For a long while, you needed to use Microsoft Word to design and print media resources using one of hundreds of Avery templates. But Avery also now provides two free standalone applications, called DesignPro (one for Mac and one for PC users) that includes all its templates and the design features for putting together and printing media projects.

If you want, you can design your digital printing project in say Photoshop, save it as JPEG file and import it as an image file into DesignPro. In this article, however, I will give you an overview of designing a label project in DesignPro for Mac.

• Start a new project (File>New) in DesignPro. Select the type of media project you want. Search for the type of template you want to use. You’ll probably want to make sure your local office supply store carries the media stock for the template you’re using. Or you can order the stock online.

• Double-click on the pre-designed template label you want to use, or select a blank design. Now customize the template. For many projects, like labels, I suggest using strong bold fonts (e.g. Arial Black, Helvetica, Baskerville) with a 10+ point size. The design features of DesignPro are not nearly as advanced as what you can do in Photoshop, but most for jobs, the tools are sufficient. The application includes tons of clip art and vector shapes, and you can also import existing image files from say iPhoto or anywhere else on your computer.

• Now here’s the tricky part. You can select to print the same text and design on each label, or you can choose to have different text and/or design for individual labels. If you choose the latter, you’ll have to select each individual label and copy and paste in the design and/or text you want. There’s no way, as far as I can tell, to select five labels at once and paste in the design or text. If you select the first label and create a design, it will be applied to all the labels that come after it. But when you click the All Same – Off button in the tool bar of DesignPro, you can further customize individual labels.

• There’s also an option to use Mail Merge in DesignPro with your contact data in Apple’s Address Book or Mail application. But for some odd reason, this mail feature merges all the contact data in those applications. You can’t select individual contacts to merge with those data applications. So it’s better to create a comma delimited (CSV) or tab delimited (TSV) spread sheet of your contacts and import it for mail merge in DesignPro.

• After your labels are set up, you‘re ready to print. I suggest first doing a test printing on regular typing paper before using more expensive Avery media stock. When you’re ready to print, make sure you have selected the appropriate media stock in your printer’s dialogue box.

If you have any questions about using DesignPro, drop me a line in the comment box.

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If we make a grave error at MakeUseOf, we can post an update or correct ourselves in the comments section. When you’re working with print the problem isn’t that easily solved. Those mistakes cannot be erased.

Written errors aren’t the worst of it – they are glanced at and forgotten.

Bad photoshop mistakes are the absolute worst-case scenario – photo editing gone very wrong. We all suspect most glamor magazines touch up their pictures. That suspicion becomes very real if the model suddenly misses her leg or belly button.

It’s even worse when we’re not talking about modelling. How about an ad for children’s toys or – if worse comes to worst – a charity campaign. It’s ridiculous if you know how much has been paid for these ads. Although these errors are usually due to lazy and inattentive designers, everyone should have noticed these errs in passing – and stopped them.

There are blogs that gather these Photoshop mistakes – often dubbed Photoshop disasters by the 2.0 point-and-laugh blogs. Read on if you would like to have a laugh at what gets past the print editors these days.

Photoshop Disasters

PsD, short for Photoshop Disasters, is the leading blog in Photoshop errors. Since print is one of the only ways to make sure it really is an accidental occurring, they specialize in print covers, ads and overall article pictures. Ads make up the big majority of them – which is one of the only sectors where image editing is actually accepted.

You can expect uploading periods with relatively frequent updates, interchanged with some more quiet periods. But highly laughable quality material is always at hand. Browse the ‘Photoshop disasters’ chronically and dig into the not inconsiderable archive, or use the tags to browse similar errs.

If you’re a frequent magazine or newspaper reader and have encountered a Photoshop mistake in the past – or if you ever do in the future – you can send them into these sites. They’ll more than appreciate the extra content.

Photoshop Mistakes

Photoshop Mistakes makes for a decent second place. It isn’t as popular as the previously mentioned Photoshop Disasters, but does provide quality and a little change in content.

The content of the two sites is very similar and often recurring. After all, printed photo editing disasters don’t occur that often.

Like the former blog, you can browse the site chronologically, or by using the tags. Alternatively, they also offer a Twitter feed. If you’re an avid Twitter user, you can follow them to stay on top of any future updates. You certainly won’t be the only one.

What do you think of these image editing mistakes? A sad mistake or an opportunity for a good laugh? If you know any other sites, or twitter and meme feeds to keep an eye on future Photoshop disasters, drop a comment below.

Want to avoid disasters like these? You can start out by reading our Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop!

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The app is a multimedia magazine, featuring professional images and how-to articles by and about professional photographers. It doesn’t replace a well designed magazine or photography book, but it’s a handy resource on your mobile device.

When you first open the open the app, the home screen dissolves to a browser of high quality Nikon images, including portraits, travel, wildlife, and numerous scenic photos. Each photo includes “Info” and an article interview with the photographer of the selected image.

The one sentence “Info” for each images is very skimpy. It might include the name of the Nikon camera and a brief public relations type comment, nothing more. Here’s an example:

The extended interviews include a little background about the photographers, their work, the Nikon camera(s) they use, and a link to their website. Since this is a “learn and explore” app, it would better if the “Info”  includes things such as the camera settings used and how the photographer went about making the photograph, both using the camera and in post-processing.

The Learn section of the app includes so far about 22 different lessons, ranging from shooting techniques about close-up photography, the value of zoom lenses, and getting candid urban photos. Unfortunately, these “learn” articles are very underdeveloped. Some “how-tos” include videos of the photographer explaining his work. The two videos I watched were much more informative than the accompanying articles. I realize that videos are much more time consuming and expensive to produce, but they would be tremendously useful on a mobile app, even if users had to pay a small subscription fee.

The next section of the app includes articles taken from Nikon World, the company’s quarterly print magazine. These articles include much more detail about the process photographers took to make their photos or complete certain projects.  As you may guess, much of the articles begin with or center on the use of a particular Nikon camera.

The application also includes a glossary of photography and Nikon related terms. For example, this is how “Aperture” is defined: “The circular opening inside the lens that can change in diameter to control the amount of light reaching the camera’s sensor or film”. Unfortunately, this definition doesn’t include an illustration or an example to further explain the definition.

Finally, you can star any article, image, or definition to add to your “favorites” list. This is a handy feature because the company says that the app will be updated with new information and articles, so a favorites list will make it easy to locate bookmarked resources.

Overall, Nikon: Learn and Explore is a great idea for an iPhone/iPod touch application. The company might consider offering an a simpler online option instead requiring future updates of the application itself. I could also foresee it making iPhone/iPod touch-formatted manuals for each of its major cameras.

I’m not a Nikon shooter, but I‘m looking forward to similar applications for us Canon photographers.

So what features would you like to see in an application like Nikon: Learn and Explore?

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In this article, a follow-on from fellow MakeUseOf author Karl’s post, we’ll take a look at some great sites you can visit to download great, high resolution desktop backgrounds for your computer.

DesktopNexus

As seen on the MakeUseOf Directory, DesktopNexus, with a sample of one of their featured hi-res wallpapers below, features all kinds of wallpapers and encourages wallpaper submissions by visitors to their site. Total, their site has almost 80,000 wallpapers in their directory and includes a wide scope of images from categories like technology, entertainment, people, nature, abstract and more.

