The Photoshop Express public beta launched about six weeks ago and other than some early concerns about the ToS, we continue to be impressed with the service. Today, Adobe has added a number of new features to the service, including support for Flickr.
At the conference call in March, we asked Adobe about their plans for integrating Photoshop Express with other web services and they assured us Flickr support was on the way. It's available now and we think it adds a lot of value to both services. Now you can download your Flickr photos directly into Photoshop Express for cropping, color correction, digital effects, etc. Photos edited with Photoshop Express can be immediately re-exported/uploaded to Flickr all in one seamless step.
Additionally, Adobe has added a new "Save As" feature so that you can save multiple versions of a photo in addition to the original image. Adobe has also introduced a new embeddable media player for photo slideshows that can be used with Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites.
Social media tool Chirpscreen is out of beta, and has a few new tricks up its sleeve. When we first looked at Chirp in January, the application was a tool for grabbing images from your Flickr and Facebook accounts and showing them on your Windows desktop. Now Chirp has added support Twitter and eBay. A Mac client is also available.
Chirpscreen comes in two parts: a desktop viewer called Chirpscreen and a screen saver. The screen saver is still Windows-only, but Chirpscreen Desktop runs on Macs and PCs.
When you first run Chirpscreen, you'll be presented with a slideshow of Flickr photos. But you can enter your login details for various social networks in order to see content from your contacts, including Facebook and Flickr images and Twitter messages. You can also enter keywords to see an assortment of images from public Flickr photostreams and from eBay.
Chirpscreen Desktop also lets you respond to Twitter messages or leave comments on Facebook images. It's also easy to share Flickr images via email or through Facebook.
Ah, Flickr. How we love you. We loved the idyllic pre-Yahoo! days, and held back our tears with the Yahoo! phase of growth. But even when things seem so good, we wonder what the future holds. Microsoft? AOL? An undead uprising?
Now couple our fears with our stupidity. All those photos we uploaded over the past year or two? The ones housed safely on our hard drive? Yeah, right... the hard drive we, in our infinite wisdom, managed to reformat during a routine upgrade?
Flickr, you are our only hope. You hold our memories safe and secure on a server bank. Somewhere. And it's not that we don't trust you. It's Microsoft, AOL, and zombies we have problems with. Sure, some of us could do a mass download from your servers on to our machines. But for others, there's that Microsoft thing again.
We use Linux, and but for one word, we'd be horribly out of luck.
Have you always thought that Hallmark greeting cards are too cheesy? Have you wanted to follow in the steps of Mr. Deeds (at least, the Adam Sandler version of Mr. Deeds) and write your own cards? Well, now is your chance...sort of.
Phreetings is a Facebook app that allows you to send a photo and a short greeting to a Facebook friend, a la greeting card style.
As far as Facebook apps go, Phreetings couldn't get any simpler. Type in a keyword at the top of the page to search for photos, and Phreetings displays the results (all photos are from Flickr, and licensed by the Creative Commons license).
Drag the photo you want to send over to the section on the right hand side of the page, then type in a short message below. You can choose an optional color scheme for your greeting as well. When your greeting is ready, hit the send button, enter in the name of the recipient, and your greeting is sent.
All in all, a simple application that helps spread your web 2.0 greetings both near and abroad.
Been so busy waiting for your American Airlines flight to actually take off that you haven't had time to catch up on the week's other news? Wait, that doesn't make sense. You've had nothing but time on your hands. Aww, whatever. Here are some of our favorite stories from the past week. No excuses necessary.
We've been expecting Flickr to add a video upload feature to the online photo sharing site for some time now. But we never would have guessed that when it finally arrived, Flickr users would be limited to uploading videos of 90 seconds or less. Flickr's justifying the move by saying the clips should be seen as long photos, not YouTube-style content. But that hasn't stopped Flickr traditionalists from forming and anti-video group and starting a petition asking Flickr to withdraw the feature.
Have a few thousand music files scattered around your hard drive and need a good way to organize them? While iTunes, Windows Media Player, and several other music players will help you edit your music's metadata to add things like artist names and song and album titles, TagScanner is probably the easiest music tagger for Windows we've ever seen. And it's free to boot.
