Yfrog, one of the most popular photo-posting services for Twitter, is making a move into video and offering webcam support. You can record and tweet, right from the Yfrog site. To get started, check the space where you'd normally see the option to upload an image or enter a URL: the new webcam option has been added right next to those. When the video window pops up, you can record a video, take a still shot, or take a still shot on a 5 second delay.

As always with Yfrog, the photos and videos you take are only a click away from being posted to Twitter. Because Yfrog is already one of the top players in the Twitter photo uploading game, and supported in several major Twitter apps, there's a good chance it could start to dominate the Twitter video arena, too. Currently, Twitvid and Twiddeo are two of the most popular options.

[via CNET]

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].

As someone who has used Windows as my primary operating system for years, I got very comfortable with modding various parts of the user interface. One of the things that was most fun to change is the startup image - my favorite was a very official looking FBI splash screen that made it look like you were logging onto a government computer.

Since switching to the Mac platform, I've been surprised at the relative dearth of modding options for the operating system. Thankfully, Steven Sande over at our sister site TUAW recently posted about BootXChanger, which allows you to change the monochromatic Apple logo that you see when booting into OS X to something different. While it's not an entire boot screen, it is enough to give your machine a bit of personality.

It turns out that creating images for use on the boot screen is very finicky, but BootXChanger comes with a set of fifteen sample images to get you started. Right away I was torn between using the radioactive symbol, or the classic Commodore 64 logo. The radioactive symbol won for now, but given the ease of switching boot logos, I can imagine I'll be swapping between the various options or maybe even taking a shot at making my own soon enough.

[via TUAW]

If you're anxious for Snow Leopard to ship, you might be excited to know that you can grab copies of the built-in desktop images, thanks to the developer previews and a crafty blogger over at Uneasy Silence.

While there are four images out of the set of 35 that feature leopards, the rest of the images run the gamut from beautiful landscape photography to classic pieces of art. The images are offered as JPEGs, so even Windows users might like to pick up a few.

It seems to be a requirement now that major operating systems release with a relatively substantial set of beautiful images to be used as desktop wallpaper.

No longer can OS manufacturers get away with offering eight photos and a few tiling images -- remember tiling your desktop? Does anybody ever do that anymore?

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.

Like a desperate boyfriend who's just been given a one-way ticket to Splitsville by his girfriend, Facebook is going to do its best to win you back. Before you push the big red button and vaporize your account (but not your content, since Facebook can keep it locked up in the basement 'till the sun doesn't shine) they're giving your heartstrings a good, hard tug.

Yes, they've found another great way to put your friend's photos to good (and acceptable) use. They're going to guilt you into staying a member of the social networking goliath when you visit the deletion page. I enjoy the zinger Facebook includes, which reads: "Your [number] friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you." [sad trombone] Yet further down the page, there's a great big list of opt-outs for you to peruse.

Why? "Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups." So wait...They can't keep in touch, but they can invite me to parties, post and tag pictures of those parties, and ask me to join groups that plan upcoming parties?

Since almost all phones can now take photos, many people have both a phone and a regular camera (or four) that they manage with their Mac. By default, you can choose whether to automatically open iPhoto when a camera is connected, but what if you want to do different things depending on which camera you connect? A new application by Flexibits has just been released to deal with this problem.

Cameras installs as a preferences pane, and allows you to very specifically choose what you would like to do with each camera. By default it is set to "Ask what to do" each time a new camera is plugged in, at which point you can choose to open a specific application, do nothing at all, or leave the option to ask what to do each time.

This functionality seems so dead-simple and obvious that I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't adopt it at some point in the future. For the time being, if you have more than one camera and you want to handle each one in different ways, Cameras is your free magic bullet.

[via our close personal friends at TUAW]

John Watson, the man behind the many fun photo-related web applications at BigHugeLabs was feeling a little down last week, and in response he produced yet another web app. But this one is a little different; while his other web apps often provide inspiration as a by-product of other actions, Watson's latest site, dubbed Ideas, is intended as a source of inspiration as a primary focus.

When you visit Ideas, you are presented with a large search box, beside which sits a button that simply states, "inspire me!" Type in a word, and the site will present you with a series of sets of information that is somehow related to the word entered. If you're feeling bereft of ideas for even a word to enter, a few examples are provided such as love, beauty, sorrow, yes, red, winter, home, africa, kiss.

Depending on the word you enter, Ideas may or may not be able to find examples of the following types:

• Famous quote
• Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr
• Color swatches from COLOURlovers.com
• Songs from Last.fm
• Related words from BigHugeLabs.com
• Videos from YouTube.com
• Listings from Etsy.com
• Bookmarks from Delicious.com
• Article from Wikipedia.com

What a great way for creative people that are looking for a little boost in the inspiration department to start with a specific word and serendipitously follow a trail to something that may well inspire them.

Twitter being the public communication platform that it is, where anybody is free to follow anybody else, leaves room for some interesting ways to use the information that people are passing around. For example, Twitcaps is a site that aggregates the links to photos that people post, and puts them together into a grid for easy browsing. You can view the pictures sorted by Newest Images or Most Popular.

