While Moodstream may be geared towards the folks in the creative department to help them design the next big thing, there's nothing wrong with using it as a screen saver. That is if you like a screen saver that doesn't actually save your screen and displays random pictures with music based on your current mood.
In order to get your mood on, you'll need to adjust a few sliders. Moods range from happy to sad, calm to lively, humorous to serious and so on. If that's more control than you would like, preset moods are also available.
Moodstream pulls in photos from Getty Images' vast database along with music from Pump Audio's Soundtrack. If you like the current mood you can save it to your moodboard (registration required) so you can come back to it later. You also have the option of purchasing any of the images or music on the spot.
So even if you're not the creative type but enjoy having random pictures and music playing give Moodstream a try.
DeskLickr sounds like that kid we knew in first grade who would take any dare, but it's actually a neat little app with an unfortunately silly name. DeskLickr grabs desktop pictures from Flickr, making sure your wallpaper is never stale. It can change your desktop manually or automatically, and give you a little "about this photo" info, so you know whose picture it is and where to find it on Flickr.
There are plenty of options to make sure you get only the pictures you want. You can tell DeskLickr to grab from all of Flickr, from a group of your choice, just from Flickr's "interesting" selection, or from your own photos or favorites. If you don't like a picture, you can tell DeskLickr not to show it again.
Regular Download Squad readers will note that app is similar in function and effect to another one we recently reviewed, Desktoptopia. To compare: Desktoptopia uses its own image feeds, which are consistently full of great desktops, while DeskLickr offers a broader range with a little more hit-and-miss involved. Also: Desktoptopia is available for both Mac and PC, so if you're running Windows, you may want to scope out our earlier post.
A lot of digital cameras are great for taking photos, but pretty shoddy for naming files. Sure, it's alright to have them listed by date and time -- at least that keeps them in order -- but we think it's a lot nicer to rename a batch of photos so you remember what they're actually of. That's where NameChanger comes in. It's a lightweight renaming app for OS X, with a focus on images.
NameChanger can append, prepend, replace, or rename all kinds of files with whatever input you give it, but it really shines when it comes to pictures. Drag a batch into the image browser, switch to sequence mode, and "DCP_16739" becomes "Hawaii01," or whatever you want it to be. Let NameChanger keep the numbers straight for you. And, at a tiny 1.9mb, you probably have pictures that take up more disk space than this useful little app.
There are plenty of attractive visualizations for Flickr images. But Tag Galaxy is certainly the spaciest. Enter a keyword and Tag Galaxy will search Flickr for related images. You can either click the big ball of gas at the center of your screen to see some of the images, or you can check out one of the little related-tag planets orbiting the center of your tag galaxy (or solar system, really).
The picture doesn't really do Tag Galaxy justice. Each planet is in motion, and you can navigate by dragging and dropping various parts of the screen. When you actually click on a tag to view the images, you can spin the ball around to find more images, and click an image to enlarge it.
Be forewarned, Tag Galaxy can make your web browser go Supernova if you're not careful. Firefox froze up on us a couple of times while we were playing with the web page. We also had a bunch of other tabs open, but Tag Galaxy certainly seemed to take a toll on our CPU and RAM usage.
The crowd has spoken. We featured an application earlier today that lets you compare images in your library to find dupicate pictures. And a whole bunch of you wrote in to let us know that Dup Detector does the same thing, only better. So we checked it out and you're kind of right, and you're kind of not.
Dup Detector is certainly faster than DupliFinder. And it has many more features. But it's possible it has a few too many features. It took us a couple of minutes to figure out how to load a folder. Once we did, Dup Detector scanned over 2000 images in a bout a minute. When we clicked the Find dups button, the program processed them in a matter of seconds.
For the record, here's how to load a single folder:
Select the Get data tag
Click Build
Click Browse
Navigate to the folder of your choice
Click OK
Selet the Find dups tab
Click Find dups
Select the View Dups tab to actually see the duplicates
You can change the algorithm for detecing similar images. But this is where DupliFinder excels. It does an excellent job of finding images that actually bear a resemblance to one another, while Dup Detector wil spit out a bunch of pictures with similar colors. In other words, if you have a lot of pictures with white backgrounds, Dup Detector will count them as duplicates. You can avoid this by setting the "Dup if within" percentage to something near 100%.
