In September we told you about a new exciting startup that aimed to host all of your photos in a beautiful and elegant way. That startup, Snapjoy, has announced a new feature in a big way, and it’s shooting an arrow directly at Yahoo!’s Flickr.

Up until now, you could only directly upload your photos to Snapjoy, and it would use all of the meta data from the pictures to build a gorgeous timeline. Today, with a site it calls “Flickraft“, Snapjoy wants to offer you a way to get all of your Flickr photos onto its service.

The site sports an artistic rendition of the “SS Flickr”, Snapjoy’s way of saying that Flickr is sinking like the Titanic. According to the site, 48,863 photos have been “rescued” so far.

The site clearly is meant to grab attention away from Flickr, but the new tool works flawlessly, allowing you to bring every single one of your photos over to Snapjoy for safe keeping. And at least for right now, it’s free.

Once you sign up for an account on Snapjoy, you can then authorize it to work with your Flickr account. All you have to do after that is sit back and relax while Snapjoy does the importing rescuing.

Once you’re done, you’ll be presented with this screen:

So there you have it, for everyone who has been ready to take the dive away from Flickr, now’s the time. Thanks to Snapjoy, this process is now, well a snap.

➤ Flickraft

In case you haven’t heard, Yahoo! announced its new CEO today, Scott Thompson. Talk about walking into a storm of acquisition rumors and drama on your first day. Luckily, Thompson was formerly the President at PayPal, so he’s used to sticky situations.

The company says that Thompson will be tasked at focusing on its “core business”, but nobody knows exactly what that is, including Yahoo! What should their core business be? Mobile communities could be potentially lucrative and forward-looking to start.

If I were the new CEO at Yahoo!, I’d give the folks at Instagram a call and make them an offer on the spot.

Here’s why:

1. It could strengthen Flickr

Flickr isn’t “dead”, but it has become extremely stale. In an interesting post today, well-respected blogger and photographer Thomas Hawk wrote an open letter to Scott Thompson, asking him to save Flickr.

One of his best points was:

Flickr represents your *BEST* possible chance for social at Yahoo, but it’s probably too late.

I’m not so sure it’s too late if Yahoo! were to purchase Instagram and bundle it together as the web version of the popular photo sharing community. Not only are you getting a killer service that was Apple’s #1 app last year, you’re grabbing a team that is expanding impressively. With this team of giants, Flickr could be saved and put back on track. See, the Instagram team completely understands social, community, and comprehends how ripe the world of photography is for innovation.

What has happened at Flickr is sad, there are no voices guiding its community and the innovation on the site has come to a complete standstill. The community will eventually move elsewhere if it doesn’t start getting some TLC.

2. Mobile user acquisition

If one bought Instragram, 15 million users come with it. However, it’s not the quantity that makes sense for Yahoo!, it’s the quality of users it could acquire.
Instagram users are share-hungry, and by looking through the popular photos section of the app, it appears to have a strong hold on younger demographics. For example, Kylie Jenner (the youngest of the Kardashian bunch) has such a huge following on the app that it no longer displays her total number of followers:

Fans of people like Jenner and her Kardashian family would be a perfect fit for Yahoo! properties like omg!, which serves as its celebrity news and gossip hub:

While this is only one example of demographic and content matching that Yahoo! could take advantage of by buying Instagram, it’s quite a powerful thought. By working really hard on building out a mobile community, Yahoo! can sprinkle its supporting services in to create more of a well-rounded ecosystem of content-sharing social people. Plus, Flickr saw 78,895 photos from iPhone 4 cameras uploaded to the service yesterday alone, so there’s a strong opportunity to go bigger with mobile.

3. Cut the crap and do one thing really well

Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s very difficult to do a ton of things at once. Just ask Google about how long it has taken to glue all of its services together with Google+. It’s not impossible to stitch services like email and search together, but you must have a core competency that you can fall back on. I would say that having a strong mobile community would be a smart bet for that “one thing”.

While I have no idea if either side has any interest in working together, it would make a whole lot of sense for Yahoo! to double down on social and mobile, and those goals can be gained by acquiring Instagram. The fact that the company already owns Flickr, a once-successful photo sharing network that could benefit from such a deal, is just a cherry on top.

When you surf the web, you have to click a thumbnail image to make it larger. But it’s not usually just one click, though. When you’re on a site like Amazon, if you see something you’re interested in on the homepage, you have to click the item and then click the image you’d like to enlarge. That’s two clicks just because you want to see what a product looks like.

