13 tools to spice up your Flickr photos (or the way you view them)

Written on 12th June 2008                                                                                                              26 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Take your Flickr photos – or the way you view them – to the next level by using any of these thirteen tools. Are you missing a specific service? Post it in the comments and I’ll update this post.

Fotoviewr – four cool galleries

Fotoviewr started out as someone’s pet project to learn how to program using Adobe Flash and Papervision – and you can tell. Although the service looks very promising, it’s not nearly as cool as it will eventually be. It aims to provide a better experience for viewing photos, thus you it allows you to create four cool galleries. Yet it misses vital functions like an embed option, high-res support, and there’s a max of 30 pics. The usability is great though, so keep an eye on it.

www.fotoviewr.com

Tinou Flickr Cover Flow – iTunes revisited

San Francisco-based Vietnamese guy Tinou Bao has built a tool which allows you to create a cover flow slideshow ala iTunes for your Flickr photos. Viewers can browse through the slideshow using the keyboard arrows. Tinou has made quite an effort, as you can specify almost everything that you can imagine, so make sure you have some time available before you click the link below.

www.tinou.com/coverflow

Splashr – dead-simple slideshows

This is perfect for someone who quickly wants to create an embeddable slidehow. It’s not as fancy as the creation of Tinou Bao but it sure does the job right. Splashr outputs your photos by username or tag into any number of different slideshow formats, and then creates a link to the slideshow itself that you can share with all your friends and admirers.

www.splashr.com

Dumpr – get your face on the walls of a famous museum

Dumpr is a site where you can add fun effects to your Flickr photos. You can choose from the following options: Museumr, Amazing Circles, Lomography, Rubik’s Cube, Jigsaw Puzzles, Pencil Sketches, Reflection, Easter Egg, Celebrity Paparazzi, Weave, Lego-ize and Stone Mosaic. The last two are premium options though, so you’ll have to pay a few bucks for them. The picture on the right is an example of the Museumr, featuring Digg founder Kevin Rose and blogger Edial Dekker.

www.dumpr.net (more…)

animoto, blurb, dumpr, flickr, flickr album maker, flickriver, flickrtoys, fotoviewr, kubickr, moopix, photos, photoscape, piclens, splashr, tinou, tools

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Blurb: wouldn’t you want to see your name on a book cover?

Written on 22nd April 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Robin Goldberg from Blurb

Yesterday Boris and me visited a pre-Web 2.0 Expo meet-up, organized by Flickr and blurb. We were welcomed by Robin Goldberg, she is the SVP Marketing and Business Development of blurb. After a drink, she pitched the service, and we were pretty impressed – despite the hideous name of the service.

The San Francisco-based company celebrates the good ol’ books by allowing anyone customizable photo-orientated books. It launched in October 2007 and differ from competitors like Lulu with the ultra-slick look of the books. Goldberg: “Whenever I tell people about our product, they react positive. Yet when I show them the books they get really enthusiastic”. I can see why, since the books I saw yesterday reminded me of the photo books I’d seen earlier at bookstore Borders. They’re also equally expensive with prices ranging from 12,95 to 159,95 dollar. By downloading their software program, making a book becomes pretty easy.

A Blurb book

Cool features are importing your Flickr pics and blog posts. You can either print a book to caress your beloved Flickr pics or sell your work for profit in the online bookstore of Blurb.

Blurb has just opened a European office – with a printer – in Amsterdam. So the service becomes more accessible for us Europeans.

I like this service as it gives you an opportunity to turn your online content into a touchable project. Some photographers are working daily on a beautiful collection of photos on Flickr, yet what will be left of that in 30 years? When creating a book, these photographers can show their work to their grandparents as well as their (future) children and at the same time own a gorgeous product.

I’m thinking of creating a book yearly, to capture the highlights and remember them in a rather fashionable way.

blurb, books, flickr, Publications, web20expo

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