A few days ago we reported that Flickr users were revolting. Wait, no that came out wrong. What we reported was that a group of very attractive (or so we assume) Flickr users are unhappy about the addition of video to the site. So they did what any self-respecting group of netizens would, they started a group and created a petition asking for Flickr to remove the video upload feature.
Flickr so far has resisted their demands. But demonstrating that the Yahoo! owned company can in fact be bullied into doing just about anything, Flickr's Mathew Rothenberg has agreed to another demand: free donuts for any member of the We Demand Donuts Flickr group who shows up to claim one in person. Seriously.
The We Demand Donuts group was obviously formed to mock the No Video on Flickr group. But so far more than 1800 people have signed up. While that might seem like a lot of donuts, Rothenberg is only promising one donut per member while supplies last, and members will have to show up at a San Francisco donut shop to be determined. So if you happen to be in San Francisco and want to see if it's possible for a donut shop to sell out of inventory, there's still time to sign up.
Pownce, the social network that's all about sharing with your friends, just made sharing a whole lot easier. Now you can grab an RSS feed of all your incoming Pownce messages, for more convenient reading. This is cool, but RSS is par for the course on social networks these days. It would be bigger news if Pownce still didn't have it.
What is actually quite unique about Pownce is the variety of video and photo hosting sites it now supports. If you post a video link to Pownce -- under the link tab, not as a regular post -- it will now display inline on your Pownce page. This goes for the big players in online video, like Vimeo, Viddler, YouTube and the new Flickr Video, as well as a smattering of other sites. CollegeHumor video support seems sort of arbitrary, but hey, we guess some people watch it.
An innovative an dinteresting venture by the University of Southern California called Viewfinder seeks to spatially locate 2D pictures within a 3D environment like Google Earth. The end result places the pictures within Google Earth so that they seamlessly integrate within their environment. Can't picture it? Just check out the video after the jump, and check out the site for more information on how it works.
The goal is to eventually create a service that basically mixes something like Flickr with Google Earth, enabling users to view and post photos within their virtual environment. Flickr currently allows for geotagging, but viewing the pictures within their environment adds tons of more fun to the idea.
Perhaps Flickr should consider expanding its photo services instead of adding video, which it is trying to do right now, since Flickr users seem to hate the presence of moving pics on the Yahoo owned site. It seems a partnership with Viewfinder and Google Earth would be a better move, and -- since Yahoo's busy intermingling with all sorts of companies right now -- why not?
If there's one thing we know about Flickr users, it's that they'r not shy about sharing their opinions. Shortly after Microsoft made an offer to buy Flickr's parent company Yahoo!, images mocking the deal started showing up all over the site. And now that Flickr has added the ability for uses to upload short videos, a large group of Flickr image-only purists has formed a "NO VIDEO ON FLICKR!!!" group.
Over 6,000 members have already joined the group, and more than 1600 have signed a petition asking for the new feature to be removed.
Basically, their argument is that there are plenty of places for people to upload and share videos. What's made Flickr special is its focus on images. Of course, anyone can filter out videos from their search results just by clicking on the advanced search options. It would be nice if the feature were more prominently placed, but why ask Flickr to modify its search bar when you could just try to incite a riot?
Online photo sharing site Flickr is branching out into video. Starting today, paying Flickr Pro members can upload and share video clips. We're not entirely convinced that Flickr's parent company Yahoo! plans to turn the site into a YouTube killer. Videos are limited to just 90 seconds and 150MB. While that should cover the videos you shoot on your digital camera, which are often limited to 90 seconds or less anyway, it's hard to imagine music videos, video blogs, or other YouTube-style content taking Flickr by storm with this limitation in place.
But the move makes some sense if you think about that 90 second limit on your digital camera. In the press release, Yahoo! claims 40 percent of survey respondents use their cameras to capture short videos, but 55 percent of them only share those videos with friends on their camera. Today's move lets Flickr users upload and share everything on their digital camera, including photos and videos.
Videos will show up in users' photostreams, and can be managed just like images, with tags, privacy settings, and other controls. At launch, video will be available in 8 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and traditional Chinese.
It's not clear if or when Flickr will role out the ability to upload videos to free account holders. But anyone can currently view videos uploaded by Pro members.
