But who offers such a service?   These tools are not normally offered in a very prominent place and you have to do some digging on each site for them. After some browsing, I found 5 services who offer secret email addresses for you to update while on the go.   There are probably many more but here are 5 of the top ones that a lot of people normally use.

Flickr

Flickr is the first service I found that supplies secret updating email addresses.   If you take a photo with your phone and you want to directly send it to your Flickr photostream then doing so is extremely easy.

Just go here to see your own updating address (Flickr log-in is required).   Then add that address to your email address book (you can even ask Flickr to send the address to your email address book if you are too lazy!).  You can also specify any default tags you want added to emailed-in photos.   Since I will always be using the email function with my mobile phone, I chose to have added #frommobile with these pictures.

Then in the future, when you take a photo with your phone :

• open a new email window
• add your secret email address
• add the photos as attachments
• put the desired title of the photo in the email subject line
• put any photo description in the body of the email
• tags can be put in the subject line or in the body of the email using the tags: title.

Or for those of you who like graphical explanations :

When I tested it, it took 15 minutes for photos to arrive on my Flickr photostream. So it isn’t an instant thing. But if you are out and away from your computer anyway, 15 minutes won’t make any difference.

If you think your secret upload email address has been revealed to others, you can also easily reset the address by pressing a button on your Flickr page.

As soon as the picture(s) arrive at Flickr, the site even offers to put them on your blog automatically.   Is there anything Flickr won’t do for you?

YouTube

This one is a bit redundant for me as my Android phone already has YouTube uploading built in.   But for those of you who haven’t got this feature by default, here’s a quick and easy way to send your videos to YouTube.

By going here (again, log-in required), you will see your secret uploading YouTube email address.  Now whenever you want to send a video to the site, just attach it as an email attachment and send it to your secret address.

Be aware with this one that virtually all email services have an attachment size limit.   Videos are normally huge in size so unless you keep the video clip small, you may have trouble getting your email service to accept it.  So no uploading Ben-Hur!  Keep it short, simple and small.

Facebook

The Facebook one seems to only allow the uploading of photos so no status updates or poking with this address.   But if you regularly upload lots of drunken party photos to Facebook then go here and find your secret Facebook uploading address.  Speed is of the essence if you want your boss to find out why you really took the day off sick.

Blogger

Blogger has two methods of letting you post content via your mobile, and of course, me being me, the first method didn’t work at all!  Typical.

The first method, which you can read about here, involves authorising your phone to send content to your blog.   But when I tried, I got an email back saying that my “device was not authorised”.   Wait a minute – a Google Android phone is not authorised to send content to a Google-owned blogging company?   Spot the irony there.

The second method is to set up a secret blogging email address.  Unlike the other services, you can choose what the second half of the address will be (so you can choose a secret word or phrase that only you will remember).   You can set this up by logging into Blogger then going to settings–>email & mobile.

The title of the blog post goes in your email subject line and all blog images go as email attachments.

Posterous

I couldn’t do a post like this without mentioning Posterous, the blogging site which seems to be doing surprisingly well.  The whole concept of Posterous is that you email in everything and it will be automatically posted for you – text, photos, mp3’s, videos, documents, the lot.

Just set up your blog, associate an email address with it and then send your blog entries with that email address to post@posterous.com .   It will then shortly appear on your Posterous page.  The simplicity of it is winning over a lot of bloggers and I have to admit, I am starting to weaken.

So there are 5 services where you can email in your updates.   Do you know of any more?   If so, let us know all about them in the comments so I can update my email address book…

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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I think this might sound convenient to some of you who have suddenly shown up on Facebook on that photo some kid made at a party where you tried to set the world record for beer bong drinking. Ouch. As you know there are too many examples of people getting busted calling in sick for work. But Flickr has implemented this well and it could be a really nice tool. Both for organizing your own photos and the people who are in them and finding other people’s photos you are in.

So how does this work? The new feature is called People in Photos and it lets you add any Flickr member to a photo. But it’s also possible to highlight people who are not registered on Flickr, although they have to give their permission by email. You tag someone on the photo by typing in their name, just like you would with a Flickr tag for the photo. For Flickr users who are familiar with notes, it should be easy to draw a face boundary on the photo.

People in photos is hooked up to Your Activity, so you’ll always know who has tagged you in other photos or when other people have added faces to your photos. The Flickr team has done a lot of work on all the privacy preferences. You can allow certain people to add you to photos or add other people to your photos. You can even decide per photo if you want to be on it, so that’s good news for that one embarrassing surprise photo when you were just waking up.

Of course many people use Flickr as their photo storage or at least have a Yahoo account which you can use for Flickr. But even when they’re not a member but appear on your photos they can be invited by e-mail. They then have the same level of control as Flickr members have over on what photos they want to show up.

To learn more about People in Photos have a look at FAQs provided by Flickr:

• What is People in Photos?
• How do I add a person to a photo?
• Who can add me to a photo?
• How can I remove myself from a photo?
• How will I know when I’m added to a photo?

The complete People in Photos FAQs are available here.

Up until now Flickr is mostly used for more professional arty photos, while Facebook or a Twitter service like Twitpic is used for quick snapshots, perhaps made with a camera phone. Do you think this new feature will change this? Have you been waiting for this or do you use it on Facebook?

For more information on a way to use Flickr more for sharing on Twitter read this article on Twitpic and Flickr2Twitter. More Flickr tips and tricks can be found here.

Image credit: allyaubry

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But that is not even the best part about Flickr. The best part is the awesome community that the site has and the knowledge that one can gather by just ‘lurking’ around the various photography groups and the forums.

Despite all this, one feature that I really wish Flickr would provide on its own is to let users take a backup of their Flickr photos from the site itself. While Flickr refuses to give this feature on their site, a number of third party tools have sprung up to fill the void and in this post, we’ll be taking you through 3 such tools.

All Flickr applications require you to allow them access to your photos. The application, when launched, will ask for your permission and if you want to try out the application, grant it the required access. You can, of course, revoke the permission later if you’re not interested in using that particular application anymore.

Flump

Flump is an Adobe Air based application that is designed to be as simple to use as is possible. Use it only if you intend to make a backup of all the photos in your Flickr account since Flump doesn’t give the user any option to select which photos/sets they want to download.

As far as the user interface goes the developer couldn’t have made it any simpler. Login using your Flickr account, select the folder that you want to download your pics to, and click the Start Flump button. That’s it !

Flickr Backup

Flickr Backup is a cross platform Java application that lets you backup individual photos as well as complete sets. This is definitely one of my favorite tools for the job. The only thing that I have to do is wait for it to load all my sets/pics, select the ones that I want to download and then click the backup button.

Flickr Backup also gives you an option to burn the backed up pics directly to a CD/DVD using an external application but I didn’t try that option myself. If you only want to make a local copy you can either download the pics to a folder on your computer or create a zip archive.

Flickrtouchr

This one is for all you command line enthusiasts. Flickrtoucher is a simple python script and if, like me, you prefer the command line, also the easiest to get going with.

Just download the script, flicktouchr.py, create a directory where you want it to store all the downloaded files to and launch the script.

python flickrtouchr.py <directory name>

Flickrtouchr will start downloading all the pictures from your account and store them neatly in directories named after the set in which they exist.

How do you guys manage your Flickr photos? Do you backup your Flickr photos or just let Flickr manage all your pics?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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But what about all those photos you see when you click on the more tab at the top of a Google map?

Where do all those photos come from? That’s right – Panoramio.

Today I will show you how to get your photos uploaded with Panoramio so they too will start appearing on Google Maps and Google Earth. Basically, this will be a guide on how to geotag your photos.

Using Panoramio is a good way to get more eyeballs on your photography work and gain some more exposure. I mean, how many people use Google Maps and Google Earth? Precisely. The numbers are huge and as soon as those users switch on the photos layer, relevant images will start popping up on the screen for them to click on and view.

Now, if your photos are located in a really busy location such as New York City, then your photographic contributions may end up getting lost in among all the other pictures. But if your photos are located in a really quiet, not so well known area then your pictures may end up being the only ones on display.

Our journey to photographic fame and fortune starts with Panoramio, obviously. If you don’t have a free account then you will need to make one. Then sign in.  Once you have logged in, you’ll see a link at the top which says “upload“. Click on that to begin sending your photos to Panoramio.

Now, before we continue, I should mention that you will save a lot of time if your photos are already geo-tagged before sending them to places like Panoramio. If you don’t know what geo-tagging means then you probably haven’t done it before. Geo-tagging basically means that you are adding some extra identifying information to each photo consisting of where the photo was taken.    This information isn’t immediately apparent to anyone viewing the photo (as in it’s not splashed all over the front of the picture). But if you then insert the photos into say a mapping application then that information CAN be read and the photos will be positioned in the right places.

The way I like to do it is by using a bookmarklet called Localize. When you are on your Flickr photo page (it doesn’t seem to work with Picasa Web Albums), just click the Localize bookmarklet and the photo is suddenly replaced by a Google map.

Move the pink arrow, as shown in the screenshot, to the photo’s correct location and save. That’s all there is to it. You will then get a URL below your photo which, if clicked, will take you to the Google map and the location you specified. If you make geo-tagging a habit everytime you upload a photo to Flickr, then it won’t be such a big boring unappealing job.

OK, back to Panoramio and our upload link. On the page, begin uploading your photos (if they are not geo-tagged yet, don’t worry, we can do this later inside Panoramio).

Once the photos are uploaded, you will be asked to tag your photos. This is not geo-tagging, just tags for Panoramio visitors to find your pictures when they search.

Fill out all the required information and save it all.

Now it’s time to properly geo-tag them (if you haven’t done that already). To do this, click on each individual photo and you will then see a “Map This” button to the right hand side. Click on that and you will then be prompted to enter the location for the photo. Try and get it down to the actual street if you can so the map is more accurate.

A Google map will now open up and you then have to move the red marker to its proper position on the map

Now save your changes and then move onto the next photo. As you move each photo to its proper position on the map, Panoramio will update.

