Nothing is more important than that great photo you took at the concert you went to last night, but the thing that’s almost as important is the data that goes with it. Sure, apps let you attach a general location to your photos, but to fully chronicle your experience at a live event, you can’t pin a photo to a specific spot at the venue.

A new iOS app called Picket lets you tag event photos with the exact seat you sat in when you snapped the shot. Maybe this seems like over-sharing to some, but as you decide to buy tickets in the future you want to know what the view will look like from specific seats.

The Picket app calls itself “the world’s first Social Ticketing Network.” While that is a pretty big statement, I will say that the nuance of tagging photos with seats definitely makes this the first such photo sharing app to tie itself closely to ticket sales.

What does it look like from row 9 seat 7?

The Picket app is powered by ticket purchasing platform SeatGeek, so it’s safe to say that all major upcoming events will be available in the Picket app.

You could purchase tickets to a baseball game through the app and when you take a photo you’ll be able to fill in your exact spot. That data will be tied to both the venue it took place as well as the actual event day and time:

Once people have started to fill up Picket with their photos, when you go to buy tickets you can see exactly what they saw at a previous event. Up until now, you’ve had to rely on 3D flash models of a venue, especially at baseball parks, and make a really good guess at whether the view is a good one.

Additionally, you can chat within the app with people who are at an event in real-time. You could ask them questions about how it was, or how the seats are. All of this interaction makes the ticket-buying process much more interactive and transparent. I could totally see myself buying tickets through Picket after checking out a few photos:

As location-based services get more granular, we’ll be able to make more educated decisions on where we choose to go with our free time. For example, I’d love to see a service that let people rate the actual seating at popular restaurants. Is sitting by the window during the day too sunny and warm? This is the kind of thing that interests me.

Picket is definitely on to something with its app, especially for people who go to a lot of concerts. It might be worth spending a few extra bucks on that better seat if you like what you see in photos.

➤ Picket for iOS

As expected, more of Google’s products are getting the social treatment with Google+ functionality. The latest project to get further “Plussed” is Gmail, and the features are actually quite handy.

The “people” widget that shows up when you hover over one of your friends in Gmail, will now include thumbnails of recent photos and videos they’ve posted on Google+, along with the other recent updates they’ve shared.

Here’s what the team had to say about the feature:

Gmail and Google+ are both great places to share images and videos with your friends, and we’re always looking for ways to make this easier. We’ve been showing recent Google+ posts in the people widget for some time, and a few weeks ago we added the ability for you to share YouTube videos from your email to your Google+ stream.

Today, we’re expanding recent Google+ posts in the people widget to include thumbnails of the photos and videos shared in the post. We’re also making it easier to share inline images in emails — just hover your mouse over the image in your email and you will see an option to share it on Google+. We’re still rolling out the update, so if you don’t see it yet, sit tight.

Here’s what the people widget might look like once the feature hits your Gmail account:

The ability to share an inline image from your inbox by just hovering over it is a handy addition to the share button that Gmail added for Google+ last year.

This is further proof that Google is all about social, and there’s no turning back now. It’s also further proof that when people are using any Google product, they’ll also be a Google+ user, whether they visit the destination site or not.

A specific demographic of users have latched on to Google’s social service quickly, and that’s photographers. Virtual photo walks have been a mainstay of Google+ almost since its inception, and the platform has become the home to some of the world’s most popular photographers.

Some of these photographers even created their own book to benefit charity called the “Plus One Collection”, a first for Google+. It looks like these groups of photographers are about to have another first by holding their own conference in May called the “Google+ Photographer’s Conference“.

On May 22nd and 23rd, some of the most avid users of Google+ will meet at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to discuss photography. The conference has been put together by Scott Kelby of the Kelby Media Group, and will focus on how photographers can build their brand and best use Google+ to share their work.

Here are just a few of the impressive speakers that will be discussing photography and how to take your work social:

Scott Kelby
Trey Ratcliff
Guy Kawasaki
Jeremy Cowart
Alex Koloskov
Bradley Horowitz

While this isn’t an official Google event, the company is one of the sponsors, along with Adobe and Wacom. The price to get in is $299 if you register before April 30th, so get your tickets now.

Along with the speakers and tracks of training, there will be numerous photo walks happening around San Francisco, which are free if you sign up for the conference.