DesktopNexus also offers a very useful and creative automatic wallpaper-changing tool called “spinwall”, which can also be used to spice up your desktop background with more than just one wallpaper. Visit DesktopNexus here.

VladStudio

VladStudio, also with a sample featured hi-res wallpaper below, offers a great selection of a more abstract set of wallpapers, including two-screen and some tri-screen wallpapers as well. The site has pictures of more abstract things such as computer-generated maps, moons, etc. It also offers a neat feature – zip downloads of batch sets of wallpapers for specific monitor resolutions. Still, Vladstudio’s selection of offered wallpapers is unique and the site is surely worth a visit. Visit Vladstudio here.

DualScreen Wallpaper

While not everyone has two monitors, for the large amount of people who still do, and even those who have three monitors, I thought I’d point out a specific-niche wallpaper site I also came across: DualScreen Wallpaper. This site specializes in wallpapers for all kinds, with a cropped sample below, of dual-screen resolutions including 2560×1024, 1920×1600, 1680×1050 and a few others as well. While many images are nature photos, some are animation stills, nature scenery, cars and planets. Most wallpapers can be downloaded as a whole picture, or just the right or left segment. You can view it in the MakeUseOf directory by clicking here, or visit the site with the link above.

Hubble Space Telescope Wallpapers

Finally, if you’re looking for an out-of-this-world type wallpaper like the one below, the Hubble Space Telescope website is another great site to look as well. One of my favorite wallpaper sites and a favorite for all astronomers, the website for the Hubble Space Telescope has a great listing of fairly high-resolution wallpapers that you can grab, all taken from the actual telescope itself. There are pictures available of planets, other galaxies, nebuli and more. And each picture can also be embedded into other websites through their easy embed code.

MakeUseOf also has some great other wallpaper articles on Patriotic Wallpapers, wallpapers with calendars, and many, many other sites over at the MakeUseOf Directory on wallpapers.

Let us know what your favorite wallpaper sites or individual wallpapers are in the comments and spread the desktop background joy!

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Image search engines sift through the web searching by type of image, by license or by tags and keywords. There are of course, standalone photo reservoirs like Flickr, Stock.xchng, Photobucket, Morguefile et.al; but your kind of image may just be tucked away in some other obscure corner of the web. Google Image Search is powerful but it always pays to have a few more options up your browser.

This is where these five image search engines come into the picture.

Cyclo.ps

In Greek mythology, it’s a giant with a single eye. As a stock photography search engine, it keeps both eyes on sites like BigStockPhoto, Flickr, Fotolia, Cutcaster, StockVault, Photos.com, ShutterStock and stockx.xchng. The search interface is typically simple and you can search by selecting specific stock photo sites or all of them in one go. A horizontal menu and also a dropdown let you view results by respective site. Clicking on the thumbnail previews takes you to the source where you can see the details attached with the photo.

Cyclo.ps gives the user a Lightbox account where he can save (by clicking the little plus icon), tag, share, and print (only the thumbnail) his selected photos. Visitors can also add comments to your shared images.

Pixsy

Type in your query and you can get what you are searching for amidst millions of images and videos. This search platform delivers both. The web app looks into the RSS feed of variety of news sites and content providers like Yahoo and extracts the image previews. Clicking on the thumbnail preview takes you directly to the source. The source webpage opens in a two frame layout with a Pixsy brief on top and the source page below. You can filter the search by content type (image or video), category and source (BBC, MSNBC, Rolling Stone, Webshots, Yahoo etc).

The site is very neat and uncluttered.

Spffy (Beta)

Ferret out the image or video you want using Spffy’s multiple searches. Spffy checks out a cross-section of sources like stock photo sites, web sources like Flickr, public domain sites and videos from YouTube. You can tune your stock search with settings for royalty-free, rights-managed and news/archival. Web search on Flickr can also be similarly configured for relevance.

Incogna

The Canada-based search engine company looks at the visual shape rather than the meta-data. This gives rather interesting results which are distinct from the others profiled here. The image search is fast though the number of results is not plentiful. You enter a keyword and then select an image from the results to do a similarity search. A moving slider to control the number of images per page is the only preference tool to set.

PicSearch

Picsearch indexes the web for images and is probably the best of the lot. The About Page of the site says that its unique search algorithm is due for a patent. The search engine has indexed more than 3,000,000,000 images. You can set a few preferences like an interface language.

Advanced search options give you several image factors like color or black and white, animation or image, portrait or landscape and more importantly the ability to search by image size. You can also use normal search operators to fine-tune your search. The site also comes with a family filter to keep out you-know-those kind of images away from the mix.

There are two things I really liked about the site. Firstly, its speed; and secondly, the Image Directory which is a vast collection of subject specific images. Oh yes, there’s a third thing to like too – it comes with a Firefox extension.

In listing these five sites, I have tried to go beyond the omnipresent searches provided by the regulars like Google, Yahoo and Bing. When it comes to search, often a single tool does the job; but there are also times when many need to be pushed into action. Along with these five, you can check out two others we have profiled before –

• PicFindr
• Everystockphoto

Do remember that although these search engines may give you the right image – using the image itself is subject to copyright. So do check the sources before you click on save. If unable to do so, what are search engines for…hunt out a few more.

Which is your image search engine of choice? Does your image search go beyond the biggies? Let us into the picture.

Image Credit: Playingwithbrushes

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Amazing Textures

Amazing Textures list various free Photoshop textures nicely sorted into different categories. You can find textures representing wood, bricks, glass, metal, fabric and many more. You can browse the site as it is, however if you want to download higher resolution images you would have to register with the site. The registration is free.

DeviantArt

DeviantArt is renowned for this kind of creative work. You can find some amazing textures to work with. Many of them created by users themselves rather than from photographs as on other sites, you can thus find some really unique textures here.

Lost and Taken

Lost and Taken works like a blog. There are regular posts listing free Photoshop textures that pertain to a particular theme. You might want to point your RSS reader there if you like collecting resources for design work and inspiration.

Grunge Textures

Grunge Textures specializes (hold your breath…) in grunge textures! There are all kinds of textures with a one common aspect – all have a grungy feel to them. According to the site, there are 1355 high resolution images in 18 categories that you can browse through to find what you are looking for.

Shizoo

Shizoo lists various resources like brushes, icons, patterns and much more that you can make use of. The textures section lists some nice colorful textures which you won’t find on every site.

Texture Gallery

Nicely designed site listing textures organized into various categories. One thing (besides the textures) I like about Texture Gallery is that most of the site is in a neutral gray, this helps in any avoiding any influence that the site’s color may have on texture choice.

Toybirds

Toybirds not only lists textures but also lists other resources you may find handy in your design work. There are occasional posts featuring brushes, patterns etc. Although the latest post dates back to 2008, it is nevertheless a worthy resource to browse when looking for design resources.

Texture King

Texture King offers stock texture images for free. While the textures may be low on count, you can find large high resolution textures for your work.