Now it is worth stressing here that your photo uploads don’t take effect immediately. So if you now went straight to Google Maps or Google Earth, you will NOT see your photos appear. A notice on Panoramio says that you currently have to wait a couple of days before your images will start appearing on the map. So don’t get frustrated or angry because you don’t immediately see your picture of you mooning from the Hollywood sign.

Upload the pics, leave it for a couple of days and then check back to see if they are there yet.   Just have a think of how many photos Panoramio must be receiving every minute and then you will then appreciate why it will take some time for yours to appear.  Have faith my young apprentice.

To get Panoramio photos to appear on Google Earth, you need to go to the lower left hand corner box, find Geographic Web and then tick “Panoramio“.   Pictures corresponding to the area you are currently viewing in Earth will now pop up all over the place and you can now click on each one to view them.

In each picture box is a link to the Panoramio user’s profile so you can see, with one mouse click, what else they have uploaded (here’s mine).  So if you put a lot of effort into uploading your photos, tagging them and geo-tagging them, then Google Maps and Google Earth will provide the necessary audience readily interested in taking a look at your work.

Do you have any other tips, tricks and suggestions for geo-tagging your photos and getting them onto Google Maps / Google Earth? If so, let us know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Flickr offers both free and paid subscriptions, and after you open your account and start building your own photostream, you’ll want to sign up for several of the tens of thousands of groups on the popular photo sharing site.

The following is a suggested list of the various types of Flickr discussion groups you might consider joining.

1. Your Camera Model Flickr Group

One of the first groups you should search for and join is one based on the camera you use. Nearly all popular digital 35mm and compact cameras have at least one Flickr group dedicated to it. If you’re a Canon user, for example, there’s the Canon DSLR User Group.

But more specifically there’s groups based on different models of Canon cameras, such as the Canon Powershot G9 group with well over 3,000 members. There’s groups for Nikon and Kodak camera users, as well as for Sonys and Panasonics.

2. Your Town or City

If you’re the kind of photographer who likes to get out and take photographs, search for a group based on the town or city you live in. If such a group doesn’t exist, create one. These Flickr groups can be a great places for discovering nearby shutterbugs, as well public locations for photo shoots. For example there’s one group called San Francisco Graffiti with 900 members. This niche groups shares some awesome finds.

3. Black-and-White Photography

If you like black-and-white photography, there are hundreds of groups on the subject that not only includes awesome monochromatic photographs, but also great discussions about lighting, post-processing, and film related issues related to black-and-white photography. One such Flickr group has nearly 85,000 members, and it’s name is simply, B&W.

4. iPhoneography

If you’re an iPhone camera shooter, you’ll want to join one or more of the growing Flickr groups on this subject. One such group, iPhoneography has over 600 members, while another group, iPhone Camera Shots has well over 2,000 members.

There are even smaller groups based on different and popular iPhone camera applications, such the Best Camera app group.  There’s not a lot of discussion in this group, but they share really awesome photos, and you can share yours as well.

5. Photography Tips

Beginning photographers will want to find a newbie Flickr group. One such group is Your Photo Tips and another was created by author/photographer Derrick Story, and it is called  The Digital Story Group . Derrick’s group, of about 1,000 members, includes discussions about all kinds of camera features, accessories and photography strategies.

Digital Photography School is also a group for both beginning and advanced photographers, as well as Amateurs which includes long discussion threads of favorite photos and camera tips.

6. Project 365

The best way to build and improve your photography skills is to take photos every day, or as often as you can. There are over 11,000 members of the popular Project 365 group that have or are attempting to complete a photo-per-day project. Even if you don’t reach the goal, you’ll improve your photography trying to.  There are several other smaller and similar project groups that you should also query using the keyword, 365.

7. Strobist.com

If you’re wanting to learn about using external flashes and lighting equipment, the must-join group is Strobist.com, started by 20 year-old veteran photographer, David Hobby. The group, with well over 62,000 members, is an outgrowth of his popular blog site of the same name.

8. Nature Photography

If nature photography is your hobby, check out this wild nature group of 22,000 members. The discussions are little sparse for a group of that size, but there’s lots of great photos of plants, animals, fungi, landscapes and flowers.

One popular thread in the group is “the best flower shot.” These “best of” topics are common in groups where you simply share your own favorite photos based on a discussion topic.

9. Artistic Photo Group

If you approach photography from a artistic perspective you might check out a popular and respected group called UTATA: Tribal Photography. Its 17,000+ members are made up of both professionals and serious shutterbugs. It has over 8,000 discussion threads with weekly photo projects for its members.

10. Photoshop Support Group

If you’re serious about photography, you’ll no doubt spend lots of time in Photoshop. Flickr’s Photoshop Support Group has over 92,000 members, with over 5,000 discussion threads about all aspects of the popular image processing program.

When you join a group, look for the typical “introduce yourself” discussion thread and add a few sentences about you as a photographer and why you joined the group. From there, add your own photos to the group, being careful to follow the posting rules of the groups.

If none of the above groups interest you, you might want to check out what Flickr staff members suggest. Each time you reload the Groups page you’ll get a list of three or four suggested groups. While writing this article and checking the Groups page, for example, a group called Cloudporn popped up. What a great idea. I love taking photos of clouds, so I immediately joined. There’s currently no discussions in this group, but its 5,000+ members are sharing some great images of spectacular cloud formations and lighting.

This list of groups is mainly based on my five years of being a Flickr member, and thus it’s partially subjective. So what groups do you suggest be on the list? Please include a URL to the group and maybe a line or two about why you think the group is worth joining.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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But the one thing that Twitter does NOT allow, by default, is the ability to post pictures. That is where TwitPic and Flickr comes in.  By posting your pictures to one of these services, a short URL is automatically generated and then posted on your Twitter stream in seconds.

Let’s take a look at both services and see how they can help you with posting pictures on Twitter. We’ll also see how they stack up against one another.

TwitPic

TwitPic is not new but it is one of those services that I constantly heard about but never got around to trying it out. I finally tried it out today and I am amazed at how easy it is to use. With just a few clicks, you can start posting pictures to Twitter for all to see.

You need to give TwitPic your Twitter credentials and after logging in, you will see a Photo Upload page. I decided to upload a photo of me in my new A-Team t-shirt :

After uploading the picture to TwitPic, a unique URL is created and that URL is then posted to your Twitter account for people to click on and view.   Easy.  Nothing to it.

But TwitPic also has a few other features worth mentioning. They also collects the replies to your TwitPic tweet and lists them on the unique TwitPic page underneath your photo. As you can see here, I have got one reply already to my A-Team t-shirt picture. You can also reply on the TwitPic page to everyone who sent Tweets and those replies will then also be posted to your Twitter stream.

TwitPic also gives you a unique email address which you can use to email pictures in. It says on the site that it is for “sending pictures from your phone” but I tested it from my Gmail address on a normal PC and it worked fine. The picture appeared on my TwitPic account within 5 minutes of sending it.

You can also choose to not have your pictures show up on Twitter but to be honest, why would you choose that option? The whole point of using TwitPic is to post pictures on Twitter. Not having the picture links posted to Twitter would be like going to the airport but refusing to get on the plane.

TwitPic also has a Public Timeline of all the photos passing through their site. You can also subscribe by RSS to have all the photos sent to you if photo gazing is your thing (and if you have the time to look at them all).

The one downside to Twitpic is that they don’t have their own branded search engine to look for other pictures. Your own pictures are neatly laid out in your account but if you want to search for other peoples pictures, Twitpic doesn’t offer a search engine. This seems to be a rather amazing oversight.

You will have to look for pictures using a Twitter image search engine, two of which I will briefly look at towards the end of this article. But if you want to search the Twitpic site, you will have to go to Google and use the site: search term.   So to find actress Demi Moore’s pictures (Demi is a big user of Twitpic), go to Google and type :

site:twitpic.com Demi Moore

Flickr

Now there are probably a lot of people out there who don’t want to give out their Twitter details. In that case, another possibility is Flickr. Flickr connects to your Twitter account using their API and so no password is inputted.  It’s all done through “tokens”.

I tried looking to see if it was possible to post to Twitter using Picasa Web Albums but I was unable to find a solution. If you know of one, please do let us know in the comments.

Anyway, back to Flickr.   Here’s how to post to Twitter using Flickr.

Go to the picture on Flickr that you want to post to Twitter.  You need to be logged into Flickr first and it doesn’t have to be your picture. You can tweet any picture on Flickr you want.

Click on “Blog This” on the bar above the picture

If you don’t have Twitter set up yet on your Flickr account, you can click through to a menu asking you which blog you want to send the picture to. Twitter is near the bottom.

Flickr will then connect to Twitter and Twitter will ask you if you want to grant access to Flickr. Say yes and then you will be redirected back to the Flickr photo page. When you click on “Blog This” again, you should now see this :

Now just click on that Twitter link and you’ll be taken to a preview page where you will see the photo along with a text box to write your Tweet. As you can see, the link to the photo has already been shrunk into a short Flic.kr URL.

Click “post entry” and then go to your Twitter stream. You should now see the Tweet there along with the link to the picture.  It’s all done in seconds.

Like Twitpic, Flickr also gives you a unique email address to email your pictures into your Twitter account.

As far as I can see, these are the two easiest ways to send pictures to Flickr.  As I said, if you know of a way to do this with Picasa Web Albums, please do let us know in the comments how to do it.

There are two Twitter picture services which I like if you want to see what people are uploading – Twitcaps and Twicsay although I slightly prefer Twitcaps because it connects my pictures with my last tweet. Twicsy just generates lots of random, sometimes pointless, tags for the pictures.  But both offer good search and real-time updating of pictures to Twitter.