If you’re a photographer and are looking for ways to make a name for yourself, this conference is definitely for you. It’s been fun to see this group of users find a voice on Google’s social platform, and I imagine that we’ll see a lot of these types of events pop up in the future, just like we’ve seen with Twitter meetups and unofficial mini-conferences.

Before there were location-aware fads apps like Highlight and Glancee, there was a company who focused on creating chatrooms on the fly based on where you were located. Think AOL chatrooms with people who were ten feet away from you. Yobongo pioneered the notion that you may want to strike up a chat with the people who are in the same room with you, but aren’t necessarily people that you know.

A year has passed since the “Great Group Messaging War of 2011” and Yobongo has been acquired by online photo book software company Mixbook. The marriage of the two companies isn’t as odd as you’d think though, since three members from Yobongo’s team previously worked at a startup called Scrapblog, which was also purchased by Mixbook last year. Specific terms of the deal were not made available, but Yobongo investors will become investors in Mixbook.

Yobongo had raised $1.35M in seed funding from top tier investors like Mitch Kapor, Dave Morin, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, and True Ventures.

The Yobongo team will get to work on creating a mobile scrapbooking experience for photos on the Mixbook platform, once that has seen some impressive growth as of late. Here are some interesting factoids as of February of this year:

5,000,000 Mixbook projects started
10,000,000 products shipped
100,000,000 pages designed
250,000,000 photos uploaded
10,000,000 hours spent on Mixbook

Here’s what Yobongo co-founder Caleb Elston had to say about the acquisition:

It has been a whirlwind year and a half. It began with Dave and me hacking away at coffee shops, then joining forces with our incredible investors and all along building a team of the most talented product builders out there. Today, we are excited to start a new chapter in helping people communicate. Together with Mixbook we will accelerate our efforts to help people communicate with their photos.

The entire Yobongo team will be joining Mixbook in Palo Alto and we couldn’t be more excited. Mixbook is the best way to quickly and easily create beautiful customized photo books, cards, calendars and more.They’ve quietly been building their company and they are absolutely crushing it.

Yobongo isn’t the only SXSW-Hot group messaging app from last year to have an exit, Beluga was purchased by Facebook right before the event, and GroupMe was purchased by Skype.

The service will be shutting down and letting its users know when that will take place.

If you’re an iOS or Android app developer and have built something that you’d like people to share photos on, you know how plain and vanilla the default photo sharing functionality is for an app.

When using one of these apps, the only choices you get are your photo stream and camera roll, which pretty much consists of the same pool of photos. What about the photos you’ve shared directly to Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and Instagram? Unless the app developer has taken the extra steps to build in functionality to grab photos from those services you’re out of luck, until now.

The startup Chute has built a pretty epic service for developers that will make the photo sharing experience way better on just about any app. It’s called Photo Picker+ and by using its SDK and a line of code, any application can instantly pull photos off of other social platforms by allowing users to log in and authorize the app to do so.

Here’s what we’re used to seeing on most iOS apps when it comes to grabbing a photo for a profile picture or any other function asking for a picture:

Using the Photo Picker+ SDK, photo pickers in apps could start to look something like this:

Not only is this a better experience for app users, it’s a great way for developers to get more engagement on their respective services. The SDK requires no programming whatsoever and just takes a quick swap of the photo picker code within the app.

Check out the demo of Photo Picker+ below:

Photo Picker+ is completely free for developers to use, all you have to do is sign up for a Chute developers account and download the SDK. There’s pretty much no downside for developers to start using the service and I suspect that we’ll start seeing it pop up in a lot of social apps for iOS and Android soon.

“How will it make money?” is a question that we should ask, but I’m sure that Chute has something in mind.

➤ Photo Picker+

While there’s no shortage of apps that let you take pictures and share them with a bunch of people, the ones that focus on food seem to be creating a niche for themselves. Recently, we wrote about how Foodspotting decided to relaunch as a discovery app to take on Yelp reviews.

It’s a smart move for them, but the pictures you take of food that you make at home still needs a home. That home could very well be a beautifully designed app for iOS and Android called DishPal.

What makes DishPal different is that it lets you elegantly share the dishes around you in groups or by using hashtags in addition to the typical stream of photos you’d find on Instagram.

Nom Nom Nom

DishPal lets you sign up using your Facebook account and once you get started you’ll notice that the app’s design is clean and as you tap through photos it uses really nice transition effects that feel really smooth. The power of the app isn’t just taking pictures of food, it’s really all about sharing groups of things like you would on sites like Pinterest.

