Google Street View lets you see photographs of city streets and their surroundings taken by Google cameras attached to vehicles that have been driving along major city streets in the US and other countries including Japan, Australia, and Spain. And now you can also find photos taken by amateur photographers as well. In this case, that's a good thing, because the amateur photos are often higher quality and more interesting compositionally. That's what happens when a human being snaps a photo instead of letting a computer to it.

Google is using geotagged photos contributed through Panoramio. The company also makes some of these photos available in other applications like Google Earth.

If you're viewing a location in Street View that has user photos available, an icon will pop up in the upper right corner of your screen letting you know that user images are available. When you click, a series of photos that you can scroll through will pop up. Just click the button on the right, which should now be labeled Street View, to go back to the normal view.

[via WebWare]

2Pad is a new and interesting photo importing service. The process is compatible with GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL Mail, Mobile Me, and any mail server with IMAP support.

Provide your credentials, and 2pad will begin culling your stored messages for picture and video attachments. You'll receive an email notification when the process starts and again when it's complete. Files 2pad finds will automatically get sorted - by GMail labels, in my case. It also has a built-in slideshow feature, duplicate file remover, and several other handy features.

Like any decent photo gallery app, 2pad allows you to easily manage albums, organize and share your photos, and even create Flash photobooks to share online or order in print.

They do offer their assurance that your password is fully encrypted, and you'll be logged in via an SSL connection. If you still have qualms about providing your mail account credentials, 2pad is probably not for you.

Tilt-shifting, that spiffy photo effect that makes real people and objects look like part of a tiny toy set, has become really popular lately.

Tilt-shift time lapse videos by Keith Loutit were recently featured all over the Internet, inspiring others to figure out how to achieve the effect in their own photos. You could Google a step-by-step tutorial, or you could save yourself the trouble and use Tiltshiftmaker.

Pop a photo into Tiltshiftmaker, move the sliders around to choose the area you want to focus on, and that's all there is to it. It seems to work best with photos that are shot from above and from a distance. If you need some inspiration, there's also Tiltshiftmaker's gallery you can check out and add your own photos to.

There are plenty of online image editors out there, but it can be tough to find the right one. If you're looking for a few filters, a bit of layer support, and a decent range of tools, Pixlr might be the one you want. You'll be familiar with its tools from using desktop apps like Photoshop and The Gimp, but it's rare to see so many advances options in a web app.

Some of the Pixlr perks that surprised me: opacity sliders! Layers and transparency! The collection of filters includes halftones, scanlines and pixelation. Common (but useful) features like hue/saturation, resizing, and brightness/contrast are also intact. Next time you find yourself on a computer without Photoshop, you might also find you don't need it.

Looking for an easy way to share photos with your GMail contacts? Adding the GPhotoSpace extension to your Firefox install provides you with a solution that's just as easy as using "send to: email recipient" in Windows.

Once you've installed the addon, you can open it by clicking the status bar icon. If you're like me and your status bar is hidden, you can also customize your main toolbar and dropping the included button (which is a little lo-fi) or bookmark chrome://gps/content/gpsMain.xul to access it.

The interface is extremely simple. Create a new album, describe it, add photos, and save it. The only adjustment you can make is the size of photos to share: 320/640/1024/1536 pixels. Make sure you change this setting if you want to upload full-size digital images, as it defaults to 640 pixels.

Remember that this is a GMail hack, so "sharing" an album actually just fires off an email to your recipient that contains your photos. Still, it's a much simpler way to send multiple images than using GMail's attachment button.

If you're simply in need of a good, free way to back up your photos, sign up for a new GMail account - the 7 gigs they provide will give you room for several thousand images.

Be aware that GPS currently only supports jpeg images. That shouldn't pose a problem for most users, but I'd like to see it at least support a couple other formats like png and psd.

GPhotoSpace is free, and currently only available for Windows - a Mac version is in the works.

[ via Life Rocks 2.0 ]

Alana Taylor is probably best known for writing a song about Twitter, but maybe not for long. She's also just released a Facebook app that you might find handy. If you go to a lot of tech-savvy social events, like Alana, or if you just have friends who like to play Facebook paparazzi, you've probably wished you could grab all the tagged pictures of you in one fell swoop.

That's what this new app, the accurately-named Get My Tagged Pics, can do for you. It displays all your tagged pics in rows of 10, and lets you download each row as a zip. This is good, because it's halfway between the one-at-a-time method and the other extreme of grabbing hundreds (or maybe thousands!) of pics in one huge file. Sure, it could let you select 10 at a time, but clicking to select wouldn't be any faster than clicking to download. One click is all you need, here.

Here's a question for all our elderly readers: Do any of you remember the primitive era affectionately called 1995, and hearing your college professors speak hopefully (or possibly lament) that soon all the information and media ever created would be up on this web thing and easily accessible and available free of charge? Do you remember how many people went out and bought those state of the art 486s and bleeding edge Pentium I computers, and signed on with AOL or Compuserve or Mindspring to fire up Netscape, stumble on to Yahoo! only to discover the truth.

Even back then, there was a lot of stuff online that was technically information or visual/audible media. It was free, much of it, anyway, as well. I spent way too many hours watching an oddity called a webcam update at shockingly fast one minute intervals, as it delivered grainy black and white stlll images of some forgotten webmaster's painted turtle in California to my desktop in Northern Virginia.

