Every now and then I find myself working on slides in Keynote and writing Download Squad posts - and struggling to find a suitable image. Of course, Flickr is the best way to find images - their clear licencing and Creative Commons support makes finding images fairly straight forward. However, getting the image into Keynote isn't entirely painless. The workflow of browsing search results, viewing the image and then finding it at a suitable size (if it exists) takes time - however that's where Viewfinder steps in.

A native Mac OS X application (requiring Mac OS X Snow Leopard), Viewfinder allows you to search Flickr from the desktop apply filters to show only Creative Commons images, and specify a particular image size. Then, once you select an image you can download the image, set it as your desktop background - and most importantly - send images straight to Keynote for your slides.

If you're a heavy keynote user (or blogger) who frequently needs to find Flickr images for your work Viewfinder is indispensible. I've been testing it since early September and found it an incredibly convenient tool to have at hand. A licence costs £15 (roughly $25) and a free demo is available for you try from the Viewfinder webpage.

Flickr has an open and very powerful API that's been around since 2004. Five years later, developers have built an enormous number of great apps and cool toys for Flickr. Now you can browse and discover Flickr apps in one central location, the new App Garden. Apps in the garden range from stats to importing/exporting to integration with other sites.

Although Flickr has chosen some featured apps to display prominently on the front page, any developer can submit to the App Garden. The Garden itself isn't the only place apps are being promoted around Flickr. On each photo page, along with the info you regularly see, you'll now see which app the photographer used to upload the image - as long as it's an app has already been submitted and listed by Flickr. If you're a developer, you have plenty of incentive to submit your app, and if you're a Flickr power user, you'll definitely want to check out what's already been posted.

[via Flickr Blog]

If you're a Mac user who's considering giving iPhoto a try, and you're also a fan of sharing photos on Flickr, you might want to give FlickrImport a try. On its face, it's just a utility that imports your Flickr images into iPhoto, but there's more to this little gem than meets the eye. It preserves photo info, including EXIF and TIFF metadata.

Even better, FlickrImport works for more than just your own account. You can also use it to import photos from your contacts accounts, as long as those photos are visible to you. If you have more than one Flickr account, for some reason, you can add yourself as a contact and import from both accounts that way. One caveat: FlickrImport doesn't play nicely with Snow Leopard. To make it work, do a Get Info on the app and check the "Open with Rosetta" box.

At long last, after what seems like an eternity compared to the usually-rapid pace that most social networks evolve at, Flickr has implemented people-tagging. The functionality that most consider a defining characteristic of Facebook is now available on Flickr.

We've all been there: waking up on a Saturday morning, rolling out of bed, last night's drunkenly-debauched memories slowly swimming back into focus through your rheumy, sleep-encrusted eyes. You stagger into the kitchen or your study -- maybe there's a nice cup of coffee waiting for you. You sit down at your laptop -- or turn on your iPhone -- and check your mail.

There's the usual spam, the banal good-luck chain-letters and perhaps news that your copy of Windows 7 has just been dispatched. And then you see it.

'John Doe has tagged a photo of you on Facebook!'

Suddenly you find yourself plunged back into your memories of the night before. Desperately you poke and prod at the memory, praying the holiest damn prayer you've ever prayed, hoping that you didn't do something you'd later regret... something you'd later see on your computer screen... something your mother should never, ever see...

Quickly you un-tag yourself, cursing your friend, his family and his loved ones, praying you've done it quickly enough to avoid disaster.

And now ...? And now it can happen to you on both your social networks!

But wait! No! Flickr has gone one step further than Facebook! With Flickr you block people from tagging you in photos! With Flickr you can specify that only friends or family can tag you -- or no one at all!

The only real problem of course is that people don't often use Flickr for 'wild night out' photos -- that's usually reserved for Facebook. But would it be too crazy to suggest that Flickr could tie into the Facebook API and tag your Facebook friends on Flickr? Or will Facebook simply turn around and enable similar privacy options on tagging?

[via TechCrunch]

Flickroom is an application that lets you interact with photo-sharing site Flickr from your desktop without opening a web browser. Flickroom is based on Adobe AIR, which means you need AIR to be installed in order to run the application. But it also means that Flickroom is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The program lets you login to your Flickr account and view photos in your own photostream or those of your contacts or groups. You can also use the search feature to find images from all Flickr users, upload your own images, save images from Flickr, add comments, notes, or share images via Twitter.

I have to say, I'm not that impressed with Flickroom's tools for discovering photos from users that aren't your contacts. I find the Flickr web interface much easier to navigate for that activity. But Flickroom has an attractive user interface and handy tools for keeping up to date with your contacts' activities.

Flickroom also has a few odd features like an integrated chatroom where you can communicate with other Flickroom users. But since the program is still in beta, I suppose any chance to leave feedback for the developer and other users is a good thing.