How do you go about posting pictures on Twitter? Do you know of any other good alternative methods apart from Twitpic and Flickr? Or any good alternatives to Twitcaps and Twicsay? Let us know all about them in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Flickroom is the new Adobe AIR kid on the block that will change the way you interact with Flickr.  Flickroom lets you browse Flickr in a beautiful charcoal colored interface that is soothing to the eyes, allows easy photo uploads and downloads, gives you real-time notifications for comments and faves on your photostream, and more. The app is still in beta and new features are being added at a rapid pace.

Flickroom Setup

Download and install Flickroom from here. When launched, it will allow you to connect with your Flickr account or create a new one. The application requires a simple one-time authorization process via Flickr so that it can work with your account. Your credentials are cached locally so you don’t need to login again in the future.

Browse Flickr with Flickroom

Users of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom will feel right at home since the interface to browse Flickr is very similar. The bottom filmstrip shows your (or your contact’s) photographs. The center area is where you view photos, edit photo data, and chat with other Flickroom users.

You can choose the display size and background color of the photo viewer, and click Details to view photo information like description, comments, tags, and EXIF data.

At the top right, you can navigate between your photostream, contacts, groups, etc. The application commands are in a toolbar at the top-right of the window. From here, you can view the latest photos from your contacts, upload, chat, search and set default settings. Hover your mouse for a popup description since it may get some time to get used to the command buttons.

Viewing recent uploads from your contacts is very easy. You can see the recent photos in the right sidebar or launch a separate filmstrip view. In this separate window, you can flip between your contacts to see their recent uploads in a filmstrip.

Upload Photos

There are three ways to upload photos using Flickroom:

• When your photostream is visible, drag and drop any photo into the app to add it to your photostream.
• When viewing one of your sets, drag and drop any photo to add it to the set.
• For powerful upload functions, use the Upload Manager accessed from the top-right toolbar.

I was very impressed with the simple yet powerful Upload Manager. You can select a batch of multiple photos, choose privacy settings, use tags and existing sets, create new sets, and add to groups, before the actual upload.

Download Photos

At present, you can download only one photo that is selected and displayed. For batch downloading, do checkout the two different apps we have previously covered on MakeUseOf.

Edit Photos, Add Comments and Notes

For any photo you are viewing, the action buttons below the photo on the right allow you to edit information, make comments, add notes, mark as favorite and so on.

Search Users and Photos

Flickroom allows basic searching for photos and users at present. You can search for users by email address or username. The photo search searches tags to find matches. Though the search is basic, the best part is that you can add users as your contact from within the application.

Preferences

The application preferences allow you to set the default photo size (useful for slower connections to use smaller display size), background color, initial view, and a ‘signature’ for all new photos.

Live Feed, Chat and Tweeting

The most unique feature of this app is the ability to get real-time notifications for any activity such as comments and favorites on your photostream. You can tweet about a photo from right within the application.

If you’re in a social mood, you can jump right into the Chat room, where you can chat with other Flickroom users currently logged in.

Do you like Flickroom’s interface to browse Flickr? Does it make your photos come alive? Let us know in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Step 1 – Show off your best

No one is ever going to know what sorts of photos you are interested in unless you get some of them online. If you take photographs regularly, upload regularly. Really, what excuses do you have?

Second only to getting the images online is making sure they can be found. I’ve spoken about tagging before, but perhaps an example might help?

If you want other folk to find your photos, you need to take some good guesses as to what they might search for, and add those word or phrases to your photo as tags.

Some people like to look at photos of roller coasters. I think this is the only one I have, so I’m not one of those people, but I’m not immune to wanting people to like it. So I’ve tagged the image with the search phrases I think people might use to find it.

Needless to say, your list would differ from mine. I posted this a few years ago as well, and these days I’d probably add ‘roller’ and ‘coaster’ separately as well.

But the focus here is to find other people’s images, so let’s move on.

Step 2 – Join groups

Aside from searching for images in Flickr, you can search for groups. Just in case there is any confusion, a group is like a set, except that it’s designed for multiple people to use. Most groups are public, but you can also restrict the membership of a group.

Search for groups that contain things you are interested in. That could be objects (like roller coasters), colours (careful with your spelling), techniques, moods… I’ll be surprised if you can’t find at least one Flickr group on any reasonably broad subject, and you’ll generally find hundreds.

Join groups. Add images. Comment on other images you find there. Go on.

Step 3 – Create your own group.

Eventually, you might find that you’re searching for something that’s too specific for a group to already exist, and you’ll need to create one of your own. That’s going to take a little more work, so decide if you’re up for it first.

Just as an example, I like to take photographs of rusty things. Peculiar I know, but I’ve even exhibited on the subject, so I’m definitely not alone. Anyway, I became interested specifically in images that were rusty, and also blue. At this point, feel free to substitute your own obsession.

I’m going to cheat anyway, as this group already exists. I’ll create a similar one for yellow rust pictures.

Creation

After checking that a group doesn’t already exist on the subject, create a new one here.

You can see that various types of groups are possible. Given that we’re looking to find people, let’s make it public.

Supply a name for the group, and add some idea of what it’s all about. Make a decision about whether there’s anything that might be in the group that kids shouldn’t see. Click Next.

Decide what non-members of the group should be able to see.

Decide what to call the administrators and moderators.

You can make a whole set of choices about administration, addresses, moderation etc. Just remember you want people to join. Which leads me to the next part…

Invitations

You can use all the means at your disposal to invite folk to your new group. You can email them, send them a text from your phone, put an advertisement on national television. Whatever you like. Flickr has its own method as well, so you can easily invite your contacts.

Go to the main page for your group and look at the top menu.

Click the invite Friends link, and invite anyone you think might be interested.

Of course for this to be useful it assumes you already know the people who might want to join. If you don’t, you need to locate some images that might fit in the group, and invite them instead.  Let’s switch back to my real group of blue + rust to see how this works.

Basically, other than images I stumble across in Flickr, I want to know about images which are tagged with both blue and rust. You see why it’s important to correctly tag your images?

Click the search link on the main Flickr page, and then click on advanced search. You want something like this:

Run the search, and depending on what you’re looking for you’ll almost certainly get back a stack of images.

Click on one that’s of interest (such as my friend Kate’s wheel), and fill in the boxes…

Hit Post Comment, and you’re all set. Take a look at Kate’s image to see how it comes out.

Maintenance

One of the toughest parts of running a group is keeping things moving. You always want new members, more images, interesting competitions and discussions.

Assign some other folk admin privileges so things don’t stall if you’re busy. Start conversations.

The query process above is great for getting things started, but it’s not great for ongoing invitations. You need a way to be automatically told when new images arrive that might suit the group.

That’s where we add a little more technology…

The Flickr API is able to generate RSS feeds on the fly, based on a query string. Then you sign up for the RSS feed, and every few hours you get some more images to invite. How this looks depends on both your browser and your feed reader, but the way it works is fairly clear in the link.

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=blue,rust&tagmode=all&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Take a look at the query. Just replace blue and rust with whatever you want to search for, separating any additional terms with commas.

And that’s it. Now you have a group, some members, some images, and a way to build on it.

I’d love to know if you’ve used any of this and if you have any other tips or tricks. Let me know in the comments. Oh, and… any chance you might want to join my group?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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• Make Use Of Podcast #37: Top Ten Flickr Greasemonkey Scripts (2)

But the coolest thing about Adobe AIR apps is that they often add new functionality to web apps and allow you to interact with those apps just like you do with desktop programs. Adobe Air Apps often make those websites even more useful.

For media junkies like myself, this is fantastic. Watching movies gets easier, as does looking for photos and listening to music. Here are three of my favorite media-based AIR applications.

Bookmash

Bookmash does a little bit of everything – it’s got media on the Web pretty well covered. It’s basically a multi-platform search engine that lets you search through YouTube, DailyMotion and Metacafé for videos, Last.fm and Seeqpod for music, and through most social networks and news sites to find what’s going on around the Web.

The social stuff is great, but the media is where Bookmash shines. The search is impressive, and everything can be watched, listened to or downloaded right from within the Bookmash interface. I wish it offered more search possibilities, but between YouTube and Last.fm, you’re pretty set for most of your media needs.

My Media Player

One of my favorite sites on the Web is Hulu (unfortunately, it’s only for the US at this point but you can learn how to access it from other countries here). It’s a fantastic portal for legally watching TV shows, movies, and clips of great shows like Saturday Night Live that have historically been unwilling to share their material on sites like YouTube.

My Media Player plugs into Hulu, and doesn’t offer playback of anything that Hulu doesn’t already. But what it does do is: make it a separate window, with no toolbars or anything like that, that appears just like any other media player and can be resized or docked to fit your needs. It makes watching Hulu videos (particularly if you’re a multi-tasker without a huge screen) a much easier proposition.

Stefan wrote about Hulu Desktop, even if it isn’t an Adobe AIR application, you should give it a whirl.

My Media Player also hooks into Twitter, which means you can tweet about what you’re watching – making TV and movies a lot more social.

(A bit of warning: Hulu appears to have made a change that is causing some issues with My Media Player. I’ve used it with no problem, but it sounds like some have. If it doesn’t work immediately, that’s why – stay tuned! I’ll find announce a workaround in the comments if I know about it)

zflick

According to all three browsers I use regularly, Flickr is the site I visit most. I use it for blog posts, wallpapers, and a whole host of other things as well. It’s a great tool, but isn’t the easiest to navigate.

zFlick makes finding and downloading images easier than ever. Search for an image, or browse through the impressively attractive interface of photos, complete with awesome transitions. Once you’ve found the photo you want, you can just drag-and-drop to download it. You can drag it straight to a number of other applications as well – Photoshop, AIM, and the like – if that’s where you’re using the photos. The more I use Flickr, the more I appreciate how simple, quick, attractive and useful zFlick is.

For a more powerful Flickr search tool, Ann Smarty has the lowdown with 16 Flickr Search Tools That Are Fun to Use.

Increasingly, I’m watching, listening, and viewing my media on Adobe AIR, using a growing number of applications. These are the three I couldn’t live without, though – I need my music, my zone-out videos, and the incredible resource of pictures that Flickr has become. Adobe AIR makes all of those better.

