Hasta La Gadget!

Embarrassingly, it has taken Flickr over a year to make an Instagram rival

Just a year after Instagram stole its lunch, ate it and then moved in with its girlfriend, Flickr has launched a rival mobile application — on Android.

Unlike the plain Jane Flickr app on iOS, which lets you upload vanilla images and view pictures already on Flickr, the Android app has ten filters which can be applied first, just like Instagram. Also like Instagram, you can see where geotagged photos were taken on a Google map, share images on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so on and see comments.

In short, it’s the closest thing Android users will get to Instagram without Instagram itself, and it’s free.

Also announced by Flickr is Photo Sessions, and it’s pretty damn sweet. Photo Sessions lets you watch slideshows of your photos with friends around the world, in real time. Say you’re on your iPad, and your mom is on her crappy old Mac at home. You can start a session (pick the set of your latest vacation, for example) and then send her the URL. It’ll launch into the same slideshow, and whenever you swipe to the next picture, your mom’s computer does the same.

You can even zoom in and draw on the picture, and this is mimicked almost instantly on others’ machines. And if mom is signed in to her own Flickr account, you can use a chat box in the bottom corner. I’m going to try out this exact same scenario, only I plan to do it alongside a Skype session.

Both Photo Sessions and the new Android app are good examples of what Flickr should have been doing a long time ago. With its huge existing community, it could have out-Instagrammed Instagram. As it is, Instagram has grown to 10 million users in a year, with just six employees, leaving Flickr playing catchup.

Flickr App [Android Market]

In-sync browsing with Photo Session [Flickr]

See Also:

• IPad Flickr
• Instagram 2 Ruins Almost Everything
• Instagram Hacks: How to Get More Out of (and Into) the Electronic …
• Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos

This article was written on May 10, 2011 by CyberNet.

It can be a pain sharing files with other people if you don’t know whether they will have issues opening a document, or whether they even have the necessary programs installed. For example, lets say you had a Photoshop file that you wanted to show someone. Do you just send them the original file in hopes that they’ll be able to open it, or do you take the time to save it into a more universally accepted image format?

Dropdo wants to solve this exact issue by working to become a universal online file viewer. To get a file on the site you can upload it or point it to a file that already exists on the web. Here’s an overview and some examples of the different types of files that can be uploaded and viewed online:

• Documents (Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, RTF, CSV, etc.) – DOC example, PDF example
• Images (including formats like EPS, SVG, PSD, Illustrator, etc.) – JPG example
• Few video formats – example
• Few audio formats (including MP3) – MP3 example
• Plaintext
• Markdown – MD example

If you try to use a file format that Dropdo doesn’t directly support it will still accept it, but it will only be able to provide a download link rather than using a web-based viewer. According to the FAQs you are restricted to files that are smaller than 25MB, but the good news is that files will stick around indefinitely (unless they violate the terms of service). The big drawback is that as of right now there’s no way to have your file(s) removed without emailing the developer. Hopefully that feature will be coming.

Dropdo Homepage
Firefox Extension
Chrome Extension

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Seam carving (also known as content aware image resizing) has been the hit lately when it comes to photo editing. It all started with the presentation by Ariel Shamir who put together a nearly breathtaking demo. In it he showed how scaling images could be done without losing or distorting the important aspects of photos.

Just three weeks ago we got a glimpse of what an implemented version of such a technology could actually do, and as expected, applications and plugins are popping up all over that make use of the technology. This article will focus on one free application called Liquid Resize that has made huge progress over the last few weeks. Below we’ll highlight some of the features, and you can watch a video we put together on how to use the program.

–Liquid Resize (Free Windows/Linux Application)–

The primary way that you’ll want to use seam carving is with the free program called Liquid Resize. It has almost everything that the original demonstration included, and it produced decent results from the few photos I tried. It’s available for both Windows and Linux, and doesn’t require any installation to begin using it!

Here are some of the features it has:

• Increase or decrease the size of the image using the seam carving algorithm.
• Animate the process of scaling the images (as seen in the video demonstration below).
• Mark areas of the photo that you want to be removed first, and other areas that you want to be removed last. This is actually pretty easy to do because the program offers a resizable brush to designate the respective areas (called masks).
  • You can temporarily store and recall masks, which is important because the masks are removed once you begin resizing the image.
  • You can also save and load masks which is meant for more long term storage.
• Zooming capabilities are a nice touch if you’re working with a large photo.
• A “Reset” option to restore the original image.