Urban Dirty

Urban Dirty also lists stock texture images, most of them have a grungy feel to them. In addition, the site also lists a few examples in which the texture images have been used, just in case you are looking for some inspiration! You can also check out the Urban Dirty photos in action on Flickr

Texture Library and Texture Archive

Just because we love to throw an extra one to make that 10 an 11 here are two more resources you can check out when looking for textures. Both of them list textures in various categories which often overlap. However, these are indispensable resources listing lots of textures to have in your bookmark directory.

Which site has the most variety of textures and appealed to you the most? Do you use any other site when looking for textures? Shoot a comment, we would love to know about them.

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That’s why I don’t need the expensive heavy-duty image editor with steep learning curve. On the other side, I can’t use the free but too-simple image editor alternatives either. Unfortunately, the available choices out there mostly fall into one of that two categories.

The Free Image Editor For Humans

After the seemingly never-ending quest to find the perfect image editor for my usage (free and powerful enough but user friendly), I found Acorn, which I personally think is the closest to my requirements.

This app, which is dubbed as “the image editor for humans“, is actually a powerful, free image editor with enough bells and whistles to satisfy even the professionals. Acorn is available in the free feature-limited version, and pro version. The first installation will give you 14 days free trial of the pro version, then you can register it or the app will be downgraded to the free version. Nevertheless, everyday users will find the free version more than enough to cater to their needs.

There’s no better way to understand what Acorn is capable of than to take it for a spin. So let’s see how this cutie caters to my needs.

Light Edit The Images

Here are some examples on how I use Acorn.

1. Resizing and Cropping

Let’s say that I’ve just captured a screenshot of an app, but the size exceeds the maximum pixels allowed by my editor. To resize it, I open the image using Acorn and go to the Image –> Resize Image menu (or hit Command + Alt + I)

Then I write down the required size, check the “Keep aspect ratio” box so that the image will stay in the correct proportion, and click OK.

Alternatively, I can use Crop to choose part of the image in the desired size. I go to the Image –> Crop menu (Command + Alt + K) and drag the edges. Cropping will not blur the image like resizing, but will not work if you need to show the complete picture.

2. Converting Images

I personally prefer PNG for my images because this format gives better quality, but sometimes the size will be too big for a blog post. In the blogging world, file size translates to traffic bandwidth and results in hosting costs.

So I compromise the quality to size by converting the PNG to JPG. I go to the File –> Save As menu (Command + Shift + S),

Choose the format and quality (for JPG only), and click OK.

3. Cover some secrets

Sometimes I have images that contains some personal information like an email address or user account. I could just place a solid rectangle above it to censor the information, but Acorn lets me do it elegantly.

First I choose “Flood Fill” from the drawing toolbox,

Then I would place the mouse cursor over the area that I want to cover while holding the “Alt” key. The “Bucket” will turn into “Droplet”.  If you click on that area, Acorn will adjust the “outline” color to match that area. Do the same for the “fill” color.

Next, I choose Shape –> Rectangular from the Drawing tools, and draw a rectangle over the area that I want to cover.

The result is as if there’s nothing written there. Compare the original image and the one that I’ve edited below.

Explore Away

The examples that I’ve given here are just a fraction of what Acorn can do. It’s impossible to discuss everything here. So I suggest that you explore the free image editor and use it according to your needs.

Have you used Acorn? Can you recommend other free alternative but powerful image editors?  Please share using the comments below.

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As I write this article Google’s current doodle is a barcode to celebrate the anniversary of the invention we all take for granted now as we queue up at the supermarket.

Today’s doodle made me inquisitive about the actual doodles themselves so I delved a little deeper and found some cool stuff you can do with the Google doodles. If that piques your interest, check out Saikat’s recent article (5 Sites To Spread The Love For Google Doodle Pictures) which shows you some websites where you can check out the older Google Doodle archives.

Check out the old ones

Until I wrote this, I assumed that once the holiday, occasion or anniversary had passed the Google Doodle was gone forever- sucked up into the abyss that is the Internet. However you can browse through hundreds of different old logos and doodles from all over the world in a gallery kept in an archive by Google.

It’s one way to waste half an hour on the internet when you should be researching an article.

Keep the Good Ones

I found a script that will allow you to scroll through the vast Google Doodles archive discussed above and select one to have as your permanent icon on your Google homepage. I though this was cool seeing as new doodles only come out once or twice a month depending on which local Google site you’re using. It was developed by a Google employee a while back to celebrate the tradition of Google doodles.

There are however a few constraints to it. Firstly you have to have Firefox which you can download from here. It won’t work with other browsers such as Google Chrome (surprisingly enough, although I’m told the developer is going to get one when the browser is developed further and is more stable) or Internet Explorer.  It also needs to have the Greasemonkey add-on installed to work.

The script to select which Google logo you want, cunningly called ‘Favourite Doodle’ is available here. They’re both really easy to set up and should take no longer than 2-3 minutes for most users. You shouldn’t even need to restart Firefox when it is complete.

Then, right click on the Greasemonkey bar along the bottom of Firefox and select ‘Choose Favourite Doodle’ and then ‘User Script Commands’ as shown in the screenshot. This will bring you to a gallery similar to the one discussed above but each logo will have a ‘Make this my favourite’ button underneath.

Once you select which one you want as your favourite you’ll be redirected to the Google homepage where your favourite logo will replace the original one. When a holiday rolls around, you’ll still get the new custom logo for that day in place of your favourite one.

Make your own doodle

Google also allow people to submit doodles in annual worldwide competitions. Normally, this privilege is reserved for leading artists and cartoonists who are allowed to submit their designs not for money, but for the sheer publicity designing a Google doodle would bring.

The scheme is called Doodle 4 Google and is open to anyone still in their country’s education system. The winning entrant gets their college tuition of up to $15,000 paid for and a host of other goodies. Plus an all expenses paid trip to the Google HQ in the Big Apple (this is the US prize – it will differ depending on each country).

Google also give the winning school and district thousands of dollars. There are thousands of prizes to be won in each country for those who didn’t quite make the cut such as laptops, t-shirts and goodies.

So there you have it, three cool ways we can ‘interact’ with Google’s Doodles.

Aside from amusing us by catching us off guard, the Google logo and its many incarnations will be going down in the history books as a mover and shaker within the industry.

Do you know of any other tips and tricks to make the most out of Google’s Doodles?

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As such an almost ritualistic art form, getting the right tattoo can be incredibly difficult. How do you find one that will represent what you want? Will it fit with your personal style? Does it really speak to you and about you? If you’re not very artistic (and I am not) you may want to look at some tattoo flash. Flash is tattoo jargon for pre-drawn tattoo designs. You’ll often see books of them in any tattoo parlour. Ideally, the flash should show you what styles your artist is capable of. So, each shop will have different flash. But you can’t go to each and every shop hoping to find something that you will recognize as being in the right vein for you.  That’s where the free tattoo design sites come in handy. Here are some that I think could be the best.

Flash and Furious

The only real drawback to this free tattoo design site is that it’s in French. Now, I can read a little bit of French, but even for someone who doesn’t, this site is very easy to get around in. That’s the beauty of tattoos – they aren’t language dependent.

With over 2500 designs on the site, broken into 6 categories, you are bound to find something you’ll like. At the very least you’ll find something to take to a good tattoo artist to give them some idea what you are looking for.

