensing stock photography, launched SnapVillage in 2007, arguing that the microstock market was still young. But on Thursday, Corbis announced that it will phase out SnapVillage by the end of the year.

Contributing photographers and illustrators, along with customers and existing imagery, will be moved to a new microstock part of Corbis' existing Veer property called Veer Marketplace. Veer, a stock art agency Corbis acquired in 2007, offers both royalty-free and rights-managed imagery.

"We recognize that as the market has rapidly evolved over the past two years, we need a bigger, better offering to achieve success in microstock," Corbis said in a blog post. "In the months ahead, we'll be inviting SnapVillage contributors and customers to Veer Marketplace. Once Veer Marketplace is launched and fully operational, it will become Corbis' only microstock brand."

SnapVillage competes with a host of microstock competitors that arrived on the market earlier. Those include iStockphoto, acquired by Getty Images; StockXpert, acquired by JupiterImages; Fotolia; Dreamstime; and ShutterStock.

Editor's note: From now through the end of December, various Crave experts will be sharing their top five (mostly) tech-related wishes for the holiday season. See what we crave, and maybe you'll get some ideas!

I'll be honest. What I want is Canon's EF 500mm f/4L IS USM telephoto lens, but it costs $5,600, so let's move on to some options that aren't quite so detached from economic reality for a mostly amateur photographer such as myself.

Obviously my camera is a Canon SLR, but I'm reasonably happy with my setup right now, so here are some items I covet that are more modestly priced and that happen to be neutral as regards camera manufacturer.

RawWorkflow.com's WhiBal white-balance card

(Credit: RawWorkflow.com)

1. WhiBal white-balance card. I shoot raw images, which means data is taken directly from the camera's image sensor without any in-camera processing. I like it because it gives me more flexibility for matters such as exposure adjustment. Second in importance to exposure, though, is fixing white balance--for example the orangey color cast you'll often see when shooting under incandescent lights or the bluish tinge of pictures in the shade.

The flip side of raw photography is that it's more manual labor than just grabbing the JPEG, but to me it's worth it. I mostly just eyeball the white balance, but sometimes keying off parts of an image--the whites of someone's eyes or gray and black clothing--gives an easier way to set white balance with software. But for more precision, the WhiBal cards from RawWorkflow.com give an easy way to be more rigorous. You take a photo of the durable card, which shows a standard 18 percent gray, then set the white balance in software off that part of the photo. With modern raw-image editing software, you can synchronize the white balance for a series of images off the one you took with the card. The $19 keychain model looks about my speed. ... Read more

Microsoft's improved photo-hosting site offers slide shows, but images don't fill the screen.

(Credit: Microsoft/CNET News)

For a company that's trying to take on the online might of Yahoo and Google, Microsoft has had a decidedly inferior photo-sharing site. Now that's changing, though.

As part of an overhaul of its online properties, the company announced a number of improvements to its Windows Live Photos site.

Among the new features:

• 25GB of storage space and no more 500-shots-per-month limit on uploads.

• A what's new feed to show what photos your contacts are adding, part of the social side of Windows Live.

• A new slide show view.

• Better permissions for controlling how photos are shared.

I found the new site workable but still imperfect.

The photos.live.com site bears a strong resemblance to Yahoo's Flickr.

(Credit: Microsoft/CNET News)

The most glaring ugliness to me was that the slide show is limited to small versions of the images. That's no problem on an 800x600-pixel screen, but even Flickr, which still hasn't figured out how to dynamically scale images on its regular photo pages, has full-screen slide shows.

Another hitch was that it's apparently impossible to rename your photos. So pick a file name you like before you upload. And you can't change the order of photos shown unless you want to diddle with the photos' "date taken" metadata, which sounds like a bad idea for any number of reasons.

As a fan of keyboard controls, though, I do like the fact that I can use the arrow keys to cycle through photos in an album, though it works only intermittently.

Update 10 a.m. December 5: My bad: it turns out you can change photo titles. Here's Microsoft's description how: "Click on any photo in the browse view of the thumbnails and the page that comes up lists several different options. Listed under More is the ability to move, copy or rename a file."

I still prefer Flickr's method, though: Click on the title, type a new name, then click "save."

Only two and a half months after announcing Picasa 3 beta, Google has done the uncharacteristic and on Thursday has issued Picasa 3.

Here's the clincher:Picasa 3 is the exact same desktop organizer and editor it has been under the beta flag. (This is a good wagon for the Gmail team to climb aboard--Google's e-mail service has been in beta since 2004 and its latest releases have been earthshaking themes and emoticons.)

Although Version 3 beta users won't see changes in this release, those switching from Version 2.7 will enjoy the substantial boost in features. Version 3 stacks on over a dozen more tricks to refine the editing, creative, and sharing options in what has for years been a solid consumer app. Highlights below.

With a little creativity, you can make gorgeous collages like this in Picasa 3.

(Credit: Tara Morrison/Google)

Syncing and sharing
Instead of manually uploading new photos to Picasa Web Albums from Picasa 3, you'll be able to click "Sync to Web" to keep the folder automatically updated. You can exclude photos by right-clicking and choosing "block from uploading" from the context menu.

Sharing has also gotten much easier. In previous versions, you would upload the photos from Picasa and then click within the Web album to e-mail the link to friends. The 'Share' button next to Picasa's syncing button helpfully auto-uploads the album and sends the Web link without compelling you to go online.

No more leaving Picasa for the Web to update or share photos.

(Credit: CNET)

Movie Maker
A terrific but light addition, Picasa 3's new movie maker can take videos from your digital camera and other clips and intersperse them with any other file Picasa supports. You can then upload your video to YouTube or to Picasa Web, or share via e-mail.

Bare-bones editing tools will trim the clips and add a song for background. However, they don't do fading and there's no template to carry your caption style from frame to frame. Video output is currently only the WMV format, and encoding takes a little time--be patient while it renders.

Drop Box
Drop Box is the new default storage locker for newly uploaded photos, for pictures you don't want to assign to an album, and for multitaskers who tell Picasa to take it easy on the bandwidth so they can simultaneously surf and upload. The Drop Box also holds photos uploaded via Orkut, ShoZu, and other third-party photo uploading services that integrate with Picasa Web Albums. This is one of those features that some users will love and many will ignore.

Screenshots
Picasa 3 hooks into your keyboard's PrintScreen key to index captures of your screen, Webcam input, or a video. For casual users, this feature may replace independent screen-capturing software like Gadwin PrintScreen, Capture.NET, and SnagIt. Those who continue to use those apps may find the cataloging amusing or mildly annoying.

You can upload photos to the drop box and start making a movie from Picasa 3's toolbar.

(Credit: CNET)

Other notables
Picasa 3's red-eye reduction tool detects and auto-corrects all the red-eyes in a photo. This substantially cuts out the hassle of clicking and dragging over individual eyes to wipe out the redness, and it works well most of the time. For blotchy faces and other minor blemishes, the retouch tool will awkwardly but fairly effectively let you blot out problem areas.

Finally, the collage tool has gotten more customizable. Before Picasa 3, you couldn't delete, drag, angle, or print in full resolution. Now you can. These substantial additions make the tool an easy way to get really creative (see photo).

There's always room for improvement, especially with the movie maker and red-eye tool, which could use some more precision controls, but this Version 3 release is an excellent effort that will give people much greater control over their photos and Web albums without sacrificing simplicity. All without clinging to beta.

>>Want more detail? See the full list of additions and changes in Picasa 3.