What’s your favorite AIR app? Share with us in the comments.

Photo: YngveNilsen

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• How To Watch Movies and Shows on Hulu & Sling from Abroad (78)

I’ve talked about Flickr sets before, in terms of how to best get your images noticed.

The Collections are live. That is, if you add more images to the member groups, then the Collections are updated accordingly.

Unfortunately, Sets themselves are static. They contain whatever images you add to them, but there’s no capability within flickr to automatically add images on the basis of any sort of rules.

Ideally, sets would work the way that smart playlists do in iTunes. These playlists are essentially sets of rules, and can be set to update themselves when new tracks are added to iTunes. Until a similar capability is added to Flickr, some clever folks have found ways to achieve similar ends. We plan to take advantage.

All of this requires the use of tags, which are keywords that you can add to your images in Flickr to make them easy to find later. I’ve talked about this before as well.

SmartSetr

The idea here is to set up some rules in SmartSetr, and then have those rules update your flickr sets. It’s pretty easy. Just follow along.

First off, you need to have a Flickr account, and you need to let SmartSetr have access to it, just the way any Flickr add-on works.

After that, click on the Click Here link, just as you might expect.

Create a new SmartSet. First you need to select a type. We’re going to use tags, but some of the other options are interesting, especially the last one, which lets things get quite complex by adding multiple sets of rules.

Fill in the boxes…

The SmartSet title is what finishes up being the title of the set in flickr, and description is added to Flickr as well.

You can choose to use public images, as we have here, or those which you only allow certain groups of people to see.

Sorting the images in the set isn’t exactly intuitive, but the Interestingness Descending option, despite the long-windedness, is usually the best choice. Your most popular images will be shown first.

In the real world, it’s best to stick with the default 500 images rather than the more manageable 10 I’ve chosen here.

Now for the crux of the matter. Add the tags you wish to filter by, with commas between multiple selections. For instance, if you only want pictures of rusty walls in blue, then try rust, wall, blue, using the exact same words you used for tagging the images in the first place. I’m just looking for anything that’s been tagged yellow.

You can say that the resulting set needs to match all of the tags, or any of them, as we have here.

Hit Preview First 50.

SmartSetr will interrogate Flickr, and come back with an example of the set contents.

If you’ve made the right choices, go ahead and hit the Save button. If not, backtrack a little and make some changes.

You’ll finish up on a confirmation screen with links to your set in Flickr, and an Edit link to make further changes to the rules.

On that same screen you’ll find a Refresh All SmartSets option, and that’s the one downside to SmartSets.

They don’t update unless you ask them to. You need to come back to the SmartSetr site, and request it to refresh all your sets any time you want to include new images.

Flickr Set Manager

The second option is very similar to SmartSetr. Let’s run through the same example to see what’s different.

Click on the Manage My Sets link from the main page of Flicker Set Manager, and then click Create New Managed Set.

The interface is a little unusual. Each section is opened by clicking on the title of it. Start with the Title and Description heading first, and fill in the name and description for the set.

Click the Set Type heading, and choose Most Interesting for the sort order, 20 for the number of images, and then we have the major difference between this product and SmartSetr. Flickr Set Manager will automatically update the sets on a daily basis.

Click Text Filtersand add yellow as the only filter.

We’re not going to use the Date or Location filters, but feel free to take a look.

Hit the Preview button to see what the result looks like.

Those are the same images with got with SmartSetr, so click the Back button, and then click on Save.

My new set – along with a couple I’d already created – are listed, and you have the option to Edit Set, Delete Set, or Create New Managed Set. Enjoy.

I use sets a lot in Flickr, and plan to add new ones using one of these webapps. How do you manage your sets? What functionality do you think is missing? What other tools do you use to help? Tell me in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Soon after the early search days of AltaVista, Infoseek and Yahoo, Google took over. Google would not only find those same pages during the internet conception, but would essentially answer any question you want as well. Today, we still have all of that, but with Maps, News, Videos, and of course images.

Ginipic is an depth image search tool of not only your own entire image collection, but almost all of the major image hosting/sharing sites as well. This includes DeviantArt, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Google, Fotolio, Photobucket, and several others. The tool runs locally on your Windows PC and includes a very easy to use navigation tool.

First and foremost, the biggest and most important piece of Ginipic is the search portion. Having the ability to comb several image hosting sites in the matter of a few seconds makes life very easy when you’re searching for that next great photograph or graphic. The screenshot below gives you a better idea of how exactly the search works.

After finding something you’ve been searching for, you simply click on any particular image to quickly preview it before you accept your selection. From the preview window, you can share it on all of the major social networking sites, e-mail, save it, favorite it or set it as your desktop background.

The preview window is also where the drag-n-drop feature comes into play. From Ginipic you can simply select your picture from the window and drag it into any compatible image application.

Ginipic includes both a large sidebar window to search and preview, or a full screen mode. It includes windows wrapping so it never gets in the way, and when you’re done using it, you can have it continuously running in your system tray.

Ginipic is one of the first of its kind and works really well at what it’s main purpose is – meta image searching. Its incredibly fast search of not only your PC but essentially all of the web as well makes it a one of a kind of application that can come in handy in many situations for work or home.

What do you think? Do you have any similar desktop or web based image search engines that you use?im How do you see utilizing an application like Ginipic?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• Take Flickr Straight to your Desktop with Interactive Wallpaper Updates (15)
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Never thought about that did ya? Well most of us wouldn’t – seeming as Flickr is a huge business that has been around for a while. But in this day and age it is possible for anything to go under.

Now let’s take a look at Downloadr. It can help us download flickr photos in bulk and backup our entire Flickr account. I started by downloading a tiny 20KB file called Updatr (you just have to love the naming convention right!?!?). Copy this file to a new directory, run Updatr and it will download the newest version of Downloadr.

Downloadr will then launch and you will see this screen:

I then typed in my username in the User field and hit search. DownloadR returns the first 10 items and 10 more for each subsequent push of the Search More button.

I highlighted one picture and clicked on “Download selected”. This allows me to grab the largest available file from Flickr of this picture. Once you click download selected you will get this normal “File Save” dialogue box.

That is all well and good when you have say 7 photos in your Flickr account. But let’s be a little more realistic. If you want to grab a whole bunch of images and save them all to your machine you will need to authenticate first by going to, Extras —> Authenticate:

You will get a few warning boxes asking you if it is ok to allow “Downloadr” access to your account. I saw two Windows Dialogue boxes followed by this web page opening:

I clicked “OK I’ll ALLOW IT” and I was ready to backup my images. I went back to my Extras menu and chose complete backup. I then got this window:

I hit the “Backup now” button. Downloadr got my Flickr ID# and then started downloading my images. In no time at all I had all my 200 images on my local machine.

I clicked OK and Downloadr showed me the folder that contained my images, A job well done!

Another app which you could use for your Flickr backup needs is FlickrDown which Mark profiled here.

Do you backup your online accounts? If you do – how? Share your brilliance with our readers…. in the comments! If you’re aware of any other tools to download Flickr photos in bulk, please post them in comments as well.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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To explain it clearer, Google tries to guess what other type of information the surfer would also like see based on his or her search query. For example, for “Britney Spears” you’ll see images and videos blended within the search interface and for “downtown Los Angeles” you’ll get local search results (i.e. maps.google.com).

The idea of pulling more data by one-click searching can be expanded. You do not have to limit yourself to the Google search engine only. This time I am listing a few cool FireFox addons that show you more relevant information based on your search query and provides you with more opportunities to browse through.

Add Multiple Search Engines to Google Search Interface

WebMynd offers to search a wealth of search platforms simultaneously with your Google search, by default: Twitter Search, Amazon, YouTube; but you can also add numerous other search options (e.g. Flickr, Wikipedia, Digg, LinkedIn, CNN, etc). The search results will appear right on Google’s results page in the right sidebar:

Additional great features of the page:

• send Tweets directly from your search results asking your friends advice related to your search;
• user-friendly interface: add/hide engines with one click, drag-and-drop ordering of pages.

Integrate Amazon.com and eBay Search:

GoogAzon adds the first ten search results from Amazon and eBay in a collapsed orange bar to the top of your Google results page (works also for Yahoo or MSN / Live search). The results include the title, price, and a mouse-over thumbnail image.

You can also quickly share the results with friends and access the actual Amazon / eBay search results.

Add Reference Information

Google Search Sidebar for FF3 (Greasemonkey plugin) adds relevant results from Wikipedia and Dictionary.com (as well as Flickr, and YouTube) :

See Your Browsing History

Infoaxe is a browser addon (both FireFox and Internet Explorer versions available) that will show your browsing history results based on your Google search term.

Note: it requires registration and access to your private data, i.e. browsing history.

See What Your Facebook Friends Have to Say:

SideStripe offers a handy Google Gadget that integrates with the Google search results page and searches your friends list for your search query.

The tool offers some more functionality (e.g. it invites you to ask your friends’ opinion on what you are searching) but I didn’t invite my friends to use the application, so I can’t say if it works. The search functionality works pretty well though:

Would you like to add more searching functionality or do you think “plain” Google is all you need? Do you use any tools that make Google better? Share your thoughts!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Track Facebook, Twitter, Flickr & Youtube Updates on iPhone (3)
• Shozu – The Mobile Social Networking Hub (12)
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Shozu is a software for mobile devices that serves as a hub for you to connect to a long list of social networks. With Shozu, it is not about how fast you can upload your photos, it is about how many social platforms you can connect to at the same time and how effortless you can get everything done.

When I first tried out Shozu on my iPod Touch, I was overwhelmed to see the huge number of social platforms that it supports. Other than the popular Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter, it also supports some of the smaller networks such as HotSMS, Hyves, Ipernity, ITV Uploaded, moblog:UK, Netlog and many many more.

While Shozu is mainly an application for you to upload and share your photos on the various social networks, there are some additional features that makes it stand out from the rest.