Tattoo Tribes

Completely free and with some very cool features. There are a few hundred free tattoo designs to look at here, but expect this site to grow exponentially. The designs are crisp and clear. You can use the Virtualizer to get an idea of what it might look on you, or where best to put it. You can download and print high-resolution images of the tattoos to take to your artist.

The tattoos are mostly suited for black work, but they are just as eye-catching as any colour work that I’ve seen. Really, check it out. You will get some great ideas here!

Tribal Shapes

Seems that the word tribe and its derivatives are very popular in tattoo circles! Tribal Shapes has a fairly large collection of, well, tribal shapes. The tribal tattoo genre is defined by its use of broad black strokes and stylized images. These tattoos pay homage to real Maori and other tribal tattoos. Most often, tribal designs are 2 dimensional in nature, but there are a few 3-dimensional ones out there.

Tribal Shapes also host a large number of Kanji characters. Kanji, “…are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese…”, according to Wikipedia. On a personal note, I would beg you to NOT get a Kanji tattoo, unless you are a native reader of Kanji and have a tattoo artist who is a master at scribing in Kanji. Do you really want to end up with Japanese people laughing at you?

Old Timer Tattoo

If you’re looking for some genuine old school flash, this is the site. The drawings were originally done in the late 1970’s. There is definitely a 70’s vibe or outlaw feel to a lot of these designs. Some are really neat renditions of sailor style tattoos. You’ll also see some that tend more towards the stoner side of the 60’s and 70’s. Still, you might get some free tattoo design ideas, even from them.

For some ungodly reason, there are tattoos here featuring Nazi swastikas. At one time, those kind of tattoos were favoured by outlaw bikers. No one even remotely associated with MakeUseOf.com approves of Nazism. Please try to think of it as more of a historical perspective of tattoo trends.

Tattoos By Design

This site out of the U.K. is more of a community site, with forums, photos and flash. Unfortunately, the flash part costs about $19 a year to join. But you only need to join to get full size images of the flash. If you want, you can go through their entire catalogue and see the smaller images to get ideas. The gargoyle is an example of how small the images are, but how they are still useful.

Of course, the photos of tattoos sent in by community members are free to view. This will also give you some excellent ideas, however, it’s not a good idea to get a copy of someone else’s custom tattoo. That’s just poor tattoo etiquette.

Where do you go if you need to get inspired for a tattoo? Tell us in the comments.

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The second scenario will work you up even more. Imagine the commonness of having more than one camera in the house. Each, lending to the graphical stew of your pictures folder. Of course, your exasperation can be easily cured by the timely habit of renaming photos when you transfer them. Arranging photos chronologically (according to dates) also makes retrieval a snap.

Today, most digital cameras have an internal clock which tags the photos with the exact time when it was clicked. This information is embedded as meta-data (meta-data is data about the data) in the photo itself.

The EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) and DCF (Design rule for Camera File system) standards are specifications for this meta-data. EXIF, in simple terms, defines the camera and image information in the files. DCF defines standards which ensure compatibility between different recording media like a camera and a printer.

It is this photo information that software programs tap into when they read the pictures. And using this information makes arranging photos by timestamps as easy as clicking them.

Automatically Batch Rename Photos With the Date They Were Shot with Namexif

When we say ‘Namexif’ aloud, it sounds like a blend of ‘name’ with ‘fix’ and also ‘exif’ (a portmanteau). The free software does exactly that. Namexif batch renames photos with the dates they were shot. This helps to ease the chronological assortment within your pictures folder. Of course, photos compulsorily must have the EXIF data.

Namexif is a lithe 700MB batch renamer with a simple interface. The timestamp software is a standalone executable. It runs on Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP and Vista. Namexif works snappily in three steps –

• Run the program – select and add the individual files or the folder where the photos are stored. Click Next.



• On the next screen choose the date format you want from the three pre-sets given. In case of high speed shooting mode, where the times may differ by sub-secs, the format adds dashes (-) to tell filenames apart.



• You have the option of keeping the original name or adding your own name as a describer. In case the camera (or photo) does not support EXIF standards, then the original name is kept intact.

Namexif is a simple no frills app for a necessary task. It does not require an install and can be carried around like a portable app. My only other demand would have been an option for a custom timestamp and a way to edit a photo’s embedded date. If you like lightweight, self running simple software then you can give this a shot.

Automatically timestamp photos with Stamp

Stamp is another free software which batch renames image and video files chronologically. It can also batch process entire folders and add a timestamp to the beginning of each filename. Stamp is an improvement over Namexif on several fronts. It can directly transfer photos from most cameras. It batch renames audio/video files too.

Also, unlike Namexif, Stamp saves the renamed image files in a different folder (gives an option of copy or move) thus preserving the originals. Some of the other power features include -

• Stamp gives the choice between five different file formats which fall across – DCF convention, History Data formatsCustom format.



• Custom format is handy for generating long or short filenames with descriptive information like location of shoot.



• Stamp comes with various filters which lets the user control the processing by including certain files and excluding others.



• Stamp features extra options for file handling like preview function which displays a summary of predicted results and an error reporting log.

The Stamp user guide is exhaustively detailed in its help with the software feature set. The 2MB free software is supported by 95, 98, 2000 and XP.

Of course, there is a tool like Picasa which in itself is a complete photo management application. It also automatically renames photos by date. Renaming photos by date is quick and simple with these two little file renamer alternatives. After a few gigabytes of photos we will find that arranging photos chronologically rather than by name is easier for instant recall.

You can also try out the cross platform JetPhoto which Jeffry has written about in a previous post.

Let us know how easy (or difficult) it has been for you after spring cleaning your pictures folder…

Image Credit: Viernest

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It’s nice to at least have the image files named like image1, image2, image3, etc so that you can at least order them. Luckily for us Mac OS X users, we have a nice little tool that Apple has developed called Automator which makes such a batch rename task  a breeze.

Open up Automator by going to your Applications folder and then double click Automator to open it up. Alternatively you could use Spotlight or Quicksilver to open up the Application.

When Automator has loaded up you will be presented with a window similar to the one pictured below.

From here, select Custom and ht the Choose button to begin creating your workflow.

First, search for Get Specified Finder Items or click Files & Folders under Library and then select the action from there. When you have found it, drag and drop it to the right to add it to the workflow. Leave the field empty for now.

Next, search for rename in the search field at the top of the Application.

When you have found it, drag and drop it to the workflow. An alert box will pop up asking you if you would like to add a ‘Copy Finder Items‘ action to the workflow. Click on Add to add the action. All it does is duplicate the items to be batch renamed, serving as a backup in case things go wrong and leaving the original files intact. Choose a suitable destination for it — a new folder on the desktop should be perfect.

Your workflow should look like the one below.

There is one last thing I am going to change and that is within Rename Finder Items. I am going to change Add Date or Time to Make Sequential. Also change Add number to to new name, set this to whatever you like, I have named it image. Make sure that you tick Make all number 2 digits long so that when you reorder the images the ones that are image_2 will come before image_11.

We are all done.

Save the workflow as a batch rename application by going to the File menu and choose ‘Save As…’ Enter a name for it, like “Rename to Sequential” and select ‘Application’ for the file format and save it somewhere obvious, the Desktop, perhaps. To rename your images, simpley drag them over the icon and release. Automator will spring into life, copy and bulk rename your images, and save them to the destination you specified in the workflow.