These types of situations are exactly why extensions and add-ons for browsers are so awesome. The Hover Zoom extension for Chrome is no exception, and will take a few clicks out of your browsing by enlarging photos when you hover over them with your mouse.

If you were to count all of the clicks you make throughout a day spent on the web, you’d probably find that you’re wasting more time than you’d think.

Clicking is so 2011

If you’re looking to streamline your web browsing, Hover Zoom is definitely for you. After you install the extension, you’ll be alerted in the URL input box when the extension is active. The Hover Zoom creator says that the extension works with most major sites like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, 4Chan, Flickr, and Reddit. Pretty much any site that links thumbnails to its larger version will work successfully with the extension.

As long as the above image appears when you land on a site, start hovering over any photo you see and the larger version will show up with no clicks required. You can change how long of a delay there is before the larger image displays in a lightbox, in case you’re worried about accidental hovers.

The settings for Hover Zoom can also control what sites the extension is active on, letting you create a list of sites to leave out or include. Other settings include loading images in the background as soon as you visit a page, but that will slow your browsing down quite a bit, even though the images will load faster afterwards.

These are the type of lifehacks that make browsing the web easier and less annoying. Even browsing around on a Facebook Timeline and seeing a larger image without having to click is super helpful.

What are your favorite Chrome extensions? Share them in the comments.

➤ Hover Zoom for Chrome

The world loves to Instagram their lives, apparently. The app made our top 10 social apps of the year list, and was named Apple’s app of the year. All of this popularity is thanks to iOS and its web presence.

The app has over 15 million users, and has promised an Android app sometime in 2012. That leaves a lot of people out of luck when they want to view some of Instagram’s best photos.

There are quite a few sites that let you search for Instagram photos, but we found one that is absolutely gorgeous and creates an experience that Instagram should think about porting over to its own site. It also lets people without the app check out your photos in an artistic way.

PhotoPile generates a pile of photos for you to click-through, showing the people who favorited them, and the comments that they left.

Forget tweets and Facebook posts

All of your friends who don’t have an iPhone can only see your photos when you tweet them or post them to your Facebook wall. They don’t stand out on these sites, since everything flies by so fast. PhotoPile gives you a well designed presence for your Instagram photos, and lets people discover everything you’ve filtered and shared using the app. Just authorize the app, and you’ll be presented with your own page that looks something like this:

While it just looks like a pile of photos at first glance, you can click on them to get to the full details of the photo. The site uses really fun fonts to display comments, and it’s actually a better way to view photos than Instagram’s own app stream. When you’re in the app, you can click over to someone’s profile and see their photo thumbnails, but it’s not really exciting or special. The experience on PhotoPile is, though.

In addition to showing off your own pics, you can search for users and tags, which will then be displayed in the same way as your own photos. You can cycle through all of the results by clicking “More Photos”, and you’ll find yourself clicking away until you’ve realized how much time you’ve spent.

In addition to an Android and Windows Phone version of its app, I would love to see Instagram spend more time on its website in 2012. The folks who made PhotoPile would be a good group of designers to bring in for the project. This is proof of why I love APIs, you never know what developers are going to come up with for your favorite services.

➤ PhotoPile

If you’re a longtime Flickr user, you know that getting photos out of the service isn’t always a piece of cake. If you’re planning on not renewing your Flickr Pro account, then you most certainly need to find a way to get those precious pics a new home.

UnifyPhotos is an app by Goyaka Labs that aims to make copying your Flickr photos to Facebook set-by-set super simple.

The app launched yesterday and the Goyaka team tell us that in its first four hours it transferred some 20k photos and over 500 albums from Flickr to Facebook.

Goodbye Flickr!

The process to migrate your photos to Facebook using UnifyPhotos is rather simple. You have to connect with your Facebook account and allow it to post on your behalf, and then authorize the app for use with Flickr.

Once you’ve authorized your accounts, you’ll be shown all of your available Flickr sets to migrate. Make sure that your Flickr Pro account hasn’t lapsed yet, or you’ll only have access to your last 200 photos. The other thing to note is that UnifyPhotos will only migrate sets of photos, not single photos that you’ve uploaded. I’ve asked the team about that feature and hopefully it’s something that they’ll add.

By selecting all of the sets you’d like to migrate to Facebook, they’ll be placed in a queue and uploaded to Facebook as an album. It’s really nice that the Flickr set is sent to an album complete with its original name, so that you can keep everything sorted. The photos that are sent to Facebook are automatically set to private so you can hand select which ones you’d like to share with your friends. Again, that’s a nice touch, because nobody wants to accidentally share a photo on Facebook.

