Have you ever wanted to send sensitive information to someone else over the internet? I’m sure you must’ve felt a little paranoid about your details getting stolen along the way. Ever wished there was a way to send messages across to a friend without others knowing? Or even not having the slightest hint that you’re sending a secret message? Do you need a way to disguise your message so that no one could tell anything from plainly looking at it?
Magicians often use this method to distract their audiences away from what is really happening — it’s called misdirection. This is mainly to get someone to focus their attention on something, while you’re performing something totally different.
Make Use Of authors have covered a wide spectrum of online and desktop image batch-resizing programs, sadly none of them were Mac-specific. Luckily, I found this small but handy application which was born and bred for the task.
Previously, when I needed to resize an album of images, this is what I had to do:
Doesn’t sound like much but trust me, after a few hundred images, you’re bound to get tired of it.
Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of pictures in your digital camera which you want to transfer to your PC and store them securely. When you transfer all the pictures you’ll find that the file names are a combination of letters and numbers which do not tell anything about the image. So what do you do ? Obviously renaming them is the solution. But doing it in the conventional way (one at a time) is time consuming, in fact very time consuming if you’ve got 200 or 300 photos. This is where ReNamer comes into the picture.
We’ve covered lots of neat Adobe AIR applications here before, but I found a new one lately that just blew my socks off. This new Adobe AIR application is sure to excite the photo lover in anyone!
DestroyFlickr is a new application that was built for beauty and functionality. DestroyFlickr does its magic by giving you a whole new way of exploring Flickr images. The user interface is absolutely beautiful, with its dark neutral backgrounds, you can view pictures in a new amazing way.
First off, you’ll have to download DestroyFlickr (& Adobe AIR if you don’t already have it).
When it comes to photo-sharing, Flickr is definitely leading the game. It’s interface is simple and easy to use but for those of us who need more from it than just uploading and sharing photos, I’ve got these applications that will pull Flickr out of its ordinary shell into a more extraordinary light. Get ready!
iPhoto is an addition in Mac OS X which I prefer over the traditional method of viewing and collecting photos in Windows. I highly doubt that merely keeping all your pictures in folders justifies a proper photo “album”. Shucks, there goes the infamous “Mac-ego” again. I apologize for that. But still, my stand remains — iPhoto is a joy to use, it’s a great way of viewing pictures and showing off to your friends by encapsulating it within a gloriously beautiful interface.
It does however (sometimes), turn out to be a pain in the ass.
There is no doubt about the fact that Flickr is the most wonderful tool to upload photos to the web and share it with others. Plus it’s the most popular too.
If you love uploading photos to Flickr, and have been using for sometime now, maybe 2-3 years then you’ll know that although it’s a great tool to preserve your photos online and share it, if you want to be nostalgic and navigate through old photos in Flickr and revisit those moments in your life, it may not be very easy and could be time-consuming.
Wallpaper is an ever fascinating topic for me. Earlier this year I wrote an in depth article on pimping wallpapers and we’re constantly adding new desktop wallpaper resources to the Make Use Of directory. Today I have a very cool tool for you.
John’s Background Switcher is different from all previously mentioned applications, because not only can it load images from a predefined folder on your machine, it can also load them from online sources such as Flickr, Picasa and Yahoo. Let’s take a look at how to set it up to work with Flickr.
Be it your desktop, a post to your blog or your homepage banner, the right image can help bring your point across, make it stand out and shine or simply look very cool.
What does royalty free mean in the first place?
Simply put, you don’t have to pay royalties or license fees for using the material. It doesn’t necessarily mean the material is completely free, in most cases you will still need to pay a small initial fee to obtain the image, icon or sound. Then however, you can use it in any way the end user license agreement allows you to, meaning no further license fees will have to be paid.
How many people out there have hundreds, if not thousands, of digital pictures stored on their computers accumulated over years that no one has ever seen? Me! Thankfully, I try to upload most of my pictures to free online photo sharing sites like Picasa and Flickr to at least get some return on the time I spent actually taking all of those pictures.
However, I noticed that not too many of my friends nor my family really care to wade through hundreds of pictures, usually the same scene, just a different angle, because it’s boring. That’s where photo slideshows come in handy. You can make yourself look pretty suave by creating fancy slideshows with customized music, titles, and more using some very easy-to-use and free tools.
Photographs are little gems and just like with shaping a rough diamond it requires a lot of work as well as skill to reveal the true and full beauty of a simple snapshot. And there are a thousand different ways to get there. Here are ten image editing programs that may come in handy one way or the other.
1. GIMP
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a powerful and free piece of software that can handle all basic image editing tasks and much more beyond that. The fact that it’s open source and available for UNIX platforms, Mac and Windows makes it extremely flexible.
I love it when events are timed perfectly. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been contemplating how best to download my photos from my Flickr account before the pro membership expires in March. I kept putting off the task because it wasn’t very appealing to think of sitting at the computer for hours clicking individually on each photo and making multiple clicks to download it. I can think of better ways to utilise my time.
Then today, fate magically intervened and delivered to my RSS reader, FlickrDown. Using the free tool, I managed to download around 2000 original sized photos in about 30 minutes. All I needed to do was point and click.
I have recently begun to move all my photos from Flickr back to my own website. I was encouraged to begin this huge task when I was introduced to the freeware program Web Album Generator.
I figured this would be a good time to introduce it to Make Use Of readers, what with the holidays approaching and your photo-taking likely to increase.
A bunch of really cool and dead-simple tools to add a “WOW” factor to your images. We have mentioned most of them already, here I wanted to put the better ones together.
beFunky - This is by far my favorite tool. With beFunky you can take any of your photos and turn it into a cartoon like drawing. You can either convert it into a black and white sketch drawing or into a colorful animated painting.
And that’s not all, it also lets you do the same for videos. Check out the video below.
There are lots of image editing applications out there, some focus on resizing, some on image editing, and others on photo enhancements. Here is a list of online image editors that incorporate most of the above mentioned functionalities in one application. In addition to nice interface and rich choice of image manipulation (and resizing) features some of them also give you an option to:
Well, I must admit although I don’t have a Mac, a main reason I’d like one is for Photobooth. However, luckily I have found 4 comparable FREE web based applications that are pretty much Photobooth. So, enjoy and if you find others, please let me know…
Options are:
a) Color
b) Morph
c) Scenes
Options are:
a) Colors
b) Effects
Options are:
a) Colors
b) Effects
As the title says what we got here are a couple of tools to share and track your well-being. While each of them are slightly different from the other, they share a common purpose and more or less work in a similar way. Basically, the idea is to allocate 1-2 min. at the end of each day in order to quickly rate it and if necessary comment on it. By doing so for a couple of months you can get a pretty good insight into your overall well-being (or happiness) and the reasons behind it.