If it is successful it should have copied all the images and renamed them image-1, image-2, image-3 and so on in the folder that you chose.

I went from this :

to this with a nice, simple workflow.

The advantage of saving the workflow as a batch rename application is you can use it over and over again. If you need to change the settings in the workflow, open the “application” in Automator.

There is a bulk rename utility for Mac OS X called NameChanger that is similar to what we have just done. But its nice to know that there are alternatives, for example if you don’t have an internet connection and can’t download NameChanger.

This has been a workflow that has came in useful for me on a number of occasions. Share your workflows with us and our readers in the comments below.

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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?

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There are 2 major, accepted color scales out there for consumption by human eyes – additive color and subtractive color. Subtractive color is accomplished via some sort of dyeing, screening or printing method. This is achieved by mixing either custom ink colors, or adopting a color scale , which in the subtractive realm of color, is called CMYK.

This refers to the 4 base colors used to physically, in paint or dye form, mix together to allow the formation of any color in the Cyan Magenta Yellow Black scale. This is what’s knows as CMYK – but i’m not sure why K stands for black though.

Additive color is the realm of discussion in this article. Additive color refers to the scale of color produced by adding different colors of light (rather than ink) to produce an image or color shade. In additive color, when you add the 3 primary colors together, Red Green and Blue (RGB), you get pure white, as illustrated in the additive color wheel above. Whereas if you mix together Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black inks, you get a dull brown.

Since RGB is the primary color scale for all monitors, phones, screens, laptops, anything that produces light; we will be discussing this today, as a way to empower you to be able to have brilliant images on your websites, and to get the most out of the pictures you snap in with your camera in any condition. We begin with a picture of a clearing on the ocean.

The following picture looks dull, discolored and too red. But you’d be surprised how much color information is contained in the picture, that simply needs to be brought out.

Open the image in Photoshop and you can follow along as you read the article. The tool we will be using can be found in the Image menu under Adjustments, and it’s called Levels. Otherwise it can be Hotkeyed at Ctrl-L.

The levels panel is one of the most used panels in Photoshop. You will also find Auto Levels. It is not recommended to use Auto Levels because it simply cannot replace the eye, and most importantly the taste of the viewer.

Once you have the levels panel open, there is a simple way to tell if all of the available color information is being used. The following is the levels output from the original image of the clearing on the water, showing a red discrepancy where all of the available color frequencies aren’t being utilized to their potential:

In order to correct this, and the inherent lack of color and brightness in the image, we need to give each respective primary color its own attention.

Using the Channel picker at the top we first choose the Red channel.  Next, pull the right, white slider over to the left where the dots begin to appear on the graph, indicating the channels are being used. Next pull the left, black slider over to the right to the point where the channel begins to show usage. Do this for red, green, and blue respectively.

As you make these changes, make sure the Preview checkbox is ticked so you can see your changes in action. Here’s what the process looks like, after gradually fixing red, green and blue:

Notice that even when we only fix the red channel, the picture already gets slightly brighter and richer. By bringing these sliders in, we are essentially telling Photoshop to spread the available color information over a wider range of color frequencies, and thus fill out the full spectrum more richly. Next we move on to the green channel.

At this juncture shown above, the picture starts to become richer and more saturated with color.

After finally adjusting the blue channel below, we can see the picture is at a very rich stage. Details that weren’t previously visible shine out now. What used to be shadows in the bushes are now more bushes, more leaves, more detail. And you would have never known the image contains all this information if you didn’t open the Levels panel.

Using these steps, you can take any RGB image and really pull the most out of the information that’s there.

Not all the detail in a picture is immediately visible to the naked eye. But with the Photoshop Levels tool you can maximize on detail and quality for each image.

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However, the downside is that all those photos are going to cost you. It’s important to understand the term “royalty-free” (RF) for those websites. RF images are not in the public domain, nor are they free to use without purchasing a license.

Luckily, there are plenty of websites for copyright free photos that won’t require you to dig into your pockets.  Here’s 5 of them.

Freerange

Once you register for a free membership at Freerange, thousands of high-resolution stock photos will be at your fingertips at no cost. All of the website’s images can be used for personal or commercial projects.

For photographers, Freerange also offers Google AdSense revenue sharing when you contribute. Check out this list for more of the top websites to sell your stock photos.

Stockvault

With over 13,000 free copyright free photos, Stockvault connects designers and photographers. The photo sharing website offers all of its images for absolutely free personal or non-commercial use.

Check out more about Stockvault in MakeUseOf’s Directory.

FreeDigitalPhotos

FreeDigitalPhotos neatly organizes its thousands of photos into easy-to-find categories and sub-categories. Every image is available for free download but if you want a larger version or a high-resolution version, they’re priced at $5 and $10, respectively.

stock.xchng

SXC.hu has over 400,000 photos to choose from by more than 30,000 photographers. The website maintains that all images are free, but you must abide by its image license agreement.

Some of the site’s artists may also need to be notified about using some images, and in most cases, you’ll need to give credit to them.

Flickr

If you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, you may want to actually try Flickr. The popular image hosting website has millions of images from its users who have offered their work under a Creative Commons (CC) License. All you have to do is simply pay close attention to the type of licenses each image falls under to use it appropriately.

Keep in mind that Flickr photos offered under the CC Attribution License requires you to give credit to the photographer.

Want more? MakeUseOf’s Directory of Apps has got details on MorgueFile, yet another website database for free high-resolution digital stock photos. If you’re still having trouble looking, try out PicFindr, a stock photography search engine.

If you know of any other good sites, let us know in the comments.

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Watermarking is the process of adding an identifying tag to your image – it can either be text or an image.WaterMarkLib makes this process easy for you. WaterMarkLib is a small download weighing in at 2.7MB. We have shown you online watermarkers before and Jim has even gone out of his way to show you 4 ways to watermark your images online.

This one however, resides on YOUR machine.

Once you extract the installer you will have to run through the basic setup clicks. You know, hit next, next, finish.

When you launch the application you will get a screen that looks similar to this. For some reason, it seems to only open in full screen but that aside, this is a great utility and very easy to use. Start by clicking File – Open and open an image. It seems to recognize all the formats I threw at it including: JPG, GIF and PNG.

Let’s start watermarking. You can either hit the Tool menu or there is also an icon on the tool bar that will allow you to add a text or image watermark. We will start by walking you through creating a text watermark.

After you hit the Text Watermark button or icon, you will get a screen that looks like the one below. You get to choose your font, size, opacity, color, drop shadow and even rotation. Opacity simply means the level of transparency i.e. how much of it can been seen through. So by putting the opacity around 20 or 30%, you can still see through your watermark onto your image. Go ahead and add some text and options. Then hit OK.

Then you will see your image with the watermark in the center. You can just grab the text with your mouse and place it where you would like to. I like to put my watermarks in the bottom right hand corner of the image like so:

Next, if you want to save your image, you should setup the output directory – this is so you do not overwrite your original image. After selecting a directory, you can simply hit the Save button and your watermarked image will be saved to your output directory and won’t affect the original image.

Next up, let’s take a look at adding an image as a watermark. It is almost the same as adding text – but with image options as you can see in the shot below:

Once your image is on the screen, you can move it with your mouse just like the text.