I would say that this works pretty well, and it’s actually not a bad way to quickly crop someone out of a photo (by marking the person as an area to be removed first). Sometimes you get unexpected results, but it’s normally only if you try to resize a photo more than 50% of the original size. And be careful when trying to use this on large images because the process can take quite awhile, and in cases like that I would disable the animation.

Here is a video that I put together to show the Liquid Resizer in action:

–Other Alternatives–

Liquid Resizer is the best seam carving app that I’ve come across, and it’s especially nice since it’s free! There are a few less-detailed alternatives available, and so I thought I would present those as well:

• GIMP Liquid Rescale plugin – This just gives you input options for the desired width and height, and then makes the appropriate changes. Definitely not as extravagant as the standalone program I mentioned above.
• Picutel Photoshop plugin – I didn’t actually try this one out because the free version only works with images up to a resolution of 640×480. Beyond that you’ll have to pay a whopping $95 for the plugin!
• Web-based Flash version – This is a nice way to quickly try out the seam carving, but you’ll have to pick a photo that is already online. This is also extremely limited in what you can do.

–Overview–

There are still some things that I would like to see Liquid Resizer do, such as “blur” the seams that it adds/removes to the photos. That way the edges wouldn’t always look so jagged. Other than that I would say that this technique definitely has a good future in image resizing, and I can’t wait to see where it is taken.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Attention celebrities, I have some shocking news: People really want to see you naked. So if you take a photograph of yourself in the buff, someone’s gonna find it. So put down that cameraphone. Or don’t! More »

This article was written on August 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Flickr is an extremely powerful resource for uploading your photos, especially if you’re like me and bask in the glory of their Pro account for just $25 per year. With a Pro account you get unlimited storage and no bandwidth restrictions. That’s the reason I use it to backup all of my images!

Uploading thousands of photos can be a daunting task, and that’s why I’m glad that I came across a tiny little app called FlickrSync. It’s free, open source, and runs on Windows XP SP2 as well as Vista. It supports one-way photo syncing…meaning it will take the photos on your computer and upload them to Flickr. It never modifies the images that are stored on your hard drive, so you don’t have to worry about permanently losing an image.

Here’s some of the features Flickrsync has to offer:

• Works with both Pro and non-Pro Flickr accounts
• Browse local folders and Flickr sets. Then match your local folders to the corresponding Flickr sets.
• Create new Sets when uploading new folders.
• Define Flickr permissions for each folder and other synchronization options
• Preview all operations (including photo thumbnails) before applying them to Flickr .
• Synchronize specific folders or all selected folders
• Synchronize all image information, including metadata like title and description, keywords/tags and even geo information. Works great with Vista’s built-in tagging and caption system.
• Use different synchronization methods according to your needs (ex: by date taken, by caption, by filename).
• Define optional filters for each folder. For example: only synchronize to Flickr images that have a certain keyword/tag on a specific folder.
• Support for all Flickr image formats

So now that you know exactly what FlickrSync is capable of doing, why don’t we take a look at how to use it:

Important: I’ve noticed a slight bug in the program, and it’s that you’ll get an error message if you have no sets in your Flickr account. So you’ll need to make sure that you’ve created at least one set before proceeding.

1. Download and install FlickrSync (currently in the Beta stage).
2. After installation you’ll be prompted to authorize FlickrSync so that it has access to your Flickr account.
3. After FlickrSync starts up you’ll want to check the box corresponding to a folder on your computer that needs to be synchronized (your Flickr sets are shown on the right side):
   
4. Now you’ll need to pick one of your existing sets or create a new one to be synchronized with that folder. Here you can also choose how you want FlickrSync to match up photos, what permissions they should be given, and whether you want to filter a certain set of images to be uploaded. Also, look closely at the two checkboxes located at the bottom of the window, because if you leave them unchecked some of your Flickr images might get unexpectedly deleted:
   
5. Now when you’re taken back to the main screen just go to the Sync menu and choose the View and Sync option to synchronize your photos. FlickrSync will then show you which photos will get uploaded, and which ones will get deleted:
   

Tip: If you don’t want to synchronize all of the folders that you have setup, just right click on a folder (or on the corresponding set) and choose the View and Sync option. This will synchronize only the photos associated with that particular folder or set.

This is one app that I’m really glad I found. There’s no doubt that it will shave some time off of my photo management process, and all I’m hoping to see now is a scheduler so that I can automate the syncing process. Boy, you’ve gotta love when you come across free apps like this that are unbelievably useful!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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