The Next Web » photo

Flickr to remove features including Google’s Picnik, but promises big things in 2012

Drew Olanoff — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:57:31 +0000

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.

Flickr’s ‘Year In Photos’ for 2011 reminds us why it should have never sold to Yahoo!

Drew Olanoff — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:36:19 +0000

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

Privacy check – Facebook settings say photo and location tags are the same

Drew Olanoff — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:15:04 +0000

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.

Make any picture blink festively with Photo Lights for iOS

Drew Olanoff — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:45:23 +0000

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

Google accidentally announces Google+ Photo and Video APIs too early

Drew Olanoff — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 23:59:45 +0000

According to TechCrunch Google has accidentally announced its read-only APIs for Google+ Photos and Videos in a blog post the company put up too soon and then pulled down today.

The removed blog post said:

Google+ gives users full control of their information, and we’re starting with read-only access to public albums, photos, and videos. Google also supports Creative Commons licensing, which we expose so developers can easily respect copyrights.

Using the new API, developers can get a list of public albums from a Google+ user, and list the photos and videos within each album. Combined with our existing public data and search APIs, I’m hoping to see new services such as a family-focused ‘screen saver’, a new way to crowdsource great images, or a live photo wall for a party.

We don’t know exactly when the APIs are to be released and officially announced, but we assume that it’s going to be soon, since someone had their hands on the finished blog post already.

As we reported before, the Google+ team is taking a slow and very calculated approach to the release of its APIs. Not wanting any privacy disasters like it had with Buzz, the company is choosing to release read-only versions of APIs at first. No writable APIs have been made available for the service, yet.

The photo below shows the official post that was pulled down almost immediately:

What does the API mean for app developers? It means that companies that develop apps that pull in photos from all different social networks and sites now have one of the biggest ones to pull from. For example, photo sharing app Batch will benefit greatly from being able to pull in photos from Google+. It also can help Google+ catch up with top photo sharing sites Facebook and Flickr.

How long can the service turn down growth opportunities with having a read and writable API? Twitter saw incredible growth when third parties started building apps on top of its service.

1000memories’ Shoebox wants to store your paper memories

Drew Olanoff — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:50:33 +0000

A lot of us, or our mothers, have a shoebox stuffed in the closet containing old photos and memories. Some of us even have these items strewn about our desk with nowhere to put them.

The company 1000memories, which stores your family history online, wants you to put all of your paper memories into a digital “Shoebox” with its app.

The service is primarily displayed as a place to share scans of physical photos, but I’ve found a few different uses for it. Since the camera has gotten better on iDevices, services like DocScan that let you “scan” documents with a photo have popped up.

Shoebox‘s differentiator is the social sharing aspect, though, and isn’t focused on just storing receipts to expense later.

Here’s a video from 1000Memories, showcasing Shoebox:

Scanning your stuff

I’ve found that I keep a lot of things that remind me of events I’ve attended, things I’ve done, and places I’ve experienced. I have stacks of ticket stubs, lanyards from conferences, and other physical items that probably should be placed in a box and stored. But I like remembering them, none the less.

Shoebox lets you take a photo of these items, describe and label them, for safe digital keeping and sharing.

The app allows you to crop and change the aspect ratio of the image, making it as flat as possible. Of course, taking a photo of the item from above will make sure it comes out great.

The missing piece of this puzzle though is the ability to add your own descriptive tags manually. I’m not sure how 1000memories could have left this out of Shoebox, but they did. Right now, items are tagged by the title, date you enter, and the names of the people in the photo. A little more customization would make this product near-perfect.

Social Shoebox

Instead of taking that Shoebox out of the closet, you can share your items publicly or with your family and friends. There’s no commenting or interaction here, which isn’t a bad thing necessarily. Not every service needs the ability to like something and say “wow that’s cool”. Shoebox is more personal than that.

When you open the Shoebox app, you’ll see items that are featured. Right now they’re mostly old photos, but I did stumble on some old postcards and letters. I don’t know the story behind them and don’t really have to. It’s interesting just to see what people would store in their own digital Shoebox.

While it’s not time to box up all of your stuff and throw it away, storing things in a place to share with others and review often is a great thing. Shoebox could add some more customization features like the tagging that I mentioned, but if you’re ready to clear your desk and closets of some things, the service is a great place to put them. Digitally, of course.

5 must-have apps that Apple should have made itself

Drew Olanoff — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:08:51 +0000

At The Next Web, we get asked one question a lot. “Which apps are must-have’s for my iPhone?”. It’s a common question, especially with a lot of new Sprint and Verizon users jumping on the iDevice bandwagon. Luckily, we look at quite a few apps.