I noticed that my photos sat in a queue for a while on UnifyPhotos, but if you refresh the status page, you’ll be updated on where you are in the process. After about an hour, all of my new albums were placed on Facebook, ready for me to share. If you’re looking for a way out of Flickr, this might be your lucky day.

➤ UnifyPhotos

It would be easy to argue that 2011 was the year of mobile photography. At the top of the app list facilitating this trend is Instagram, sporting over 15 million users. With the simple premise of taking a photo of something around you, throwing an artistic filter on it, dropping it into a stream, and beaming it to Twitter and Facebook, the app has built a gigantic community around itself.

Today, Instagram posted its first in a series of 2011 review posts, listing the top locations that people shared with their photos.

The top 15 locations showed heavy usage on the West coast, California specifically, with top spots being Disneyland, AT&T Park, and airports in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Here is the complete list of the top 15 locations people Instagram’d in 2011:

1. Disneyland
2. Suvarnabhumi International Airport (BKK)
3. AT&T Park
4. San Francisco International Airport (SFO)
5. Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
6. Hong Kong International Airport (HKG)
7. MoMA – Museum of Modern Art
8. Golden Gate Bridge
9. Metropolitan Museum of Art
10. Parque do Ibirapuera
11. Siam Paragon
12. Mission Dolores Park
13. Terminal 21
14. LACMA – Los Angeles County Museum of Art
15. Times Square

While it’s not mandatory to post your location with an Instagram photo, I think it’s safe to say that major metropolitan areas and landmarks are the most photographed on the platform. It’ll be interesting to see where Instagram goes in 2012, will filters be enough for its hungry user base? So far, so good.

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.

If you’ve been using Picasa on your desktop, you’ve noticed that there haven’t been any updates that involve Google+. That all changes today with Picasa 3.9.

The desktop app boasts a few new features, with Google+ sharing front and center. Here’s what the Google Photos team had to say about the features in its latest client:

Share with people in your Google+ circles: Picasa 3.9 makes it easy to share the right photos with the right people with just a few clicks. To share an album, just click on the green “Share on Google+” button and add the specific circles you want to share your photos with. Find out more here.

Tag people in your circles: When you click a photo to tag a friend, the dropdown menu now includes people in your Google+ circles in addition to your Gmail contacts. If you tag friends from Google+, Picasa will automatically suggest that you share your pictures with them when you upload your album. Learn more about tagging.

Tagging people and sharing to circles on Google+ is drop-dead simple with the latest version of Picasa, which you can download here.

Along with the new social features, the team has also included 24 new photo editing effects as well as side-by-side mode for comparing two images. This is super helpful when you’re editing your pictures and want to match colors and effects perfectly.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that Google is integrating social into all of its products one by one. The only downside of this new update, is that they’re still calling the product “Picasa”. Dearest Google, can’t we just rename it to Google Photos and call it a day already?

➤ Picasa for Mac and PC

Along with everything else that Google released today, which includes Circles integration everywhere you could imagine, the Google+ Photos team announced a new feature called “Find My Face”.

Tagging photos, or tagging anything for that matter, is one of the most time-consuming functions of using a social network. Over the next few days, you’ll be able to allow other Google+ users to be prompted when a photo they upload matches your face.

Here’s what Matt Steiner, Engineering Lead on the Google+ Photos team had to say about the feature:

Around the holidays, many of us get together with friends and family, and if you’re like me, you take lots of photos! Tagging those photos can be a lot of work. So today we’re launching Find My Face, an easier way to tag photos of yourself and your friends.

By turning on Find My Face, Google+ can prompt people you know to tag your face when it appears in photos. Of course, you have control over which tags you accept or reject, and you can turn the feature on or off in Google+ settings. (https://plus.google.com/settings/plus)

Find My Face will be rolling out over the next few days. We hope this makes tagging your photos much easier, so try it out! And as always, keep the feedback coming.

The feature isn’t in place yet, and neither are the security controls but this is what it will look like once it’s rolled out to everyone:

With this type of technology, it will be a way better experience to upload hundreds of photos from a party where you might not remember who everyone is. Remember that guy sitting in the corner? Nah, me neither. Now thanks to Find My Face, you could remember who that gent was, and show the world exactly how sad he looked at the party.

All kidding aside, this is a great feature, and especially one that makes Google+ Photos more useful. The other thing that continually makes me happy is that Google has stopped referring to it as “Picasa”.