One of the really cool features of DishPal is called “Party” where anyone can set up a themed group that invites others to share pictures of similar food. For example, you can set up a “Chocolate” party and everyone on the service who has taken a picture of amazing dishes with chocolate can add them to the party. It’s a great way to find new dishes and meet people:

In addition to these groupings which require you to participate, the DishPal app smartly uses hashtags as a way to automatically group photos together. Doing this for a photo sharing app for food makes absolute sense and makes discovery of great dishes even easier:

While some of the users on the platform are sharing their recipes upon request, it doesn’t seem like the community has taken to the idea of doing this with every photo they post. Of course you can still take photos of food from restaurants but I think that the more powerful play for DishPal would be to make itself the “homemade version” of Foodspotting.

If inviting people to add photos isn’t your thing, you can set up your own groups of food by using the app’s “Magazine” feature which you can set up for any theme you like. For example, if you wanted to make a Magazine for the top 10 dishes in San Francisco, you could do that in just a few taps. It’s yet another way that DishPal is utilizing curation to power discovery.

If you just want to share pictures and stories about food, checking out DishPal might be for you. I like taking pictures of food, but I don’t really want to provide a review for a restaurant like Yelp, Foursquare, and Foodspotting wants me to do. This app is for hardcore foodies.

➤ DishPal for iOS and Android

In a blog post today, Flickr has promised that a big 2012 is in store for its users. The massive photo sharing community owned by Yahoo! has announced some “New Year’s cleaning”, which includes the removal of a few features, but no actual details on how it plans to make the site better.

Here’s what Flickr had to say about the upcoming changes:

This year is going to be big at Flickr! In the coming weeks and months you will see significant updates to Flickr’s user experience, new features and offerings across devices. Our goal is to build a gorgeous, intuitive, and truly beautiful experience for you, your friends and your photos.

To do this, we are starting 2012 with a renewed sense of focus. This means discontinuing certain features that are not core to our product or that haven’t resonated with you. Since the upcoming new experiences will either require, or work significantly better, with modern browsers. We will also discontinue supporting some of the older browsers that only a very small percentage of people are using with Flickr.

Among the cuts is the photo editing feature powered by Picnik. Picnik was purchased by Google in 2010 and was integrated into Picasa, and now Google+ Photos. Flickr promises to transition into another editing solution, presumably created in-house, but doesn’t say exactly what that will entail. Also, it’s unknown if Flickr is simply choosing to remove Picnik, or if its agreement with the product merely lapsed and Google chose not to renew.

Here are some of the other cuts Flickr is planning on making:

Photo Session

Photo Session is a feature that offered a real-time way to share photos with other people in a browser, with no additional apps to install. The feature had been developed as a technology showcase, but has not seen the user adoption we were hoping for. The feature will be turned-off by March 20, but we will continue to use the technology in other parts of Flickr. For example: Go to Flickr.com on your iPad or iPhone, open the full-screen lightbox view and experience the performance and pinch-to-zoom in the browser – it’s just one place where we are using the technology that was developed for Photo Session.

Flickr Clock

We removed the Flickr Clock from the Navigation late last year. We created the clock to gather visual, video (or “long photos” as we like to call them) moments in time from around the world. It’s a pretty little thing, but its user experience is complicated and it’s not core to our product offering – so we’re going to say goodbye. (Pssst… You can still see it here for a few more days.)

Flickr for Windows 7 Slate PC’s

While we continue to build the best photo sharing app for Windows Phone, we made the decision to discontinue its Slate counterpart. We see great traction with the Windows Phone app and are going to continue to release frequent updates, but the Touch-PC version of the Silverlight App will not be supported after March 20.

FlickrAuth

The Flickr API fully supports oAuth, which is already used by hundreds of Flickr apps, but there are still some apps that use the old authentication system, called FlickrAuth. We are asking all developers to move over to the new standard bu July 31. There is a related blog post on this topic on our engineering blog code.flickr.com.

Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6

For both of the browsers we are seeing a very small percentage of people using them and as of today people with those browsers will see an “update” message to encourage the download of the latest browser versions. This does not mean that IE7 and Firefox 3.6 users will experience problems using the site today, but the features and experiences that we will be releasing this year may not be supported on these browsers. For many reasons, foremost security, we encourage everyone to use the latest browser version on their devices.