Blog from Shozu

If you are using Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, Typepad, or the less familiar Vox, you can now post text/photos to your blog right within Shozu.

Become an online journalist

If you have always dreamt of becoming a journalist, Shozu has just make it slightly easier for you. You can now submit your photos to the various news networks such as CNN Express, BBC News and Reuters. You can even leave your name and telephone in the signature so that the news network can contact you in the event that your materials are picked up by them.

Receive updates from friends

What use does it have if it can’t connect to the popular Facebook and Twitter and receive friends’ updates? Luckily, it can. Shozu has a rather good Twitter and Facebook support. For Facebook, you can receive friends feeds, download their photos to your mobile devices, update your status and get notifications on events.

Listen to podcasts

The podcast features in Shozu comes with a great list of podcast channels that you can subscribe, download and listen to while on the move. While there are plenty of choices to choose from, one thing that I don’t like here is that I cannot add my custom podcast or RSS feeds.

Conclusion

If you need a no-brainer tool to upload and share your photos to various social networks quickly and easily, then Shozu is definitely the application to go for. It is free and works on a large variety of handsets, so you shouldn’t have any problem getting it to run on yours.

iPhone and iPod Touch users can get Shozu at this link.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Note that all of these are individual apps that only allow you to access one service at a time. But what about an app that can let you receive updates from all of these social networks all in one place?

Ziibii is an iPhone app developed by Zumobi that allows you to connect to various social networks and receive all the updates in one centralized place. Instead of loading several apps, now you only need one app to rule them all.

Ziibii currently supports Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and also has a built in RSS reader. One good thing about Ziibii is that it doesn’t require you to set up an account with them. You simply load Ziibii, sign in to the various services and receive instant updates for those services.

There are three main icons on the Ziibii main page – River, List and Settings. Let go to the Settings page first.

The Settings page is where you enter your login credentials and configure the settings for each service.

Twitter

You just need to enter your login name and password to start receiving updates from your friend.

Facebook

When you login to Facebook, it will prompt you to install the Ziibii app in your Facebook account. This is to allow Ziibii to retrieve your friends updates and notifications from your account.

Flickr

You are not required to login into Flickr. However, you can configure what and whose photos are retrieved from the Flickr server. The default option is for it to fetch the daily Interesting photos. You can also configure it to retrieve photos from a particular Flickr user or tags.

YouTube

There are plenty of video channels in YouTube and I am sure you won’t be interested in all of them. This is where you get Ziibii to retrieve videos from your favorite channels.

Web Feeds

Ziibii comes preloaded with several RSS feeds from popular sites of a different nature. You can easily tap on the feed to select it. You can also add custom feeds to the feed reader.

While most RSS feed readers require you to enter the feed address of your favorite sites, one good thing about Ziibii is that you can simply enter the site’s URL and it will automatically search and retrieve the respective feed address. This means that if you have forgotten MakeUseof’s RSS feed address, you can just enter http://www.makeuseof.com and it will automatically fetch the feeds from the MakeUseOf site.

Receiving updates

After you have completed the setup, now is the moment to check and receive updates from your friends. There are two views that you can use – River and List.

In River view, the background is a river and every item (updates/feed/videos/photos) will just float across the screen just like a raft on a river. At any moment in time, you can tap on the Pause button (on the top right-hand corner) to stop the motion or tap on an individual item to access its preview.

In the List mode, all the rafts are arranged in a list and you can swipe the screen to access the next list of items.

Whenever you see an update/feed/video/photo that you like, you can easily tap on it to see it in a new window. There are also options for you to retweet it or email the item to your friends or to view the item in a browser.

Currently, all the information on Ziibii is only one-way traffic, which means you can only receive, but cannot tweet, update your status on Facebook or upload videos or photos to YouTube and Flickr. If in the future the Ziibii development team can include these features, this will definitely be a great app.

Download Ziibii now (iTunes link).

Do you use Ziibii? If so, what do you think of it? How can it be improved? Do you use something better? If so, tell us about it.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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The site has been running for about a year, and went public a few months back. Since then they’ve been adding capability to the product. It’s looking good. They even have a scanning service to convert all those old prints into a digital stream.

I like the layout of the site. I’m not so sure about some of the things that happen on the page. For instance, in Firefox 3, Ctrl-Tab doesn’t work any more, and neither does the scroll wheel on my mouse, at least in the main part of the page.  I’m running on Vista if that make any difference to you.

Membership of the site is free, but requires the usual collection of personal information to get in. After you’ve got through that, click the blue Create button and then New Capzle to get started.

You can add an impressive stack of stuff to your Capzle. But it’s easier to do than to describe, so let’s get started.

First, the content. Click the button, and choose the directly option. You can try out the stacked and blogging settings later. The idea here is that you are creating a timeline, and putting items in place on the line.

Capzle wants you to have the files with you, so if they are on Flickr, for instance, you’ll need to download them first. Browse to the files, select them all, and upload them to the site.

The most common use of Capzles is to capture a sequence of events, so you’re going to be forced to put up with my trip to Melbourne for Christmas. No one ever said it was easy.

Now you’re in edit mode with an untitled Capzle in place. Let’s set a few things. Top left in the menus is the Add Title & Description option. Go ahead and click that.

Set the title and description as you please. You can choose from what must be the wackiest font list I’ve seen in a while, and colour it as you please. You can see that the title in the main area changes as you tinker. Eventually… hey, pay attention… eventually you’ll get sick of fiddling with that.

We’ll go through and set some more things, but first we should have a look at how the result is going. Click the I’m Finished button, top right, and you can preview the result. You can click Edit Capzle to return to this design view any time. Go on, you deserve it. This is the view other folk will see of your work, but with more controls in place.

In preview mode you have a control panel in the centre of the page, and you can also use your mouse to move around. Try holding the mouse over an image, and clicking on it.

The control panel consists of six buttons. The magnifying glass controls the size of the images, as you might expect. The four centre buttons are used by holding the mouse button down over them, causing the stream of images to scroll to the left or right. The final button is for the soundtrack volume. More on that later.

Back to design mode now… We need to change some more settings.

Just quickly… the Tags and Categories section in the menu will let you set some metadata for your show, and make it easier for other folk to find your work.

We’re now heading for the Design Your Capzle option.

That’s where we make some sweeping changes to the look of the production. You can choose from a substantial list of themes in the list. As a photographer I don’t want anything too overpowering back there, but if you’re the day-glow-pink-bling type you can find something in here too, I think.

You can also click the design it myself tab at the top and make more controlled changes if you like, including the choice of a single colour background or some sort of gradient. You can also upload a background image if you are possessed so inclined. Fiddle with this until you are happy with the result.

The playlist option lets you choose a background track for your visitors to enjoy while they look at your shots.

Click the upload button, choose one or more tracks, and upload them.

It’s worth noting that the dialogue that displays states I certify that I have the right to upload this content and that it does not violate the terms of use of the Capzles website. I’m pretty sure that, at least where I live, that statement precludes the uploading of the latest hit by your favourite artist, but obviously your mileage may vary.

Two to go…

Set the privacy level of the Capzle in the next section. Be a grown-up, and consider whether anyone will be offended by what you’re doing. Good.

Now the best part. Share the Capzle. There are essentially two ways to do this.

First off you can click the Send to Friends button, and get Capzles to do the heavy lifting for you. I’m not fond of that option, purely because my paranoia kicks in. I don’t want to send the Capzles folk a list of my friends’ email addresses. it’s not them. It’s me.

The other option is to grab the URL for your Capzle, and send it to them yourself. I’d do that.

So in the end, we’ve fairly easily constructed a complex timeline. You might have noticed though that what we finished with isn’t a slideshow in the traditional sense. Navigation is the responsibility of the user. That’s great for your friends at school or work, but it’s not going to work for Granny. She’s just not a Web 2.0 girl, and you know it. So think about what works best for you audience.

Visitors have all the main controls at their hands, but they can’t edit any of the info. That’s just as well, because they missed out on the trip, right? So they’ll be jealous.

The Capzles folk tell me that both an automated play option and a Flickr import are in the wind. I look forward to both options.

I’m curious. Do you prefer this approach to a standard slideshow? Who would your audience consist of? What other options have you tried?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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But if you’re like me, you’ll be looking for something different to do with the megapixels of memories that you’ve collected over the past few weeks, as well as of years past.

Here is a collection of a few websites that should give you a little more freedom with your images and are sure to change the way you work with digital photographs.

Collagr

If by any chance you’ve already done that Flickr upload, then Collagr is just for you. This easy-to-use site lets you quickly spice up a collection of photos that you may have either on Flickr or Photobucket by simply providing a URL.

Thus far, collages can be customized by way of background colors, layouts, resolutions and overall size. However, the site is still in open beta and more features (including a sleeker UI) are currently in the works.

Big Huge Labs

Big Huge Labs is hands down one of the best sites for playing with your digital photos. The site has a ton of things to do and uploading images is effortless. Photographs can be transformed into movie posters, calendars, trading cards, badges and the even motivational posters.

BHL also offers a bunch of cool effects as well, including a caption-maker, billboard-creator fake magazine cover generator and my personal favorite, the ‘Warholizer’.

Imageloop

Imageloop is a website that offers to create customized slideshows of your photos and images. Registered users (it’s free) can upload photos from their computers, social networks (such as Facebook, Flickr or MySpace), or even from a URL of their choosing.

From their customization of your slideshow is simple: everything from image animations and effects, background music, captions and size can be specifically tailored. The site also allows you to set privacy restrictions to your slide shows; such as allowing or disallowing viewers to add their own images to your collection, for example.

Finished slideshows can be uploaded to preset sites like Facebook and Blogger or to personal websites. Imageloop can also create loop galleries, which feature a sleeker interface, as well as play/pause and speed controls.

Blipfoto

Another cool site, Blipfoto has a unique premise: upload one photo per day to create a daily journal to share with family and friends. The site will probably appeal to more photo-savvy users but the idea is certainly out of the ordinary and can give you a chance to showcase your photos, whether professional or just for fun.