Ever wish you could scan your entire photo directory to find and delete duplicate images? Sure, one or two pictures here and there might not take up that much space. But when you realize that you've accidentally stored your entire wedding album in three different folders, that's a whole different story. Of course, you don't want to start deleting images until you're absolutely certain they're identical. And that's where DupliFinder comes in.
This Windows-only utility will scan any directory (and optionally its subdirectories) and look for identical images. But that's not all. It will also look for images that are compositionally similar. As you can see in the screenshot, this means you won't just find exact copies of an image, but also pictures that look a little bit like your original image. This can come in handy if you're looking for another picture of your kid or dog to send to your parents. Or you know, if you're looking for a picture of a microphone.
It takes a while to scan large directories. And the open dialog is a bit awkward. You can either browser your My Pictures folder, or you can drag and drop a directory to DupliFinder from Windows Explorer. There's no way to navigate to folders outside of your My Documents directory with the browse feature.
Yahoo! has added the ability to view photos in email messages as slideshows without downloading them first. Honestly, we're not entirely certain when this feature was added, but it was brought to our attention by a reader comment. When we looked into it, we found that at least five months ago, there was no photo slideshow feature. And now there is. So we're going to call it a new feature.
In order to view attached images as a slideshow, you'll need to switch to the Yahoo! Mail beta interface. This feature is not available in Yahoo! Mail classic. When you receive an email with attached images, you should see an option to show images. Once you click the button, you should see several thumbnails at the bottom of your message, and the option to view those images as a slideshow.
When Adobe launched Photoshop Express last week, we were so excited to try out the powerful online image editing application that we didn't read the fine print very closely. But one of our readers was kind enough to point out the fact that Adobe reserved the right to do some interesting things with your photos.
Specifically, Adobe's terms of use stated that the company could "use, distribute, derive revenue or other renumeration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate" and use your images "in any format or medium now or later developed." Now, while it makes sense that users need to grant Adobe some non-exclusive rights to their images so Adobe doesn't get accused of any wrongdoing by publishing your images on the web, the whole making money off of your images even after you remove them from your account thing seemed like a bit much and led to a few complaints.
Now Adobe has revised its terms of use. And while the company still has the right to display and distribute your content, the new terms clearly state that Adobe does not have the right to sell your content or to use it at all once you remove it from your account. And if you want to prevent Adobe from displaying your image publicly in the first place, all you have to do is refrain from clicking the share option.
Yesterday evening we told you about a program called Squash, which offers a simple way to batch resize images on Windows, Linux, or OS X. While we still think it's a handy little utility, a reader pointed us to another application that makes us rethink our claim that image resizing doesn't get much easier.
Picture Resizer could be one of the simplest, yet most useful image utilities we've run across in a while. It's Windows only, but it's free and powerful.
All you have to do is download the Windows-only executable file to any directory. Then drag an image over the program icon. That's it. The image will automatically be resized. By default, all images will be resized so that they are 400 pixels wide. But wait, you say, I want to make my images 200 pixels wide, or 1600 pixels wide. No problem. Just change the program name from PhotoResize400.exe to PhotoResize200.exe or PhotoResize1600.exe.
If you want to resize a group of images, just highlight them and drag them all to the icon. Picture Resizer will convert the images and spit out new images (with the pixel width appended to the image names) in the same directory.
If there's one thing we love more than an image editing application with a ton of features, it's an image editing application with a ton of features that are incredibly easy to use. And FotoFlexer seriously fits the bill. Much like Picnik, Splashup, and PikiFX, FotoFlexer is an online image editor.
You can either create an account or simply upload an image to start using FotoFlexer. You can also edit live images from your webcam or import an image from Photobucket, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, or Picasa.
The editing application is incredibly easy to use. You can perform a ton of advanced transformations with a simple mouse click. For example, we clicked the "cartoon" button to make the image above. You can also turn any image into a blueprint, Andy Warhol-like pop art image, or make your picture look like an old black and white photo.
There are also more practical tools for eliminating red-eye, reducing blemishes or wrinkles, cropping, resizing, rotating, cutting and pasting your images. If you know what you're doing, you can also add layers to your images, much as you would with PhotoShop or GIMP.
We're big fans of Piclens, a web browser plugin that lets you create photo slideshows out of search results from sites like Flickr, Google Images, Photobucket, Facebook, and about a dozen other services. PicLens has come a long way since we first covered it back in 2006. At the time, Piclens was only available for Safari.