By looking at so many apps, we see which ones stick and which ones get deleted quickly. Some apps are so useful, they’ll probably be on our devices until the iPhone 10.

Here is a solid list of 5 apps that you simply must have on your Apple devices. These are even better than Apple’s built in apps in some cases. Sadly for Google, the Gmail app hasn’t made the list yet. Some of them may seem obvious, but the uses for them might not be.

If you drive

If you’re a driver, you shouldn’t be looking at your iPhone first of all. But if you have a passenger, they must have RoadNinja. This app does everything you’d want a smart GPS to do, but doesn’t. RoadNinja will show you upcoming exits on the highway and what places are close to them, so that you can choose which exit will be your next. It’s completely customizable, tapping the foursquare API to tell you what coffee shops, restaurants, attractions, and pretty much everything else is conveniently close.

If you drive, you simply must have RoadNinja by your side. And it’s free.

If you’re into food

It’s pretty much a guarantee that you eat food, we all do. There are a whole host of apps that tell you where you can eat in the city you’re inhabiting at the moment. Some apps tell you what your friends think, some apps try to recommend places to go based on your previous eating escapades, but only Chefs Feed tells you what true food connoisseurs think.

Some of the best chefs in the major cities in America are on Chefs Feed to tell you what restaurants and foods you should check out. If you’re looking for a new place to eat, leave it to the professionals to tell you where to go.

If you’re tired of texting and email

It’s safe to say that most of us use Facebook these days. Over 800 millions users can’t be wrong. Even though Facebook has released updates to its iOS app and finally given us an iPad native one, it’s not the app that you simply must have.

Facebook Messenger is the perfect companion to Facebook. Even while you’re mobile and waiting for a bus, you probably don’t have the time to experience Facebook fully. Facebook Messenger takes one of the stronger features from the site, and makes it easy to use.

The app is a must-have to keep in touch with Facebook friends, letting you send photos and see who’s online. Considering that most of our friends are on Facebook too, Facebook Messenger completely replaces text messaging and personal email for some.

If you like music

Streaming is all the rage these days, and no app does it better than Spotify. This is by far the app that I use the most on the go. With a solid interface for playlists, sending tracks to friends, sharing on Facebook and Twitter, the app is a must have.

If you have a Spotify Premium account, you can sync your playlists on any device for offline listening. This makes plane trips and car rides perfect, as you don’t have to have WiFI or 3G signals to gain access to your music.

The discovery interface is equally as solid, letting you find new songs to listen to on the road. The music that you listen to on your iOS device will even update your Facebook Music feed.

If you take photos

With a powerful camera now on iPhones, iPods, and iPads, you’ll want to take a lot of photos. Even if you’re not a professional photographer, you may want to share your photos with people and hear what they have to think about them.

There is one king of photo apps, and that is Instagram. The app has a huge community around taking photos, putting a pretty filter on it, and liking them until they become popular. I’ve said it before, but the Instagram app is what Flickr could have had, if they dedicated themselves to its community like it used to.

Version 2.0 of Instagram was a huge improvement, letting you apply filters instantly. The company continues to roll out new filters and boasts a user base of over 12 million according to founder Kevin Systrom.

The not so obvious part of why Instagram is an absolute must have, is that so many developers are using its API to build fun and useful things that use our photos.

What’s in your top 5?

So there you have it. These are the 5 apps that I feel like you can’t live without, or perhaps 5 apps that can make your life a little bit easier and more enjoyable, just as Steve Jobs would have wanted it.

What apps can’t you live without? Tell us in the comments!

Instamory turns Instagram photos into a game of memory

Drew Olanoff — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:50:17 +0000

Remember the memory game you might have played with your parents? A bunch of cards were placed face down, shuffled up, and you’d have to flip them over two at a time to find a match.

It was one of my favorite childhood games. Today, developer Sponge Forge has released Instamory for iPad. The app is absolutely gorgeous and lets you interact with the huge database of photos unleashed by Instagram‘s API.

The Instamory app shows once again why a great public API can help bring services to those who wouldn’t have used it before. Even if you’re not an advid photo sharer on Instagram, this game will appeal to you. Instamory is $2.99, and worth every penny.

Playing Memory with Instagram photos

The premise is simple, and the features are plentiful. If you’d like to play memory with your own photos, just log in with your Instagram account. If you don’t have an account, you can still play the game with public photos that are popular, featured, or match certain tags on Instagram. You can play at varying difficulties, using 6, 15 or 24 pairs of cards.