[via MakeUseOf]

We're continuing our Tell DLS column by leaving the desktop and heading to the web. There's tonnes and tonnes of webapps out there -- however here's just 10 that I use day-in, day-out. If you're got any other favourites, be sure to leave them in the comments!

Flickr is one of my favourite all-time web services, and I'll admit a huge fascination with some of the visualisation stuff the Flickr folks do with maps, Flickr photos and their location data. So you can imagine my excitement last week as Popular Science featured a piece on how a University of Washington Graphics team automatically recreated Rome with images from Flickr. The team took photos from 150,000 Flickr users, and using some custom algorithms recreated Rome automatically using 500 computers and 13 hours processing time. They even went one better and also recreated the slowly-sinking city of Venice, and built that 3D virtual model from 250,000 photos in under a day.

By now you're probably thinking 'that's an incredibly long time to render' - however the team is touting the speed of the 3D model building here too. The technology used in Microsoft's PhotoSynth product (which also originated at the same research lab) would have taken a calendar year to automatically build the same 3D model of Venice.

Be sure to take a look at the video tours over on the Popular Science Web site, and see the end results from Flickr's library - the team have set their sights on a million-image based rendering of a city in the future, so hopefully there's plenty more of these to come!

Flickr, one of the most popular photo sharing sites on the web, has always let users organize their own photos. Being able to group your work into sets is one of the site's core features. Surprisingly, though, Flickr has never offered a way to make sets of other users' public photos, until now. Flickr Galleries allow you to build collections of photos from around Flickr, with a maximum of 18 photos in each gallery.

Flickr already has sets, collections and favorites, so why galleries? Well, sets and collections are for your own photos, and favorites are one disorganized stream. Galleries are a more structured way to share images you like on Flickr, with space to write an introduction and add your own comments about each photo you choose. To start or add to a gallery, look for the aptly-named "add to gallery" button on any photo or video page. If you don't want other people to use your photos in their galleries, you can opt out via the privacy settings on each photo or set you want to protect.

So Yahoo has finally given the iPhone a hearty high five for being the most popular camera on Flickr and produced a native Flickr app.

There's not a heck of a lot to it, but you probably wouldn't expect there to be, really. After all, you're probably on Flickr to either upload and share photos or look at what other people have submitted. The app does both of those things pretty well.

For added sizzle, if you leave Flickr idle on your iPhone, a nice slideshow of Creative Commons licensed images will pan and zoom around your screen.

Searches return 40 thumbnails, and about 16 fit on the iPhone's screen at once. Tap one to zoom and and view details like tags, the number of views, and where and when images where taken.

Comments load inline below the image and you can, of course, tap the talk bubble icon to add your own thoughts.

Viewing your contact's items is an even better experience, with buttons provided to display set and tag views as well as their favorite images. The initial display can also be swapped between thumbnails only or image with titles and view/comment stats.

If speed is your thing, stick to the Flickr mobile web interface in Safari. It's definitely speedier.

However, if you prefer a more dynamic visual experience, then download Flickr from the App Store [App Store Link].

It's easy enough to download individual photos from Facebook and Flickr, but neither site offers a way to download entire albums.

Fotobounce is an app for Mac and Windows that lets you quickly do just that, and organize your downloaded photos, too. It also has built-in face recognition, to make tagging those photos a lot easier.

You can also use Fotobounce to upload photos -- pre-tagged with the help of face-recognition -- to Facebook and Flickr. It could potentially be a real time-saver.

There's also a mobile version, so you can remotely access your photos from a BlackBerry or iPhone, and still keep them private.

[via Lifehacker]

Dazzboard, an app that enables easy media transfers between your computer and your mobile device, now has a Facebook version. This new Facebook app lets you skip a step in the process of uploading photos and videos from your portable phone, camera, or even PSP to Facebook. Instead of going from device to computer to Facebook, you can use Dazzboard to drag and drop media from one location to another.

Although you can use Dazzboard to transfer media to and from your PC, there's no desktop software required. You can transfer your media to and from Facebook anywhere, as long as you have a browser and a place to plug in your device. There's also Flickr and Youtube support, and you can drag and drop media amongst various networks the same way you'd do it between your phone and your computer. The app is currently only available for Windows, and seems to work best with IE8. Mac compatibility is in the works.

Delicious isn't the only Yahoo-owned service to get a makeover this week. Flickr also added some new search features, which should make it easier to browse the site and find what you're looking for. The layout of search results has changed, giving users the ability to resize thumbnails and click for more info without opening a photo page. The results also automatically resize to fit your browser window, which is good news for users with extremely large or extremely small displays.

There's also a new sidebar, displaying related groups, photographers, tag clusters and places. My new favorite addition, although it may seem like a small thing, is that Flickr now actually tells you which search results it's showing you. Refining searches under the old system wasn't very transparent, but now you know whether you're in someone's photostream or searching all of Flickr, whether you're searching for Creative Commons images or not, and more. All in all, the new search page is a big win for usability.