I could not figure out how to use the batch feature to apply a watermark onto several images at once. The tutorial on their website returned a 404 so if you do figure it out let us know!

Do you have another method to create a watermark for your images? Do you or don’t you watermark? We would love to hear from you in the comments!

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But I do enjoy doodling, so a boring meeting plus a pad and pencil equals time-killing fun. I have been doodling since elementary school and I enjoy looking at other people’s doodles’ as well. I am not talking about the application Doodle, either. I am talking about good old fashioned pen and paper doodles!

Now, I came across an awesome blog that not only showcases people’s doodles but they also let you upload your own! It is called DoodlerBlog.

Have you ever came across a website and said “ I SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THAT!” – well this is one of them!

I can see this going the way of lolCatz or Failblog and blowing up.

The first time I visited the site I enjoyed looking at doodles from Billy Gates, Barrack Obama and even George Bush. But that is not why I like the site so much. It has a uploader so you can submit your own doodles and have them published on the site for posterity!

I choose a few of my favorites to show you:

Barrack Obama Doodle

Inferno Doodle

Ronald Regan Doodle

Tribal Doodle

And I even uploaded one of my Doodle’s and it was published

Graffiti Doodle

You can visit the site and upload your own doodles (or email them at doodlerblog@gmail.com) to use the aptly named “Nifty Submitter Thingy” on the right sidebar as you can see below:

Simply fill in your Name and Email address. Then, locate to the doodle on your computer. It needs to be in .jpg, .gif, .png or .pdf format and under 2 MB. After you select the image, hit the Upload button.

Then, hit the confirm button and off it goes! Do you doodle? Does sharing your doodles with the world interest you? Have some doodles you want to share with us? Link us or upload them to DoodlerBlog!

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The rules are simple: your image needs to be in the JPG format and the file size needs to be under 500KB. (I did not follow the rules and uploaded a GIF and it accepted)

Not that bad. And if your images are in another format or too big – it is easily fixable with any image editing software.

I started out by browsing over to: http://repper.studioludens.com/. The site was pretty and gives off a great first impression. It has a fun feel to it and it makes you want to dive right in.

I got the idea of what kinds of cool images Repper can output by simply clicking on the change background button a few times. Very trippy! But of course, that was not going to distract me. I clicked on Start Tool Now!

I was presented with a random image which you can see in the lower right hand side of the screen shot below. Then by moving the mouse around, you create a kaleidoscope effect and make nifty patterns out of the image shown. You continue messing around with the random images or you can upload your own.

To upload your own images, click on the Upload image button in the upper right hand corner. It looks like this:

After clicking on it, you will get an Open file dialogue box like so:

I uploaded this image:

A simple text report scaled down to 565 pixels. Why did I choose this jpeg? It was the only one laying on my desktop. So, I uploaded it and got the image below. It has kind of a mirrored/alien language look to it.

Then, I got a bit braver and uploaded a picture of my wife and daughter and this is what I got:

Wow, that is a crazy pattern generated from my wife’s hair! You can download your pattern by pressing the button labeled Save pattern like so:

You will be given a URL to paste into a browser, email or IM. You can download the CSS file to add it to the background of your website or simply grab the image by clicking Download pattern.

The possibilities are endless! We would love to see what you create! Post a link in the comments.

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Rescaling stretches, or squeezes the image together, which makes for an unnatural and unappealing result.

Cropping, on the other hand, forces you to reconsider whole sections of the images, leaving out important information and often resulting in barely satisfying pictures.

Seam Carving

With the principles of dynamic page layouts in mind, where content automatically rearranges to the window’s size, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir developed Seam Carving. This technique, also known as liquid rescaling or -resizing, automatically rearranges the picture’s objects to include everything important in a smaller framing, while retaining the respective dimensions.

How it works

To achieve this, the seam carving algorithm searches for, and eliminates less important parts in the image, using seams. These seams are basically horizontal or vertical running lines, crossing points with a smaller energy function.

Seam Carving also enables the enlargement of images outside their original boundaries, while yet again preserving the picture objects, by calculating and inserting seams in the less important areas.

For a more detailed view on the concept and algorithm, please refer to the above video, or to the Seam Carving website.

Why you should love it

Through Seam Carving, you can change the size of your pictures in any dimension, without distorting the picture’s scene or any elements of it. It’s resizing 3.0, where we’re literally stepping out of the known boundaries.

Also, by assigning additional positive or negative energy values to picture elements, we can not only make sure some things ’survive’ resizing, but also filter certain parts from the image. This allows easy element elimination, eye appealing results without any learning curve.

Seam Carving Applications

After Seam Carving was first presented, on the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference, developers from all over the world have leaped onto it. The algorithm was implemented in several graphical user interfaces – a.k.a applications.

SEAMonster

SEAMonster was the first Seam Carving GUI, developed and released by Michael Swanson, not too long after the initial conference.

The application includes all basic features, like stretching and squashing, forcefully including and removing specific elements. It’s .NET based, so it requires Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0.

For more information on the SEAMonster application, check out the website or the demonstration video.

GIMP Liquid Rescale Plugin

The Liquid Rescale plugin implements the same features in the GIMP platform. One important difference is that it uses additional layers instead of ‘painting’ the extra energy to preserve or discard elements. You can also further control the intensity of said additional energy.

Contrary to SEAMonster, the plugin is continually being updated. It’s available for Windows and Linux, and can be found here.

Rsizr web app

Rsizr brings Seam Carving to the web, for all the 2.0ers amongst you. It bundles all major functions in a slick looking flash interface.

The web application was discussed in more detail in the MakeUseOf Directory.

Start playing with rsizr immediately, or refer to the official guide first.

This concludes the major Seam Carving players. Several other projects were started that were discontinued, including a photoshop plugin that was sold on to onOne Software and can now be found in their premium suite.

What do you think of Seam Carving? Which application do you prefer, and why? One we missed, perhaps? Don’t be shy, and drop a comment below.

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Picasa 3.0 is a free, downloadable easy-to-use photo editor from Google. If you don’t want to learn to use Photoshop (and don’t want to pay for it), but you’d like your images to look great, you could certainly make worse choices. It also has some surprisingly sophisticated options up its sleeves. More about those later.

This is the first in a short series of articles about getting the most out of Picasa. And I’m going to start right here. At the beginning.

Just to clarify something, we’re not talking about web-based editing here. There are some great options out there for that, but a local application lets you do things that are difficult, or cumbersome online. of course that does mean you need to download and install it. Panic not though, I’ll help you through that.

It also means that you need to watch that you have the right gear to run it on. Picasa is officially supported on Windows XP and Vista. Just recently they also released a beta version for Linux and the Mac. I’m sticking with Vista for this, and I’ve asked my good friend Kate to help with the Apple options. She’ll interrupt as soon as she finds issue with something I’ve said. It seldom takes long… Kate’s comments are in blue. You Linux geeks are on your own this time.

By the way, Picasa also has a product called Picasa Web Albums. I’ll get to that later, but that’s one of the ways to get the resulting images back to the web.

Download and install

So, first grab the application from here. Click the download button, and save it wherever you normally do. Then run it. Confirm that you really do want to run it.