Journal entries can also contain a written commentary about your digital photographs, giving the site a certain blog-like feel and keep in mind that only JPEG format images are permitted for upload.

MyFamily

MyFamily is a site dedicated to personalizing photos and sharing them with…you guessed it: your family. The site lets family members connect with each other by creating a private web locale for you and the people you want to let in.

MyFamily offers unlimited storage of photos, videos and even files, however a free account does have a monthly upload limit of 100 MB (forking over the cash gives you 1 GB). But 100 MB should be more than enough for most people per month.

One of the more prolific features of MyFamily, in my opinion, is the photo story option, which lets users create a 4-picture slideshow, coupled with your own audio commentary that adds a storybook feel to your photos and emphasizes the family-orientated feel of the site.

BONUS:

Loonapix

If Big Huge Labs wasn’t to your heart’s content try Loonapix. The site has almost 40 effects to choose from, including making your pictures look like wanted posters, YouTube videos and newspaper clippings. Most images have to be cropped to get the right effect however, so try sticking to portraits, or small group photos.

Know of any sites that are photo-friendly? Then comment below and share your thoughts with fellow MUO readers.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Enter the slideshow. I’m old enough to remember when it was common for folk who had been on an overseas trip (and everywhere is overseas from New Zealand) to return, get their slides printed, and bore their friends and neighbours to death with hours of images projected on a sheet in a dark room. I know. My father was a member of the inner circle.

Thankfully those days are largely over, and most of you don’t have, or want, access to a slide projector, to say nothing of the slides themselves.

The Internet can provide you with a way to release your slideshow tension, without the sheet, without annoying the neighbours, and with a whole lot more multimedia capability than Dad could ever manage.

Flickr is the most likely place to have your images, so let’s start there. and see how to create Flickr slideshows. It’s best to bear in mind that flickr’s focus is the images themselves, so they don’t manage some of the things that slideshow specialist sites can handle, but the capability was upgraded last year and it’s quite thorough now. And hey, you’re here already, right?

You can, if you wish, create a slideshow of your entire photostream. Unless you have a severely limited stream of images though, this isn’t the best of plans. Instead, create a set, order the images in the set as you wish, and then create a slideshow for the set. Share the slideshow, and invite folk to watch it.

Easy, right?

A short note on flickr jargon. A set is an array of images of your own, collected together on whatever basis you like. A collection is an array of sets. For instance, I have a set for each of the suburbs of Wellington that I’ve taken photos in, and a Wellington collection that pulls them all together. A group is like a set, but contains images from a number of different flickr members. We’ll stick with a set for this.

The easiest way to create a set is in the Organizer. I hesitate to spell it that way, but never mind… You’ll find it in the main menu in flickr. This thing is a little difficult to screenshot, but you should be able to see your images, in reverse chronological order, along the bottom of the page.

If you have tagged the images, then you will be able to enter appropriate terms in the search box to filter the choices shown. Otherwise you’re going to need to scroll to the right with the arrows. In either case, once you see the images you want to put into the set, drag them into the main area of the screen.

I’ll wait politely while you do that. Done? Great.

Now click the Add to set button at the top of the page.

Change the name of the set from the default new set, tell us all about the details of the set, below, and click on Save. Try to think of a better subject, and much better title, and fundamentally superior details than I have managed here. Good. Your friends will thank you.

Click the flickr icon, top right, to return to your normal view of the flickr site. Click the arrow to the right of You, and click on Your Sets.

Click on the set you just created.

Nearly there. Click the Slideshow button, top right.

That’s it. The slideshow is created, and up and running. There are various options on the slideshow screen for setting options such as fullscreen, enlarging images (called embiggening!), showing titles, and playing in reverse. Just slide the mouse over the top right of the page to see them.

You can share the slideshow from here, or share the set itself from back at the set view. From here, click Share. You’ll see a URL you can copy, a piece of HTML you can imbed in your web page or email, and an option to email a link to the slideshow to your friends, assuming that you still have some after all of this.

It’s a good idea to construct, by whatever means are the easiest, a start and end slide. These days, scrawling the details somewhere and photographing it is pretty painless. Otherwise there is plenty of software that will add titles for you. Please don’t apply them to all the slides though. That gets old very quickly.

Now it just might be that while flickr slideshows are the simplest option, they might not meet your requirements, so here are a few alternatives that offer a little more pizzazz. There are a huge number of slideshow sites out there now. I’m not pretending to know all of them…

flickrSLiDR – allows you to embed your Flickr photo slideshows easily in another webpage.

Flickrin – lets you embed a rectangular block of images in your blog or website, based on your user name or some tags on the photos. Here are some based on ‘Wellington”.

Capzles – I’ve discovered this site only recently. This site lets you compose a timeline (like a slideshow) and then add a soundtrack to it. More on that one soon.

So do you how to create flickr slideshows? using what? Do you look at slideshows?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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MakeUseOf has set up a Flickr group to which you can submit your stunning photos.  We’ll use the best and most relevant images for our articles.  Not all MakeUseOf articles have photos of course, some just use screenshots (which are accepted as well), but quite often a photo will be able to get a point across much better than words or a screenshot.

As someone once said “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Here’s how it will work. You submit photos that you think might fit well with a yet-to-be-written article on MakeUseOf.  They could be techy type images like computers and iPods and things.  Or they could be anything else really, for example, an article about working late into the night might involve coffee and sleepy eyes.

We’ll also ask you from time to time to submit pictures based on a theme.  A MakeUseOf author may be working on an article that requires a particular type of photo.  We might be specific in our requests: woman sitting on grass in summer with Macbook or we might be more general: yellow, in which case it would be up to you to interpret the theme.  When we make requests, we’ll make them in the Flickr group’s discussion section, not on MakeUseOf.com so you should join the group and check in as often as you can.

All types of pictures will be accepted into the group (unless they’re pornographic or otherwise inappropriate) but any picture you submit must be licensed Creative Commons and they must be your own legal property (in other words, you must own the legal copyright to the image and it must not have been stolen from someone else). Here’s how to change the license to Creative Commons.

Please tag your images very descriptively.  The more descriptive tags there are, the easier it is for us to find what we’re looking for.

woman, computer, laptop, macbook, grass, green, summer, red, sitting, outdoors, reading

is much better than

computer, outside

Please don’t be disappointed if your photo isn’t chosen.  It doesn’t mean it’s a bad photo, it’s just that another photo fit a little better with the article.

Image archives

While we may not use your photo immediately, MakeUseOf authors may dip into the image archives when looking for pictures, so please leave your pictures in the pool and make sure you keep the license Creative Commons.

There are no restrictions on photoshopping your images, or editing them in other free image editors, so edit to your heart’s content.  Even a badly photoshopped image might work in an article on tips about image editing.

We might also post an article every now and then showing off some of our favourite pictures that didn’t make it into an article, or haven’t yet.

As thanks for using your picture, we’ll give you credit and link back to your image on Flickr.

Oh yeah, we’ll be uploading the image to our own servers rather than hotlinking to it on Flickr, so once we incorporate the image into an article, it’s permanently part of that article.

So, get out there and start shooting.

Picture Credits: cupcakes2, Ed Yourdon, redjar

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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People are often working out Photoshop / GIMP tutorials to put in some neat effects on their photos. If you are on the look out for an instant solution for adding cool effects for your photos check out Dumpr.

The site offers some very cool effects from “displaying your pic in a museum” to “creating jigsaw effects” to “creating a sketch” to “becoming a celebrity” and many more.

Some of the effects are however “pro” effects and require you to pay $12 a year.

So how do you get the effects? Let’s say for example that you want to give a sketch effect to your photo. You could go into Photoshop, desaturate the image then find edges, play around with the sliders, play with levels to remove specks and then perhaps brush up to give a final touch. Well now, how about just choosing the image and clicking a button? That’s essentially what you do with Dumpr. Choose the effect, choose the photo and get the effect. It doesn’t have the flexibility of something like Photoshop but then that is what makes it simpler and fun to use.

If you are a Flickr user you can fetch images from Flickr. There are some other cool tools for Flickr users as well. You can search for photos that are similar to your own favorite(d) photos, look for photos of your contacts that made it to the Interestingness pages on Flickr and rate your favorite Flickr photos.

In addition to all the above goodness you can get a link to your edited image to pass it on or directly embed your ‘modified stylish photos’ to social networking sites, blogs, start pages and a number of other places right from the Dumpr page. Registered members can also tag their photos and submit them to Dumpr galleries for everyone to have a look.

Here are just some of the effects that we like.

If you love having fun with your photos check out a previous tutorial on how to create poster size images to put on your walls. Some other sites and tools for adding cool effects to photos can be found here.

Let us know what you think of Dumpr. What are your favorite effects?  Are you an adept photo editor? If yes what tools do you use?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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• 3 Easy Ways To Add Borders To Your Photos (20)

The podcast is available through iTunes so don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast if you have an iPod, or in another podcatcher if you have a different MP3 player.

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Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Although not covered in this post, Oosah has versions available for the iPhone and Google’s android mobile phone operating system. With this software you’ll be able to access your media files remotely, for example to stream up to 1TB of MP3’s to your iPhone. Sadly, no option is available for Windows Mobile, yet. Anyone?

Now let’s have a look at the details, shall we?

Below is a snapshot of the media platform. It basically resembles the file explorer most of you will know from Windows.  Thankfully, it also works a lot like it, meaning many of the typical shortcuts will work. If a file went into the wrong folder, you can simply drag & drop it into another or mark several files by holding down the [Ctrl] key or batch select by clicking the [Shift] key. Right-click does not work. Using the respective buttons you can create, rename and delete folders, and more about editing single files will follow further down. Let’s do some uploads first.

As mentioned previously, Oosah only permits media files. There is a detailed list of supported file formats here.