Triggit is a service for bloggers that lets you add YouTube videos, Flickr images, and text-link advertisements to your page without editing HTML or even launching your blog post editor. The system takes just a few minutes to set up, and once you've done so, you can add content to your blog in seconds.
We've put together a little video showing how it works. But in a nutshell, you add a bit of JavaScript to your site, and drag a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. When you click on the bookmarklet, a toolbar will pop up that lets you add content to your site including videos, images, and affiliate ads from sites like Amazon and Wine Zap. You can do everything right from your browser toolbar. No need to launch WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, or any other blogging client.
Content you add using Triggit might load more slowly than other material on your site. That's because your site is basically sending a request to Triggit's servers asking which content to display.
Triggit supports Firefox and Flock. While there's no love for Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer users, at least Triggit picked a browser that works on all the major operating systems.
Digital photography has become a way of life for lots and lots of web users and there is no shortage of services out there to host your digital pictures (Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, Windows Live Spaces, not to mention social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace). As more and more day-to-day computing tasks move to the cloud, the market really needs a solid, web-based editing suite. With Adobe Photoshop Express, which launched its beta today, we get just that.
We look at a lot of web software and services, but have to say that Photoshop Express one of the slickest web-based applications for photos that we have ever used. Although services in the past like Picasa or Picnik have offered some basic photo editing capabilities, what Photoshop Express is doing is in a completely different league. Like many other photo services, Photoshop Express will let you share and display your online photos; each user account is given 2 GB of space to store and share photos (this is free, additional space and extra features will be available in the future, pricing TBD) and you can embed links to the Photoshop Express hosted galleries or direct-embed individual images.
Search interfaces that use more than one page are starting to look quaint and old-fashioned. Why open your results in another tab if you don't have to? The talented designers behind Compfight have come up with a lightweight Ajax search tool for a service we use every day: Flickr.
Compfight fits all the most important Flickr search options into its minimal design. You can switch between tags and all text, turn Creative Commons on or off, and decide whether clicking thumbnails will take you to the default photo page or show the original size. It takes some fiddling to do all of this at Flickr.com, but Compfight uses the Flickr API and makes everything easy.
Oh, and about those thumbnails: a blue line at the bottom lets you know that Flickr has an original photo, and you can mouse over it to see the photo's dimensions. It looks so good that you might be tempted to completely give up going to Flickr.com for your searches.
Everyone loves Flickr, right? Love Flickr or not, they have some sharp minds working hard to bring you a (mostly) rock solid web application. Adding features to an application with such an enormous userbase can be tricky. At Future of Web Apps 2008, Flickr's Cal Henderson is presenting on "The Application of New Features to an Established Application." Enjoy it live, or come back to it later.
Phrasr is an interesting little flash-based Flickr app that let's you play with words and Flickr photos. Basically, you start by typing in words - which could be a cohesive sentence or a random jumble of words - click "start," and Phrasr will get busy by finding photos on Flickr that relate to those words and attach them by lining them up into a sort of slideshow.
Then you can do a little bit of editing work, if you're up to it. Although the initial serve up of images might be nice, you may want to browse through some more choices. You can change any of the photos by clicking "change," and Phrasr will search for other photos that relate to that word. Some words such as "is" "I" or "the," don't get a photo associated automatically, so you'll have to pick them out yourself if you want photos for them.
Once you have created the ideal word-slideshow, give it a title, add your name if you really want to, and hit publish. You can then check out the original photos on Flickr, send your creation to a friend via e-mail, check out what other people have made, or make another one. So if you've been waiting for a way to breathe life into a quote or phrase you like, or just want to remind someone to "do the recycling" with a bit of visual flair, Phrasr is there to help.
The Photoshop Express public beta launched about six weeks ago and other than some early concerns about the ToS, we continue to be impressed with the service. Today, Adobe has added a number of new features to the service, including support for Flickr.
Ah, Flickr. How we love you. We loved the idyllic pre-Yahoo! days, and held back our tears with the Yahoo! phase of growth. But even when things seem so good, we wonder what the future holds. Microsoft? AOL? An undead uprising?
Been so busy waiting for your American Airlines flight to actually take off that you haven't had time to catch up on the week's other news? Wait, that doesn't make sense. You've had nothing but time on your hands. Aww, whatever. Here are some of our favorite stories from the past week. No excuses necessary.
