If you watched The Grammys last night, you might have seen a new commercial for Google+ called “New Dad”. I was doing dishes at the time and wasn’t watching the TV, but listened. The commercial starts out with a male voice describing how he took a bazillion pictures of his new baby and how when he lost his phone he thought all of those pictures were gone.

My immediate thought was “Is this a commercial for Apple’s iCloud?”. Nope, it’s a Google+ commercial touting the auto-upload feature of its app, which as this commercial describes, could be an absolute lifesaver.

Google’s television ads are getting better and better, taking a page out of Apple’s book when it comes to making the human element more important than the actual technology behind its features. According to Google’s Bradley Horowitz, the story is true:

Instant Upload has already saved my own precious photos numerous times..

This commercial is really moving. Especially since it’s based on a true story from one of our team mates.

Here’s the new commercial:

While I’m not saying that Google is ripping off anyone, even the fact that these commercials get their own names is reminiscent of Apple. Two new Siri ads just hit television screens, both offering up how Siri makes our lives better. With Facebook yet to make a consumer splash over the airwaves, Google seems to be taking the opportunity to let people know why Google+ could be a service for them.

Could the “That’s a plus.” marketing campaign make a big difference for Google’s budding social network? Let us know what you think in the comments.

If you’ve used Instagram even once or twice, you more than likely saw at least one picture of someone’s pet. The service is for sharing photos of anything you want to share, so it’s no shock that man’s best friend is often seen on the most popular pics. I’m guilty of it, as I kind of think my dogs are cute as any puppy parent would.

With any popular platform, it’s bound to spawn off some copycats, or in this case, copydogs. Dogsly is a photo sharing app made specifically for sharing pics of the dogs in your life. Even if you don’t have a dog but really like them, the service is fun to use.

The iOS app lets you share pics, see a stream of the entire community and share them with your friends on Twitter.

Why didn’t they call it Doggygram?

I found this app when a friend of mine tweeted a picture of his pup. I clicked the link and saw the site and instantly said out loud “what the heck took them so long?”. It’s a brilliant idea that caters directly to dog lovers and if the app can build a sizable following, it could actually make some money too by providing deals that focus on my pet.

Ironically enough, the link I clicked belonged to the same person who introduced me to Instagram, Andrew Mager:

Upon downloading the app, I immediately felt at home, as most of the design is very similar to Instagram and other photo sharing apps. Share a pic, comment on others, favorite a pic (which they call “love”) and share them. One smart feature that Instagram doesn’t have is that there’s a retweet button with every pic, which allows you to share other photos on the service. That’s a nice addition.

You can take a photo or grab one from your camera roll, and the app has brilliantly leveraged photo editing service Aviary to give you tools to alter your puppy pics. With the built in Aviary tools, you can add effects, crop, or even draw on the picture.

If you’re a dog owner, this app is an absolute must have. Even though I tend to get a lot of likes and comments on Instagram when I post a picture of one of my pets, it’s different to be in an app among others that are just like you. And by just like you, I mean silly enough to download and use an app that’s full of people taking pictures of their dogs.

➤ Dogsly

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

As we know, sharing photos is one of the most popular things to do on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr. The act of sharing photos has also spawned services like Flickr, Instagram, and 500px who serve that purpose exclusively.

While you probably haven’t gotten around to storing all of your photos in one place with a service like Snapjoy, it can be a maddening experience to try to figure out which site you shared what photo on. Especially if you’re trying to show one to someone at a bar or family function.

SuperAlbum won’t store all of your photos for you, but the iOS app will let you view all of your shared photos from one interface within the app. It’s extremely well done, and fixes a problem I’ve been facing for years.

The app is $.99 cents, which is a steal if you’re facing the problem of “where did I post that photo?” like I am.

All the photos

Once you open up SuperAlbum, you connect the app with all of your accounts. Luckily, most services provide quick and painless authorization, so this shouldn’t take but a few minutes. After you’ve connected your accounts, you can start taking a look at all of the photos you’ve shared over the years.

The thing you’ll notice right away, is that SuperAlbum has a prettier and easier to navigate interface than most of the apps it supports. For example, one of my major gripes with Instagram is that I can’t swipe through a feed of photos, or through someone’s personal collection. SuperAlbum lets you do just that.

Additionally, SuperAlbum will let you save any picture you see onto your iDevice’s Camera Roll, which is really handy if you’re trying to text or email it to someone. The app will also let you tweet a picture instantly, or send it to another application for editing or sharing that SuperAlbum works with, seamlessly.