Newest Images tends to be more interesting if you're looking to see a cross-section of what people are randomly posting links to, whereas Most Popular tends to be pictures of celebrities, since presumably these are more likely to be reposted by their fans.

When viewing the grid, you can mouse over any image to see the content of the tweet where it originated, and clicking on an image pops up a larger view. For the truly voyeuristic, there is an option to auto-refresh the page.

Of course, probably the most interesting function in Twitcaps is the ability to search for specific words, hashtags or users. The results may not always be what you're expecting, but it can be fun to see what comes up when you put a particular search term in.

Though I haven't come across any offensive material, keep in mind that the images displayed in Twitcap are random pictures being linked to by random people. Hey, it's the internet - browser beware.

Online photo sharing site Flickr offers a tool for uploading images and videos. But the Flickr Uploadr doesn't let you keep your photos synchronized with desktop folders the way that the third party FlickrSync does.

You can configure FlickrSync to watch specific folders on your Windows desktop and sync them up with your Flickr account. In other words, whenever you add files to the desktop folders and hit the sync button, they'll be sent to Flickr. If you delete the images from your local folders, they can be removed from Flickr when you hit the sync button again (although you can configure the application never to delete photos from Flickr).

FlickrSync offers only one-way synchronization. While changes made on your desktop will be reflected online, making the program an excellent tool for managing your Flickr photosets, FlickrSync will never delete photos stored on your desktop. While two-way synchronization might be a nice feature to have, my guess is the developer didn't want to have to deal with angry users complaining that the program deleted their only copies of prized photos.

[via MakeUseOf]

If you shoot high-res photos, and you're looking for a way to show them off that doesn't take up as much space as the full-size image, but doesn't hide all the details like a thumbnail, you might want to give Closr a look. Closr lets you upload a photo, and transforms it into a widget that viewers can zoom in and out of. That way, they can either see a thumbnail, or zoom way in and drag to look at different parts of your image.

The widgets also have some other useful functions, like a full-screen button, and another button that resets the photo to its starting size. There's minimal branding and excess junk attached to them, too, so they're not going to make your site look terrible when you embed them. If you have the particular problem of finding a way to display your large photos, Closr might be the solution.

LiteFlick is a fast way to see the most interesting Flickr photos of the day, and display Flickr search results in a nice-looking layout that makes it easy to find what you're looking for. It uses a jQuery lightbox plugin so you don't have to load a Flickr page to see a larger version and a caption of each photo.

Flickr's search results are great, and very detailed, but all the information they give you makes it tough to browse through pages of results looking for something you'll know when you see it. That's what makes LiteFlick's 10 x 8 grid of photos so useful. You can scan through 80 photos in seconds, and easily get more details when you want them. The crucial feature LiteFlick is missing is a Creative-Commons-only search, which would make finding photos for blog posts a whole lot faster.

There are many ways to share your content online with family and friends. From Flickr to Facebook to MySpace, YouTube and Twitter, there's no shortage of ways, or platforms, to express yourself via words, pictures and videos. Several months ago I was introduced to another of these type of sites called Posterous.

At Posterous, much like these other sites, you can post words, pictures and videos via email from whatever device you happen to be using -- be it iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry or desktop computer. At first, I was a bit skeptical about how Posterous would distinguish itself from the other sites and platforms I use regularly.

However, once I started using Posterous and had my own page, I was quickly impressed with its simplicity, its design and its usability. Soon it became my site of choice for posting images on the go from my iPhone and may very well replace Flickr as my photo site of choice in the near future.

Recently, I talked with Sachin Agarwal, one of Posterous' co-founders, to get all the latest info on the site, how it came to be and where its going.

CHRIS ULLRICH: First off, let's talk a bit about your background. Where did you grow up, go to school, work and develop the skills to do something like Posterous?

SACHIN AGARWAL: Garry and I both went to Stanford and majored in Computer Science. When I graduated, I worked at Apple on Final Cut Pro for 6 years which was all the way up to starting Posterous. I was building the real-time playback engine and effects architecture.

That didn't have a direct impact on the formation of Posterous, except that we're definitely Apple people at heart, and we want to be the Apple of blogging. We want to make the simplest, most beautiful site out there, and make it accessible to the masses.

CU: When did you first have the idea for Posterous, how is it put together and when did it first go live?

Back in the day -- OK, 2007 -- there was a spiffy little OS X app called Facebook Sync that pulled down your friends' contact info and added it to Address Book on your Mac. This was especially brilliant if you used iChat, because screen names would be imported so you could chat with most of your Facebook friends before there was a Facebook Chat. But Facebook Sync turned out to be too good to be true when Facebook decided it violated their Terms of Service. Address Book Sync partially fills the void by allowing you to bulk-add your FB contacts to Address Book -- minus the contact info.

What good is it if you can't sync screennames and email addresses? Well, you can still sync photos and birthdays, and at least you'll have an Address Book entry for each Facebook contact. Also, if you already like the photo you have in your Address Book for one of your friends, you can uncheck a box to have Address Book Sync leave it alone. If your phone can sync contacts with Address Book, this is also a fast way to have people's photos show up when they call you. Address Book Sync works brilliantly and doesn't violate the terms of service. Now, if I could just figure out a way to add contact info to all these new entries ...