Flickr is cutting some of its deadwood products that weren’t gaining much traction and it will be interesting to see where the new focus takes them. I highly suggest that the team works on bolstering its mobile offerings, since Instagram has built a wildly successful community of over 15 million photo sharers on iOS.

One of Yahoo!’s remaining properties that still has some life in it is photo sharing site Flickr. Dedicated users still post their best photos on the site, providing us with amazing insight into what happened in 2011. It makes us wish that the site never sold to Yahoo! in the first place.

While Instagram has captured the imagination of budding mobile photographers everywhere, Flickr still has some amazing near-professional content on its platform.

Flickr has posted its Year In Photos 2011 which covers everything from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan to the Royal Wedding, and everything in between. All of the photos in the 2011 recap are from Flickr users.

Amazing shots from 2011

Flickr has listed out the top photos from its users and displays them month by month. I would have really liked to have seen a list of most viewed or shared photos from the year as well, as I think that it would give a better idea of what content meant the most to the community.

Regardless, the shots that the site has included are sometimes breathtaking. Here are my three favorites:

Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched in the final mission of the U.S. Space Shuttle program:

Remembering 9/11, ten years later:

Apple fans around the world mourn the loss of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs:

You can see the entire gallery and share your favorites, as well. What will become of Flickr in the future under Yahoo!? Nobody knows, but imagine for a moment what would have happened if the site had stayed independent, and created a really great mobile experience. Apps like Instagram wouldn’t have had a chance to compete.

Sad, really.

Tell us in the comments which moments in 2011 stood out to you the most, and which picture captured that moment perfectly.

➤ Flickr’s Year In Photos 2011

We have some great readers here at The Next Web. One reader, Koen, alerted us to something that had us completely baffled. With today’s launch of Timeline for your Facebook profile, the fact that any of your friends can now change the location on your photos went missing.

Is that a feature or a bug? I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’d want to let anyone tag my photo with a location. Furthermore, this is just asking to be misused, and it took me a half hour to find the privacy setting that shuts it off. For a while, I thought it was the “check-in” feature that allows your friends to check you into certain places with them.

Nope.

Worst feature ever

While playing around with this “feature”, I became enraged to watch our own Brad McCarty change the location on two of my profile pictures.

Check it out:

I don’t ever remember allowing this feature to be turned on, nor can I understand why I’d want this feature at all. Brad wasn’t tagged in this photo, nor did he comment on it or like it. He just waltzed in and changed the location for all to see.

I figured I’d take this fun prank for a spin and change Matthew Panzarino’s profile picture location:

Want to turn it off? Change this mislabeled setting:

One thing with this setting though, it doesn’t allow your friends to tag your photos at all, even though it promises to give you a tag review notification. Where’s the granularity, Facebook? I don’t mind if someone tags themselves in a photo of mine, but location isn’t something I’m willing to trust anyone with.

You’d think that after all of the privacy hoopla Facebook has gone through with the FTC, they’d have these kinds of things sorted out, especially when rolling out a network-wide feature like Timeline.

Seems like a mistake on Facebook’s part to me, but maybe I missed something. If this catches on, it’ll take one hour for a drunk friend of mine to change the location on all of my pictures, and even more time to change them all back.

Thanks, Facebook. I think.

It’s the holiday season, and that means a few things. Namely lights of some sort draped all over homes, mailboxes, and anything that will stand still long enough.

Now you can add obnoxious festive lights to any photo in your camera roll thanks to Photo Lights for iOS.

I was able to check this app out before it was submitted and could immediately envision every Instagram photo turning into a festive display thanks to it. Now it’s live, so it’s time to fancy up those pics you’re sharing online.

Pick, draw, twinkle

Photo Lights makes it super simple to add Christmas lights to all of your photos. Simply take a picture or choose one, then let your finger do the rest.

Once you’ve picked your photo, simply draw the design in which the lights should hang around your photo. Go ahead, get creative. Once you’re done, the lights will light up instantly. You can even choose between the colors of lights and if you want them to blink or not. If you choose blinking, an animated GIF will be created.

Your final product might look way better than mine:

Right now the app doesn’t allow you to share your photos on social networks, just via email. The developer assures me that those features are coming and have been submitted in an updated. For $.99 cents, being able to turn your Camera Roll into Holiday cheer is a steal. You’ll probably even find yourself taking photos with where you’ll put the lights in the back of your mind. It’s happening to me already.

➤ Photo Lights