For the price, SuperAlbum is completely worth it, and as soon as I started using it, I didn’t feel like my pictures were as scattered around the Internet as I first thought. Some of the other services out there should take note of SuperAlbum’s features their own adoption, as I find that even Facebook’s app is sluggish when cycling through photos.

➤SuperAlbum

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I was breaking up with my iPhone. One of the things that made the decision an easy one for me was that iOS developers weren’t pushing the envelope on their designs.

Apps have started to look the same, and follow the same design kits. For example, there are at least thirty apps that I’ve seen in the past three weeks that look and feel exactly like Instagram.

Chumkee is a social app, letting you share photos and videos with the Chumkee community. Before you turn away because there are already a ton of apps that do that, check out what developer C-Vibes Ltd has done to build what I think is the most gorgeous social iOS interface I’ve seen to date.

The app feels alive with its gorgeous design

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from Chumkee, considering that I already use Instagram and Path to share photos. I was pleasantly surprised as soon as I opened the app. The latest photos from the entire community are displayed on the main page, and they’re shown in a way that just beg you to interact with them.

The app has a touch interface that lets you drag the photos around on the home screen, and when you do, more photos are shown. It sure beats hitting a refresh button. It makes the app feel like you’re sifting through photos on your table.

When you double tap on a photo, the full screen pops up and you can like, comment, or reply with text or a photo and video of your own.

Sharing your photo or video

Sharing photos and videos with the Chumkee app is simple. Just tap the button to share, and a box comes up to take a live snapshot, or you can pull something from your camera library. The service urges you to share moments in real-time, as you’ll see from the other items that the community is sharing.

Once you’ve taken your photo or video, you can share it with your Twitter or Facebook followers with a tap of a button. There aren’t any filters like other apps, but once you post something, you’ll be surprised to see how fast someone responds with their own piece of media. The current user base is clearly not camera-shy.

Here’s a video from the company, demonstrating the Chumkee app:

It’s the community that I believe could drive an app like this. With a light and fresh design, Chumkee feels like the creators actually wanted to build an experience to keep its users engaged and involved in constant interaction. It will take some time to see if they reached that goal, but from what I can tell already, they’ve taken iOS design to an all new level in my opinion.

➤ Chumkee

One of the funnest things to do on the internet is share an animated .gif file. It’s faster than making someone watch a video clip, and it’s a great way to express yourself. For the most part, the same stale animated gifs make the rounds, ranging from cats falling off of chairs to clips from famous movies.

GifBoom wants you to be able to make your own animated gifs and share them easily. The app for iOS was developed by the company Tapmojo, and is a Tumblr users new best friend. The app is free to download.

Creating an animated gif

Creation is simple with GifBoom. You can choose to use pictures or videos already on your camera roll to piece together a seamless animated graphic. Alternatively you can take new pictures to make your animation, and the app will automatically take photos every second for 20 seconds.

Once your 20 seconds are up, you can choose which frames to included in your animation and then your animated gif is complete. You can even choose filter effects and backgrounds, as well as the frame rate to control how fast the animated gifs display. It will end up looking something like this:

Sharing your animated gif

This is where GifBoom shines. You can share your creation via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, via MMS, or just email the link. Unfortunately, we’ll have to manually share a link or upload direct to Google+, since the service doesn’t have write-enabled APIs as of yet. GifBoom is also very social in a way that Instagram is. There is a stream of popular gifs, as well as recently created ones. You can “like” a gif or leave a comment, much like you can on Instagram.

Animated gifs are certainly a niche interest, but are very popular on sites like Tumblr. With the GifBoom app, it’s really simple to create the animations but it remains to be seen if animated gifs can get anywhere near as popular as photo or video sharing.

Other apps that have similar features are Picflick, but it lacks the social aspect of GifBoom and costs .99 cents.

Photos, Photos, Photos. Now that photography is all digital, we’ve got hundreds of them, sometimes thousands of them. With the iPhone, we’re taking pictures of meals, our cats and dogs, our feet, a funny sign, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Taking photos has never been easier. Furthermore, photo sharing has never been easier thanks to services like Facebook, Google, Flickr, Instagram, and the list goes on and on.

Everyone is a photographer now, which is fantastic because moments that have never been captured before, are.

But what are we going to do with all of these photos? It’s an area ripe for innovation where I’m personally seeing little or none.