A few months ago, Piclens released browser plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer. And this week the service released a new version of its browser plugin that supercharges the full-screen slideshows. You can still browse through images using a Flickr-like slideshow with thumbnails at the bottom of your screen and a larger image in the main window.
But the default image browser is now more like a brick wall, where each brick is an image thumbnail. And the wall goes on forever. You can drag a slider at the bottom of the window and zip past images in a way that sort of defies description, which is why we've embedded a video above. You can also click on individual files for a larger view, search for more images from within the slideshow player, or click a link to see the image at its source.
One of the things that makes Flickr so mesmorizing is the ability to watch image sets using Flickr's slick slideshow feature. But if you're looking for an alternative slideshow viewer, you might want to check out Flickr Cover Flow or Flickr Guckn.
Both sites essentially do the same thing. They let you view Flickr sets using a Apple Cover Flow-style slideshow player. Guckn is probably the easier site to use. Basically you can take any Flickr photoset and replace "flickr" in the URL with "guckn." If you visit Guckn.com you can also see a slideshow with 100 recently uploaded images. That it's. No bells and whistles.
Flickr Cover Flow gives you a few more options. You can find images by photoset ID, user name, or even date. You can also choose whether or not the slideshow should automatically scroll and determine how long to pause on each image.
Neither site offers an embeddable player, which is a little disappointing. It would be nice to have a custom Flickr image viewer that you could embed on your own site. But since these services just present an alternate way to view Flickr slideshows, the novelty wears off pretty quickly and it just seems easier to look at pretty pictures on Flickr's site.
The folks at Google Blogoscoped have uncovered what appears to be a pretty glaring privacy hole in online photo sharing site SmugMug. Like many online photo sharing services, SmugMug allows users to mark images as public or private. If your images are private they won't show up on your profile page and other users are only supposed to be able to find them if you send them a special URL, which is not password protected.
Sure, a password would make the page more secure, but it would also make it more inconvenient for your friends, family, and colleagues to see your vacation photos. But as long as there's no easy way for the general public to find your photos, they're still secure from prying eyes, right?
Maybe not. The problem is that SmugMug gives images a predictable URL string, starting with http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/1000. All you have to do is change the number and you'll start to find photo album after photo album, whether they're market public or private.
As Google Blogoscope's Philipp Lenssen points out, the solution could be as simple as using a random string of characters. But the CEO of SmugMug replied in an email to Lenssen that the system wasn't built for randomized strings, and changing it now would be expensive. And you know what? If most SmugMug users remain blissfully unaware that their "private" images might be publicly accessible then maybe it's not wroth the time and money to fix the flaw. But we kind of think SmugMug and any other company that claims to offer users some level of privacy should really be willing to improve their system when flaws are pointed out.
Whenever you upload a photo to the web you run the risk that someone will download your photo and decide use it themselves. PicMarkr makes uploading your photos to the web a little safer by allowing you to add a custom watermark to your photos. The whole watermarking process takes less than a minute and watermarks can be added to up to five photos at a time. Photos can either be uploaded directly to the site to be watermarked or pulled from your Flickr account.
PicMarkr offers three different types of watermarking options: Text watermark, Image watermark, and Tiled watermark. Once an image is watermarked it can be downloaded directly to your computer or uploaded to your Flickr account.
Check out examples of all three watermarking options after the jump.
We can think of many reasons why it'd be a good idea to password protect an image, and, whatever your reason may be (patent pictures, blueprints of the Death Star, or maybe a couple naughty shots of the wife), sometimes it's best that others don't find out. To solve this problem, we present Lockimage.
It consists of just one file and doesn't need to be installed. Lockimage will convert any picture into a "password protected executable," which means the file will open on any PC without the Lockimage program. This means, however, the modified file is no longer considered an image file, so this may not be the right solution for some.
Lockimage is similar to Locknote, which uses a similar method of locking files. It's also a Windows-only application, and it's probably best to use this against non-hacker types. With the program being open-source, the recipe isn't exactly a secret.
While Moodstream may be geared towards the folks in the creative department to help them design the next big thing, there's nothing wrong with using it as a screen saver. That is if you like a screen saver that doesn't actually save your screen and displays random pictures with music based on your current mood. 
Whenever you upload a photo to the web you run the risk that someone will download your photo and decide use it themselves. 