Your high scores are tracked, and you can shuffle your photos at any time to keep game play fresh. If you have a few friends to play with, Instamory really shines then.

Multi-player memory

Up to four players can sit around an iPad to play a competitive game of memory. When its your turn, the orientation of the iPad is changed so that you don’t have to move the device around to play.

My fiancée and I recently played Instamory during a camping trip and we couldn’t have had more fun. Of course we had WiFi readily available, and you’ll need to have a connected iPad to play this game. Unfortunately there isn’t an offline mode. I’d love to see something like that in the future.

A new way to interact

You can use Instamory to browse and discover Instagram photos, as you create customized sets of pictures to play memory with. You can also “like” photos and become a follower of an Instagram user right from the app. I’d like to be able to comment on photos too, making Instamory a gaming portal to replace the need for a real Instagram iPad native app.

This is the perfect app to gift to someone who has just gotten their first iPad. Furthermore, if that person is a heavy Instagram user, you’ll become their best friend for sending this one to them. Instamory is another perfect example of other things you can do with photos.

Instaframe turns your iPad into a digital Instagram photo frame

Drew Olanoff — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 18:22:14 +0000

There are a lot of applications taking advantage of Instagram’s API right now, and the best part about having a publicly available stream of photos for developers to use, is that they can do things that the company hasn’t even thought of.

Instaframe is no exception. We carry around our photos with us all of the time, on multiple devices. When we show our friends and family those photos locally and not on the web, we’re stuck with Apple’s boring slideshow interface on iOS. Instaframe pulls in your Instagram photo feed, and turns them into a gorgeous slideshow. You could even set your iPad aside and use it as an ever-changing digital photo frame.

Viewing and interacting with photos

You can log into Instagram via the Instaframe app to look at photos, ones in your area are shown by default if you choose not to log in. Photos slide through every 3-4 seconds, and you can manually do so by swiping right to left.

Of course you can just view your own photos if you like once logged in, or discover new ones by way of Instagram’s popular photos, your own feed of friends, or those photos taken near your location.

I’ve found that Instaframe is a nice “lean back” experience to view photos in real-time, and the interface to like and comment photos is extremely well done. Just tap on a photo once to interact with it.

Instagram doesn’t have its own native iPad app yet, so Instaframe definitely fills a void. It also answers the question I asked, “What are we going to do with all of these photos?“.

The Instaframe app for iPad is $1.99, and is definitely worth it if you’re looking for new ways to display photos to yourself or to others.

E-cards live as Howdy tries to refresh a stagnant market

Drew Olanoff — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:08:27 +0000

With all of the talk about sending physical cards with the Apple Card app and postcards from Postagram, an iOS app called Howdy decided to stick with the good old e-card digital model.

The free app was built by Dutch Giraffe Communications, a developer which is focused on design and digitizing magazine content.

Creating a Howdy card

Howdy for iOS is absolutely beautiful. No physical card will be sent to your friend or loved one, just an email with a link. The Howdy app lets you create a customized card using its templates and photos from your library in seconds. You can choose a type of greeting from categories like “Love”, “Get Well”, and even “Video”. Video is a huge differentiator for Howdy, as all other e-card apps stick to flat card styles.

Once you’ve chosen your template, you can write your own message on the “outside” of the card, as well as the “inside”, with a nice animation flipping from one to the other. The inside of the card is where you can add your own photo, at which point you can crop and resize it to fit perfectly.

As with any service, if Howdy can keep the app fresh with new templates and options for card creation, it can have longevity. E-card provider “someecards” is a master at this, which brings back its users in droves.

Sharing your Howdy

What makes Howdy really neat is that you can make your card social by posting it to Twitter and Facebook, letting the world know that you really do care. Beautiful Instagram-style landing pages are created if you choose to share your card, and it can be re-shared from that page.

The thing lacking with Howdy is a missed opportunity to build a community and social network around these public digital greetings. I’d really love to see what friends are sending to other friends, and since Howdy lets you get creative with your cards, it would be easy to find new people to friend based on what catches your eye.

I’ve discussed the lack of innovation around photographs, and it seems like greeting cards and customizable postcards are the hot space right now, since its very easy and quick to use the photographs you’ve taken and turn them into something else.

Howdy has an absolutely beautiful design, and if it keep updates coming, the app could gain a huge user base. As I mentioned though, without any type of social features, it will be hard to gain solid adoption and return stickiness. There are a lot of “one and done” apps in the app store, and it would be sad to see Howdy go that way.