Agree to the license, after reading it of course, and then decide where you’d like to install Picasa.

Click the Install button.

Picasa tends to be just a little intrusive, and thinks it should be able to take over a few things, so step through this next part with a little care…

The third option annoys me for two reasons. Firstly, I’m assuming you’re doing this on your home computer, in which case why on earth would you be using Internet Explorer? Need a clue? Firefox. I’m just saying. Secondly, this is a nasty thing for them to turn on by default. Choose carefully. Leave the last option ticked, and click the finish button.

None of that funny stuff on a Mac! Of course, it assumes that you’re using Safari no matter what. Everyone knows that unless you’re just messing with the Safari 4 beta for it’s Cover Flow eye candy, chances are you’re using Firefox, and that is as it should be!

Welcome to Picasa!

You have some more choices to make…

Picasa needs to know about your images to work effectively. In order to do that, it needs to scan your hard drive to find all your pictures.

The choices aren’t what I’d have wished for. As you can see, you can only choose between the two options shown. It might have been better if you could choose particular folders, in hopes of missing the ones of Aunt Bertha and her holiday in Paris. But anyway, choose. Then click Continue.

I hear ya! 

Note that later on we can control which folders to include and exclude more specifically using something called the Folder Manager, so it’s not all bad.

On the Mac it will actually integrate with your iPhoto library and display those photos as you already have them grouped, in their proper iPhoto folders.

Picasa includes a photo viewer. You can always say no, and stick with Irfanview.

Picasa is going to take a while now, and scan all the images in the selected folders. It’s best to allow it to finish, so how about a coffee?

While the scanning is happening, you have more choices to make. Firstly, despite you having just downloaded the application, Picasa wants to update itself.

Click the Yes, update now button. Picasa will close, update itself, restart, and then continue with the scanning.

Remember I said that Picasa was a little intrusive? While you were minding your own business, it installed itself as the default screensaver in Windows. If you don’t like that, change it back.

Of course, if you were hoping that you’d end up with a handy-dandy desktop or screensaver powerhouse on the Mac then you’ll be disappointed to know that you’re stuck with one little “Set as desktop” selection in the CREATE menu and that’s it.  *sigh*

Anyway, the scanning is probably still not finished, so a few more things to set up.

By default, Picasa doesn’t want to display .png files. You can fix that by going to Tools – Options, and clicking on the File Types tab. Tick the appropriate lines to turn particular file types on and off.

I particularly like that it’s happy to display RAW images, but I’m guessing most of you are unlikely to need that option.

That’s it. Once the scanning is completed you’ll be presented with what is called the Library view, and I’ll tell you all about that in the next post.

Continue Reading Google Picasa 101 series:

• [Google Picasa 101] – Getting Started
• [Google Picasa 101] – View, Folders, Toolbars

If you’re following along, let me know how you got on, and what might be different. Anything confusing I should follow up? Do you use RAW, by the way? Let me know in the comments.

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• [Google Picasa 101] – View, Folders, Toolbars (18)
• How to Color Correct RGB Images Easily in Photoshop (14)
• The Challenging World Of Image Editing (8)
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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.

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• 5 Ways To Get Your Images Noticed In Flickr (7)
• Make Use Of Podcast #37: Top Ten Flickr Greasemonkey Scripts (2)
• Make Use Of Podcast #35: Doing Fun Things With Your Pictures (0)
• 3 Tools To Easily Backup Your Flickr Photos (3)
• 3 Steps To Find Similar-Minded People On Flickr (9)

However, Google’s implementation of their product, although usable, feels very clunky and can be extremely cumbersome, combing through hundreds of thousands of images. Fortunately it seems like there is always another way with technology.

A strangely titled website called ‘Dear Computer’, takes the incredibly large index of Google Images and simply displays images only, nothing else. They have titled it ‘Google Image Ripper‘, and what it does is it removes the long drawn out process of individually clicking images through Google’s annoying search, and displays the file in its entirety.

Here is a comparison look:

Google’s Default Image Search of MakeUseOf:

Dear Computer’s Google Image Rip of MakeUseOf:

As you can see after submitting a search, you get many more images and a much easier interface, than you ever would with Google’s version. Once the images are displayed, you then have the ability to simply right-click on the file right from the screen, for easy saving and storage.

Along with the quick search and save feature, you also have some additional options to choose from while searching. You still have the option of choosing between sizes (small, medium, large and extra large) but also an additional ‘icon’ option as well.

Now let’s take a look at the search box. Here is where you can select your image size, safe content option or even look for ‘faces only’.

Along with the website, I have incorporated Firefox’s built-in keyword searching as well. If you bookmark this link- Google Image Ripper – you can simply type ‘im insert image name here‘ and you’ll quickly see Image Ripper’s display of images.

There isn’t much else to this web app, but I find myself using it on almost a daily basis, particularly for icons and smaller images. It also comes in handy when you would like screen shots of a particular application for a blog posting or software review. You may not find a use for it yourself, but just try it out anyway. It’s incredibly fast and of course free to use.

Do you know of any similar online products?

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• Top 5 Free Websites for Quality Copyright Free Photographs (37)
• TinEye – Searching For Images With An Image (19)
• The Best 3 Tools to Search for Images Online by Color (26)
• 5 Good Image Search Engines Apart From Google Image Search (39)
• [Google Picasa 101] – Getting Started (22)

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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• Make Use Of Podcast #35: Doing Fun Things With Your Pictures (0)
• 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)

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?

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• Backup And Download Flickr Photos in Bulk (Windows) (11)
• 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)

I sure do and I work with a lot of different FTP and HTTP image hosting sites. I use them all day long everyday. I got fed up and went out looking for something to cut down on my clicks. Enter Rightload for Power FTP’ing and uploading to popular online file sharing services.

This 1.5MB download will have you FTP’ing left and right. Well more right then left especially if we are talking about how you use it. You right click on a file after installing Rightload and you will have a few new options. During the install process you will be greeted with a window asking you this:

Don’t be afraid, all this message is telling you is that you should be secure by saving your data to your personal profile directory that is not accessible by other users. This is a great idea seeming you are saving FTP usernames and passwords.

After installing Rightload you can go ahead and run it. On your initial run you will be greeted by an empty RightLoad window. You will need to configure your servers first.

Click “Tools” and then “Options” to set up your servers. You will get the following screen:

After you fill out the required information, you will have successfully created your first FTP or HTTP server. Now when you select files in Windows Explorer and right click, you will see the option to upload to your configured server like so:

Using the “Upload to Custom Directory” you are prompted by another window asking you for the upload path:

The app also has a neat option if you are uploading image files.  It will prompt you if you want it to automagically create thumbnail images for you as well. This is another HUGE time saver. Most of the time when you use images on the web you also use a thumb nail.

I clicked yes and then my progress meter took off…

Getting the HTTP sites to work require an additional step. You need to download a xml file for the configuration. See the details from their homepage below:

These files contain pre-defined HTTP upload servers that you can add to Rightload without having to set their options manually. To import them, save the XML file to your computer with right-click -> “Save Link As…” and then use “Tools” -> “Import servers…” from your Rightload menu.