Uploading is straight forward. Hit the green Upload button in the top left, choose your files and go. Unfortunately, you cannot upload an entire folder, but you can select a great number of files at once, which will be uploaded one after the other. I tried it with over 400 files from different folders which worked just fine.

Apparently, video and RAW files require some additional post-uploading processing until they are ready to be displayed. You should receive an eMail from Oosah once they are available. This may take some time…hours, days? Nothing had come in when this post was submitted.

When you scroll over a file you’ll see a small green box with a white arrow, as seen on the top left image in the screenshot below. When you click the arrow, a menu appears as shown on the right. The printing option is very well done, although it doesn’t seem to work in Macs, yet.

While you upload files you can decide whether or not you want them to be public. Later you can go back and look at some more share options through the individual file menu. You can change the share status of a file and even set a password for it. Additionally, you can copy the direct link and the HTML code or eMail the file to your friends.

Unfortunately, only individual files can be shared or edited this way. Also, Oosah appears to have difficulties recognizing international keyboards, as the @ sign wasn’t recognized, however, copy & paste worked fine. What can be done though, is select all files and delete them all or filter for certain file types, including photos, sounds, videos and Oosahs.

Oh wait, what are Oosahs?

Oosahs are personal compositions of media files or let’s say slideshow presentations. You probably noticed the orange Widgets button next to the Upload button. Clicking it will bring up a list of options: Slideshow, Playlist and Gallery, while only a slideshow is referred to as Oosah. By the way, the term playlist is misleading, since only photos, videos and slideshows are permitted, no audio files. You can add a background sound to an Oosah slideshow, though. I will not go into details of how you can create these media compositions. Basically just follow the instructions on screen and you’ll be fine!

Here is an example of an Oosah:

What’s the Connect button for?

You may have spotted the YouTube, Facebook and Picasa logos on the previous images. The folders for the respective services don’t become available until you log into those accounts. That’s what the Connect button is for. You can log in and then view or upload media files through Oosah. Very convenient! Oosah also offers a connect option for Flickr, which opens a pop-up window. Logging in didn’t work for me, the window went blank.

And that’s it. Now you’re all set up to share your media files and there is a lot more to discover on Oosah. Just follow the links from the Oosah Homepage.

I should mention that just recently Tim introduced a similar file storage platform called Hordit. That service provides unlimited amount of space for anything you may want to store, backup or share. However, there are no streaming options for your mobile device. For more information, check out Tim’s article Hordit – A Digital Packrat’s Best Friend. Oh, and meanwhile Hordit has entered public beta, so you won’t need an invitation.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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For all those who are still not sure what Cooliris is, it is a browser plugin that enables you to surf the Web with a cinematic style. The wall on which it shows thumbnails of images, videos, news pulled from various sources and so on, allows you to be fully immersed in a 3D environment. You can easily surf the Web simply by dragging, sliding, clicking and selecting the thumbnails with your mouse.

On the iPhone, you will get a similar experience to that in your computer browser. There is the same 3D wall loaded with rows of picture thumbnails. What is different is that you are using your finger to slide, click and select rather than using the mouse.

To slide the 3D wall across the screen, you just need to do a ’swipe’ left or ’swipe’ right with your finger. Alternatively, if you are too lazy to use your finger, simply tilt iPhone up, down, left, right and you can see the wall move accordingly to the direction you tilt.

When you tap on a thumbnail, Cooliris will zoom the image and position it to the center of the screen. Description of the image and its URL will be loaded at the bottom of the screen. There is also an ‘email’ and ‘download’ icons so that you can easily share the image with your friends.

To checkout the image’s URL, simply tap on the URL and the mobile Safari will load within Cooliris. Once you are done, tap on the ‘Webview’ and it will bring you back to the Cooliris interface.

There are two main features in Cooliris for iPhone: ‘Discover’ and ‘Search’. The Shopping function that is found in the browser version is not available in this iPhone version.

In the Discover section, Cooliris can cleverly detect your location and serve you the information that is closely related to your locale. It is just like an image-based StumbleUpon for iPhone, except that it is more customized to your preferences. You can also select from the channels to get it to display interesting images/videos/news. Personally, I like to use the Wallpaper channel to discover and download new wallpaper for my iPhone.

The Search function allows you to search from a variety of sites, including Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Flickr, deviantArt and SmugMug. I do not have any success with the YouTube search. When I perform a search in YouTube, nothing loads up even after 5 minutes of waiting. I have no problem searching and playing video in the in-built YouTube app, so I guess this is one of the bugs on the Cooliris app. Other than this, the search on the rest of the search engine works perfectly fine.

Cooliris for iPhone has given a new definition to Web surfing on the iPhone. This is not just another app that you use to ‘wow’ your friends, but an app that truly maximizes the touch action and accelerometer of the iPhone and brings your Web surfing experience to the next level. This is definitely the app that I would recommend to everyone.

Cooliris for the iPhone is available for the iPhone/iPod Touch and can be downloaded for free in the iPhone App store.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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10. Flickr PM – Adds useful links next to a users buddy icon

9. Flickr2Facebook – Makes it easy to upload Flickr images to Facebook

8. Flickr Cross-Recommendations – What people who faved this image also faved

7. Flickr Auto Page – Loads all photostream or pool images on one page

6. Flickr Move Comment Form Up – Moves comment form to just below image.  Useful on heavily commented-on images

5. Flickr Add Referrer into Comment – Lets photographer know in which group you found their image

4. Flickr Exif Decorator – Adds translucent, unobtrusive box with some EXIF info

3. Flickr On Black – Links to view any image on a black background

2. Flickr Comment Tools – Adds a few word processor type buttons to comment box

1. Flickr Multi Group Sender – Makes sending an image to multiple groups easy

If you’ve got some better ones, please let me know in the comments.

(BTW: Greasemonkey is for more than just Flickr.  Search for your favourites over at UserScripts.org)

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Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Tagging

Everything on the web is about context, and Flickr is no exception. If you provide tags for your photos then people can gather more information about the photograph, search on the tags, and find your image when they need one that meets specific requirements.

You can tag images for your own purposes, but if you want other folk to find them, try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and use tags that people might use in a search.

More tags are generally better, within reason. Where two or more terms might be used for the same thing (silverware, cutlery) use them all. Where different forms of the same word might be searched for, try to cover the ground (buttered, buttery, butter).

You can use multiple word tags as well, but the effectiveness usually drops off pretty fast.

if you have trouble thinking of suitable tags, try running through a list of different sorts of tags, such as place, time, objects, colours, events, people, actions… and then pick up any text that might be in the image, perhaps on signs.

Groups

An image can belong to any number of groups, and Flickr contains a scary number of the things. It’s sufficient to say that there is a group for almost anything you can think of, and many things you would rather not. For example, I’m involved in a group for images that are both blue and rusty. You’d be surprised how easy it is to find people with similar photographic interests.

You can search for groups easily, and you can generally join a group on the spot. Mostly the group owners will let you see the images that are in the group without joining, but you’ll need to join the group to add your own images. The exception here is that if you receive an invitation on your photo then you can add the image without going to the hassle of joining.

If you can’t find a group to join, you always have the option of starting one of your own. Be prepared to get involved in inviting other images and members, or you’ll have a very small group.

Sets

A set is a lot like a group, except it’s all yours. It’s just a way of assembling a number of your images together on some basis or other. Common uses for sets are to showcase your most popular images, or to put all the photos from a single event in one place. Flickr members with children often create a set for each of the people in the family. Or you might have sets for photos taken in different places.

The advantage with regard to getting noticed is that when a searcher finds one of your images, there is a link on the page to all the other images in the same set.

If all this set business gets a little cumbersome, there is also a facility in Flickr to create sets of sets, called collections.

Uniqueness

It’s very easy with a digital camera to take a few dozen very similar images. It’s also easy to upload them all to Flickr, and if your intention is to keep a record, or back up your local storage, that’s fine. But if you want people to be interested in your photographs, consider wandering through all thirty eight pictures of your cute nephew, and upload just the best two or three.

The image itself

If there are three billion images in flickr then there must be at least a few million opinions. Mine is just one. Make your own decisions.

However, as a general rule, most folk prefer images which are correctly exposed, have some compositional value and contain interesting colours, patterns, events or ideas. If your image doesn’t have any of these then it’s going to be difficult to get anyone interested in looking at them. So give it some thought before hitting the upload button. Of course it’s not clear that I’m in a position to say this. Blue and rust, remember?

So that’s my five pieces of advice to get your images noticed in Flickr. Do you have anything to add?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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• Make Use Of Podcast #37: Top Ten Flickr Greasemonkey Scripts (2)
• Make Use Of Podcast #35: Doing Fun Things With Your Pictures (0)
• 3 Steps To Find Similar-Minded People On Flickr (9)
• Top 5 Free Websites for Quality Copyright Free Photographs (37)

Listen to the podcast for a rundown of some of the ways you can use this to spice up your photos.

Here’s a calendar I made.  Click it to see the large version.  You can use it on your computer or even try printing it, but I don’t think the print quality would be very good.

This podcast is available through iTunes so don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast if you have an iPod, or in another podcatcher if you have a different MP3 player.

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• Make Use Of Podcast #37: Top Ten Flickr Greasemonkey Scripts (2)
• Backup And Download Flickr Photos in Bulk (Windows) (11)
• 5 Ways To Get Your Images Noticed In Flickr (7)
• 3 Steps To Find Similar-Minded People On Flickr (9)
• Top 5 Free Websites for Quality Copyright Free Photographs (37)

Flickr advanced search allows for multiple search options: you can choose to search by tags or full text, media type (photos or videos or both); date, creative commons, etc.

The choice is really great but somehow using the built-in search platform is by far less exciting than taking advantage of numerous external tools that search Flickr creatively.

Search by color:

Flickr Color Selectr allows you to set color preferences by color picker or color properties.

Multicolr allows to mix up to 10 colors and selects images matching the chosen color palette.