As far as exotic, fine art work or rare, priceless tomes of great knowledge went -- it wasn't all accessible online, or necessarly free if it happened to be available. But for a good portion of the '90s, people who hadn't been online much, or were in denial, insisted it was out there.

There dawns the new century, and the myth of "it's all there, free" started to fade away with the old beige Pentium I and II computers. Things went the other way, though. Every day there was more information on the internet from all sorts of sources, and some of it (shock, awe) was free, or at least accessible to some degree. Is it irony or karma? Who knows? Many people are floored, now, to discover how much useful, cool, credible information is available online free of charge.

So just in time to go back to school (or to impress your friends with your innate intelligence), I've found a few sites and tricks for getting really great information online without additional tuition fees.

Fumpr is an image hosting site that claims to be "the world's fastest photo storage." It definitely has the simplest possible interface: a browse button to select the file you want to upload, and a "fump" button to share something. Fumpr falls into the unfortunate category of names that will probably never catch on because they're just awkward to say. "Hey, I fumped a picture of you earlier today!" might meet with some raised eyebrows, to say the least.

But is it fast? Sure. It's about as fast as Imageshack, Photobucket or Flickr. I didn't notice enough of a difference in speed to call it "the world's fastest," but if they're referring to the number of steps it takes to get something uploaded, then they could be right. It just seems to me that the way Fumpr wants to distinguish itself -- other than with the silliest possible name for a storage service -- is with speed, and there's not enough of a difference there to set it apart.

Speech bubbles are great way to add commentary to pictures. To do this just fire up a graphic program like Photoshop, import your photo, make a new layer, select a shape, draw a shape, create another layer, select the text tool, type what you want, move it around and then save it. In the mean time, that fantastic comment that you wanted to share has gone passé. Of course you could have avoided all this nonsense by using Kyolo.

Kyolo has just one purpose in life, to place speech bubbles on your pictures. There are no layers or strokes here, just upload your photo, choose from 3 different speech bubbles and type away. It couldn't be any simpler.

But for those wanting just a little more control over their bubbles you can certainly rotate the bubbles and increase or decrease the font sizing.

Once you are happy with your artistic creation you can choose to save the photo locally or email it off to your friends to spread a little sunshine to their otherwise dreary day.

Unlike most online photo editing sites, Graphita doesn't give you ways to adjust the levels, white and black balance or saturation. Instead Graphita gives you stamps to "fun up" your photos. We were scratching our head at first as well. Why on earth would you not include the most basic tools for editing a photo? But the answer became apparent as we delved deeper into the site.

On most online photo sites your project ends pretty much the same way with you either downloading the photo or sharing it online. But Graphita did something different, by also letting you put your photos on mugs, mouse pads, shirts and a whole lot of other things that will either clutter up your home or your friends.

By teaming up with QOOP, the transition from one service to the next is fairly transparent. Once you're done placing witty captions or "slippery when wet" signs on your picture, simply select the Order Prints button and your image will be taken to the QOOP site where you can paste it on basically anything they carry.

So instead of trying to be a serious tool for photo editing, Graphita takes a more lighthearted approach. Upload a photo, add a caption or two and send it off to be printed... as a luggage tag.

Tiltviewer is a very slick way to present your photos online. Generally photos are presented in a slide show presentation where photos are displayed one after the other. But unlike a typical slide show Tiltviewer presents your photos in an almost 3D like grid allowing people the freedom to glide around your photos.

In order to use Tiltviewer you will have to download the code and place it on your website. But once properly configured it gives your photos a very modern interface and backdrop. You can zoom into each photo, move around a 3D like space and even click on each photo for more information about it.

We wouldn't recommend Tiltviewer to everyone because of the installation process. But if you are pretty good a following directions and know your way around a few lines of code then you should definitely give Titlviewer a try.

Web based image editors have been popping up for some time now. Even the de facto image editor Photoshop couldn't resist setting up shop. But sometimes you just want to simply resize or crop a photo and not be inadated with a multitude of tools and swatches. Enter picjuice, an online image editor with simplicity in mind.

As soon as you pull up the site it's clear that "ease of use" was the main objective here. The only tools available are Crop, Resize, Flip, Rotate and Adjust.

The controls for each tools are simple as well, depending on the tool selected you either get an A or B option, a slider or in the case of the Crop tool, a cross hair to select the area you want to use. These simple controls will aid in a shorter learning curve over the more feature rich sites.

In our testing we actually found the resizing tool here better than the one available from Photoshop Express. In Express, the resized image looked jagged but not in picjuice . However, the site seemed to be only compatible with JPG or PNG files as when we tried a GIF file picjuice would hang when we tried to edit the image.

Currently in beta, picjuice joins the already crowded online imaging arena. Hopefully, its limited get down to business attitude will help to differentiate itself from the competition.

Sites like Flickr and Photobucket already have services that let you build slide shows, MagToo takes it a step further by also letting you create great panoramic shots to share with others.

Creating a panoramic image does require some thought before you start uploading. In order to get a quality panoramic image, MagToo recommends that your photos overlap by at least 20-50% and that you try to keep the camera level as possible. Once you've uploaded the photos, it's just a matter of clicking the "Stitch Photos" button and letting MagToo do the rest.

The main issue we had with the service is that Internet Explorer is required for the creation of the image. Hopefully in the future, the developers will add content creation support for other major browsers as well.

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.