• Imageshack.us
  Imagehost
• Rapidshare.com
  Filehost — UPDATED: now with premium account support
• Rapidshare.de
  Filehost
• WaffleImages
  Private Imagehost for SomethingAwful.com
• more…

Missing a site? Please post your requests in our forums!

Do you use something similar? Think this is awesome or a waste of time? Let us know in the comments!

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• Map Your FTP Drive As A Local Drive with NetDrive (Windows) (15)
• Windows Registry Tweaks (Part 2) (8)
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• The Ultimate Extension for Windows Explorer (9)
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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)

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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• Track Facebook, Twitter, Flickr & Youtube Updates on iPhone (3)
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Let’s search the web for an autumn-like palette (yellow, red, brown) using the following 3 services. Let’s see how the search results are like.

1. PicItUp

PicItUp is a visual image search engine that combines word-based with color based search.

Test it: search for [autumn] and choose any color from the left column (I chose yellow). Now let’s look at the results:

Impressive, isn’t it?

What the tool lacks: you can’t combine several colors to refine your search (for example you can’t search for a yellow-red palette) – you are only able to search for one color.

2. Multicolr

Unlike the above one, with the Flickr-based Multicolr (already mentioned at Make Use Of) service you can combine as many colors as you want.

Test it: choose several colors and watch how the image list changes with each color added (I combined red and yellow):

What the tool lacks:you can’t combine word-based and color-based searches with this service. You are limited with playing with colors only.

3. Etsy

Etsy, an online shop of handmade products, has developed color search for their own product database.

Test it: It’s real fun to play with. Just browse your mouse across the screen and watch various colors and same-palette products pop up.

What the tool lacks: here you are unable to either set the color option or the search term. Nonetheless the tool is such fun to use that you definitely need to try it out.

Now, what do you think could be possible practical applications for these tools?

Would you use them on a regular basis or are they just for fun?

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• TinEye – Searching For Images With An Image (19)
• Top 5 Free Websites for Quality Copyright Free Photographs (37)
• Instant Eyedropper Drops The Pain From Color Matching (12)
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Luckily for Mac, we have Paparazzi! No, I’m not getting excited, it just happens to have an exclamation sign in its name. Unlike the other two web-apps, Paparazzi is a desktop application. I prefer Paparazzi! over SuperScreenshots because it is more configurable and also provides an option to create thumbnails.

Launch Paparazzi! and you’re presented with a simple interface where you’ll see an address bar and some optional configurations for your snapshot output (minimum size and crop), a preview and a large Capture button.

In order to take a webpage snapshot, you’ll need to enter the site’s address into the address bar. If the site is in focus within your browser (I’ve only tried this on Safari), you could go to the File menu -> Capture from -> Capture URL from Safari. Pretty neat stuff if you have a bunch of websites to take snapshots of because it saves some “Copy & Paste” manual labour.

After clicking on Capture and getting a preview, you can now save your snapshot. Clicking on “Save image as” will present a typical ‘Save As’ pop-up. You will have the ability to save the image as the format you desire (PNG, JPG, TIFF or PDF). Out of the four options, three are high quality output formats. Brilliant! You also have the chance to save a thumbnail of the snapshot. A thumbnail is just a smaller version of the image which you can show as a preview. The fact that Paparazzi! does this for me automatically with one click is very useful. Normally, I would have to save the image in two sizes to achieve the same effect.

Here is a snapshot comparison between SuperScreenshots and Paparazzi. Both are PNG formatted. Can you spot the difference?

Paparazzi was last updated in 2006 but it still works fine on OS X Leopard 10.5.5. Download it for free!

Personally, I would prefer to use Paparazzi if the need arises compared to any web-app. But then, that’s my opinion. What about you? Are there any other full-length website snapshot applications you would like to suggest?

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Previously, when I needed to resize an album of images, this is what I had to do:

• 1. Launch Photoshop CS3
• 2. Record a new action of resizing, saving in a different folder; and closing that image window
• 3. Click to repeat the action

Doesn’t sound like much but trust me, after a few hundred images, you’re bound to get tired of it.

Online image re-sizers aren’t an option for me because I shoot a couple of hundred of photos per session and they’re all taken at maximum resolution which is 12.1 MP. So, uploading and re-downloading those photos aren’t technically time-efficient.

Cue Pixer. It’s a relatively unknown application by a small Italian company called 1802. They make lightweight applications which are simple and perform a minimal number of tasks, so they’re pretty specific to what they do. Pixer is an image batch-resizer with a little bit extra on the side.

In addition to resizing your photos, you can also:

• flip them horizontally and vertically
• scale them by a certain percentage
• crop them by defining an output size
• rotate the images by specifying the degree by which to rotate
• convert non-jpeg images into jpeg
• create icons for the image (in Tiger)

Pixer is very versatile in the sense that it supports almost all image formats [PNG, JPG, TIFF, PSD, BMP, PICT and RAW(only in Leopard)]. After processing your images, Pixer will insert a pre- or postfix on the resulting files to differentiate them from the originals.

At the end of every operation, the application will ask you if you would like to visit their website, which can be annoying. However, if you donate to 1802, apparently they will send you an email and a little program attached which will rid you of that nuisance.

In the end, it is a small price to pay to see a tiny application like Pixer work as marvelously as it does.

Pixer is Universal Binary, charityware and available for Tiger and Leopard.

If you’re wondering which articles I mentioned at the beginning of the article, here are the links:

Resizr – Quick way to Resize Images Online
Picresize : Quick Web-based Photo Editor
My-I-Size : Resize GIF, PNG and JPG Images Online
QuickThumbnail : Resize Images Online
FixPicture: Resize and Convert Images Online
Resize2Mail : Quick Image Resizer
Dosize : Multiple Image Resizer

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Here are three very simple ones.

Browser Based

LunaPic
Beware, the interface is pretty ugly and it’s lined with ads. BUT besides supporting basic editing, you can easily add some artsy effects and animations to your images. The gif animations are pretty cool.

Yes, it remains basic, you cannot customize these special effects, the most you can do is combine several animations. Definitely a bore for the advanced user. However, it is a great tool to quickly spruce up an image without having to load a bloated desktop program.

Also check out recently mentioned GIFmake that can be used to compose and decompose GIF animations online.

J-Painter

Here we actually have more than just one tool. With J-Painter you can draw a sketch, annotate a photo, draw a diagram, draw a road map, paint a greeting card or perform some medicine drawing. Images can be downloaded as png files.

Yet another very basic looking and easy to use tool. What really got me hooked is the map editor with the predefined symbols.
You can use the tool online or download to your desktop for free. Licenses to install J-Painter on your own website are available as well, including a 30 day free evaluation.

Desktop Based

Textaizer

The people from Mosaizer developed a program that lets you combine a picture and a text file of your choice to produce a text mosaic. Or you can transform your image into ASCII Art, create ASCII text, and there is a lot more Textaizer can do.

Also check out the original Mosaizer (30 days free trial) and the new Pattaizer (available soon) from the same creators.

If you found this list inspiring, you might also want to take a look at 10 Free Image Editing Programs for your PC and 5 powerful Online Image Editing Tools.

Do you know of any web-based or desktop-based image editing tools? Drop the links in the comments.

(By) This post was written by one of our regular authors, Tina from Recommended.

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