Retrievr claims to search images by your “sketches” but all I managed to achieve was to find images by color:

Search by theme:

Tiltomo is an awesome “Flickr Playground” tool that lets you search by tag, color / texture and theme / subject. The service uses two test image databases, works fast and can be real fun to use.

Here is what the tool shows for theme based search for this image:

Search by tags:

PIMPAMPUM searches Flickr photos by tag and has a very easy-to-use flash-based interface: it will display photos in a string and show you the larger version once you click on it:

Findr performs image search by tag and also gives you the huge list of related tags to refine your search.

PiciShare is a Flickr search engine that lets you search by tags or full text; you can also limit the number of images per page and sort the results by relevance, date added or popularity.

Airtightinteractive.com tool displays the images based on your tag choice and also suggests more related tags:

Search by Creative Commons:

Compfight: besides tag-based search, the service lets you set the Creative Commons (’Off’, ‘Commercial’, ‘All’), Safe Search and “original photo” filters.

FlickrStorm allows to search by keyword and /or by Creative Commons. The tool also has a handy flash-based interface:

Search by username:

Interestingby.isaias.com.mx rates any username’s photos (I wasn’t able to define the popularity criteria though).

Search by location:

Flyr searches within geotagged photos and adds Google map link to each search result.

Geosnapper searches for US cities or zip codes and shows the place instantly on the map:

See random cool photos:

Photoree let’s you rate Flickr photos (for registered users) or just browse most popular photos chosen by other members.

Flickriver shows you most interesting photos added today / yesterday (the tool also lets you search by tags, username or group).

Girls on Flickr: shows you most popular girls’ photos sorted into the following categories:
pretty, beautiful, portrait, blonde, teens, black-white, sketch, hair, eyes, lips, hands, tattoos, glasses, skirts, shirts, jeans, shoes, uniform, celebrity, actress, model, super model, sports, fashion, cars, laptops, secondlife, interesting.

Which tools do you use to search Flickr? Are there any I missed out?

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• What are you lookin’ at? Cool Sites To Feed Your Photo Fetish (8)
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• 3 Steps To Find Similar-Minded People On Flickr (9)
• 10 Flickr Groups For Serious Shutterbugs (13)

Cooliris’ party piece which is really very impressive, is the endless 3D photo wall. Trust me, after using the 3D wall, regular browsing will never suffice again. Suppose you were searching for something on Google Images, only 20 results will be displayed on a page at any time. By using the 3D wall, you can view all of the results at once.

Have a look at the screenshots below: Search results are displayed as a “wall” and by dragging the slider at the bottom of the screen, you can swiftly browse through all of the photos easily.

Clicking on any one will bring up a larger version and a caption (if any). Also, its source will be displayed at the bottom of the photo, along with a link to that page. Next to that, there is an option to send messages to friends if you manage to find anything you’d like to share.

If you want to sit back and enjoy all the photos, click on the full-screen slideshow icon at the bottom left-hand side then hit ‘Play’. The slideshow icon will change to one which resembles a 3D wall and clicking on it will bring you back to the wall.

Unfortunately, Cooliris will not work on every site with photos, only certain Cooliris-enabled sites like Flickr, Picasa, Google, DeviantART, Yahoo!, SmugMug, Photobucket, Facebook and MySpace. The next time when you’re browsing through your friend’s photo album on Facebook, hit the Cooliris button and you’ll be instantly rewarded with the photos on the 3D wall – no more clicking on ‘Next’.

Cooliris will also work with videos from YouTube. It arranges the videos as it does with photos. Be warned, browsing YouTube with Cooliris is very addictive since it shows you all the search results next to each other. It’s very tempting to just sit there and watch all of them! Granted, YouTube isn’t the same if you can’t read the comments of others or go through the ‘Related Videos’ – two essential features which is missing from Cooliris.

“3D shopping” was implemented in the latest version of Cooliris. A few of the top online shopping destinations like Amazon, Macy’s and Walmart have hopped onto the Cooliris bandwagon and provided their patrons with an easier way to browse through their products. Clicking on a product’s photo will reveal its price, a short description and a link to the product’s page.

In my book, Cooliris is a definite keeper. Assuming that your computer has sufficient processing power and memory to allow Cooliris to operate properly, using should be a pleasure.

Cooliris is available as a plugin for Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X; and for Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows. But that’s not all, Cooliris is now available for the iPhone!

Do let us know how well it works on the iPhone. We’re eager to hear how much Cooliris can improve browsing on a such a small device.

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While we have previously covered some of the cool AIR applications, most of them are meant for the Windows/Mac platform. For Linux users who are constantly looking for AIR applications, here is a list of 8 useful AIR applications that we have tested and found them to be working in Linux.

1. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an interesting Twitter client that allows you to organize your tweets into more manageable levels. It enables the user to split their main feed into topics or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets.

There are several useful features in TweetDeck. One of them is the auto-updating of the Twitter status so that you know when Twitter is down. The next feature is that you can continue to send tweets even when you are offline (or when Twitter is down). Tweets and direct messages are queued and then sent automatically when you are back online.

2. WebKut

WebKut allows you to take a screenshot of any Web page easily. It loads the page in its own viewer and you can screen-capture the page the way you like it. This is so far the easiest and simplest screen capture tool that I have come across.

3. Snackr

Snackr is a RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop in an unobstructive way. It is easy to hide/deactivate it when you find it annoying and when you see a title that looks interesting, you can simply click on it to pop up the item in a window.

4. Xdrive Desktop Lite

Xdrive is an online storage service provided by AOL. It’s free and you get a whopping 5GB of online storage space to backup all your data, video and music. The AIR application Xdrive Desktop Lite is to allow its users to easily transfer and backup their local files to Xdrive online storage.

5. AirTube Video Downloader

Using the AirTube Video downloader, you can easily download YouTube videos to your desktop simply by dragging or pasting the video’s URL. After the downloading is completed, the application will playback the video in its viewer. A useful tool for someone who downloads videos very often.

6. Destroy Flickr

There is already a full review on DestroyFlickr, so I shall not say anymore about it. But it is definitely a good thing that a great app like this works on Linux too.

7. Klok

Klok is a time management application that allows you to monitor the time you have spent on projects, tasks and any other stuff. You can view the timeline in Weekly view, Project view or get it to generate a report and display in pie-chart format. There are some very well-thought features such as setting up a template for new projects, creating sub-projects, drop-down calendar and a zoom in/out function for the timeline. If you are looking for a good time management application, Klok is definitely the one I would recommend.

8. UVLayer

If you have watched the movie ‘Minority Report’, then you will find the interface of UVLayer very similar to that in the movie. When you search for a video via the search bar, UVLayer will instantly fetch a list of videos from YouTube and Truveo and display them in a big window. You can then drag the video onto anywhere in the canvas. It is also integrated with Google Talk, Facebook and AIM so that you can share the videos with your friends easily.

Are there any more Air applications for Linux that you want to add?

(By) Damien Oh is an all-out technology geek who loves to tweak and hack various operating systems to make life easier. Check out his blog at Make Tech Easier where he shares all the tips, tricks and tutorials.

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So when I ran across Splashup, an online image editing tool, I was fascinated by a very well designed website. I hope they made it all using their own application. Well, probably not. Anyways, when I opened Splashup I was a little turned off. It looks a lot like Photoshop and it also works a lot like Photoshop. Needless to say, it comes with only a small fraction of Photoshop’s features, and turns out to be quite valuable even for the novice user.

You can “jump right in” without signing up, but of course membership has its advantages. You can save your images locally and continue working on them later on.

You can start with a blank image or open images from your browser, your Splashup, Facebook, Flickr or Picasa accounts or using a mundane URL to an image of your choice.

To open images from Facebook, Flickr or Picasa, you first need to authenticate and allow Splashup to connect to your account on the respective site. For Flickr, a successful authentication will look like this:

Once you’re happy with your image you can also save it back to any of the above mentioned accounts, with the exception of “http” that is, and of course you can download it to your computer. But we’re not that far yet…

The canvas opens in a separate window, so it’s almost like running a separate program, only this one runs within your browser. You can even go full screen and give your full attention to the program.

As you may be able to guess from the screenshot above, Splashup works with layers, the Photoshop-typic feature that probably makes the program both most useful and most annoying. I’m not a great fan of layers the way Photoshop deals with them, but I know many people find them quite helpful, if not indispensable.

I’m assuming that most of you will recognize the standard tools, what they can do and how to apply them, so I will not go into great detail here.

What I found a bit confusing though is that boxes, circles, and polygons added to a layer will melt with it and can not be selected or moved afterwards. You can however fill them with a different color, which seems a bit awkward to me. It’s been a while since I used Photoshop CS, but that’s a drawback I don’t recall. In other words, if you don’t want to mess up a layer, create a new layer for every new thing you add.

Splashup comes with a nice selection of layer effects and filters. In the example below I created several layers of the same gradient and added (from bottom to top) gradient glow, bevel, drop shadow, and gradient bevel layer effects. I will leave the discovery of filters to your own adventurous nature.

The Layers window is one of the most powerful tools. This is not just where you control the positioning and visibility of your layers. You can also add some more effects, like changing the opacity (as seen in the example below), multiply, screen, lighten, darken, difference, add, subtract, invert, alpha, erase, overlay, and hardlight your layers in relation to each other.

There is a lot more you can do, for example capture images from any camera source connected to your computer. Whatever you do, always keep in mind that the undo option doesn’t go back very far, so better save or download your work at different stages, just to be sure you won’t lose anything.

Finally a bit of trivia. Splashup used to be called Fauxto and was mentioned on MakeUseOf earlier in 5 Really Powerful Online Image Editing Tools. Interestingly enough this is undoubtedly revealed when you open the File menu. At the very bottom it still says Exit Fauxto.

In the opinion of the experienced Photoshop user, how does Splashup compare to Photoshop in the light of minor editing tasks? I would love to read your comments!

(By) Tina is a regular MUO author. In her offline life she’s a PhD student interested in unraveling signaling events that determine cartilage and bone development.

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