Photo Hosting

Photo hosting is somewhat easy for startups to get into, since cloud storage has become so cheap on services like Amazon EC2. Facebook has developed amazing technology to host photos for over 800 million users, with next to zero downtime. Google, with its infinite server farms, can host photos for every person in the world. Apple has gotten into the game as well with iCloud, sending photos that you take from your iPhone or iPad and sending it to the sky forevermore. Shoot, even Twitter will host your photos now. These services let you host them there and maybe let you categorize them into albums, but that’s about it.

As far as I’m concerned, the best photo feature I’ve seen in years comes from photo host Snapjoy. They let you see a random photo, and give you simple shuffle button.

But so what? You’re storing our photos. That’s just not enough anymore. What’s next?

Photo Sharing

Photo sharing is something that most of us do with the really great photos that we’re proud of. Be it an artistic shot, or a photo of a street sign that says something ridiculous, we’re posting them on the internet for the world to see. The thing with photo sharing though, is that they’re sent into a stream of a zillion other posts.

When I post a photo on Twitter or even Google+, perhaps 50 of my 15,000+ followers are paying attention at any given second.

Twitter now shares the photos that you’ve posted recently in a place that gets the least amount of traffic, your profile. How much time do you spend on someones profile on Twitter? Not a lot. So that’s just not going to cut it. Google+ has photo albums using its Picasa platform, but it still feels disconnected from the overall experience.

Facebook lets you tag people in photos, which is very social, and even has facial recognition software behind it now. This still feels like a utility sharing overall, but maybe Timeline will bring older photos back to life.

Flickr was the absolute best place to share photos, because the community that used Flickr really used Flickr. We used to spend hours pouring through photos, commenting on them, and marking favorites. And then Yahoo! bought them, and the innovation, heart, and soul died.

Instagram has picked up the slack for Flickr by letting you share a photo, slap a filter on it, and post it to a…stream. Mind you, Instagram has done a wonderful job with its “Popular” feature, which lets you see the photos that have been liked the most on the platform. A real community is building there, and since it’s completely mobile, people are interacting there a lot. It still needs work though.

What’s next for photo sharing?

Photo Editing

Photoshop is great, but requires a lot of attention to detail that most normal folks just don’t have. Editing a single photo requires time and passion. A lot of the photos are tossing into a stream don’t feel like there’s enough passion behind them to spend a half hour making them pretty using Photoshop. It’s also expensive software.

I’m excited that Google purchased Picnik, because it’s a nice editing tool that should evolve under Google’s wing, but as we know with Google, products sometimes get purchased and die. I’d hate to see that happen to a product like Picnik.

You could count Instagram as a photo editor, because of its filters and effects, but it’s a bit of a stretch.

Photo editing just isn’t something that has been innovated on enough to make the average Joe and Jill want to do it. But why not? Hosting is bountiful, and sharing is simple!

Photo cards and postcards

Now we’re getting somewhere. We have a ton of photos, putting them on postcards or greeting cards is a perfect way to bring moments to life in a new and physical way.

Apple Card launched, Postagram is doing well, so that’s a space I’d like to see evolve as well. Surely cards and postcards aren’t the only ways to bring a photo to life in a unique way. Digital prints are just boring, so I won’t even spend time on them.

My point is, photos have been around for a long time. It used to be really expensive and time-consuming to get photos taken and developed. You don’t have to do those things anymore, so we’re taking and taking photos, storing them all over the world, and we’re doing nothing with them other than share them briefly, get a comment or ten, and forget about them. I’m seeing some interesting things starting to happen with Instagram’s API, which is a step in the right direction.

Startups, it’s time to start innovating in photography. Fast. It’s a golden opportunity to give us something to do with amazing moments taken and shared in real-time. It’s the day after we take the photos though that the real innovation can begin. Even further innovation can take place on photos we took years ago. Yes, years. Remember those?

If you’ve seen great apps and companies doing new and cool things with Photos, drop them in the comments!

There are a lot of social check-in apps out there. We know that FourSquare, Facebook, and Gowalla are the heavy hitters. There are some niche apps trying to steal a bit of the market with small twists and features. Some of them are even using FourSquare’s API.

crowdmug for iOS is doing just that, by showing you pictures and video in real-time from venues you might be interested in going to. It would also like you to post pictures of places around you, and you could actually earn some money from the community when you do it.

Take a photo, leave a photo

For example, if you’re at a restaurant, just take a picture or video with crowdmug, add the location, which is powered by FourSquare, and you’re done. The next time someone looks for places close to them, they might see what you posted. If it looks crowded, maybe they won’t go at all.

It’s an interesting twist on location and media sharing.

Earn some money

This feature got our attention. If someone in the community really wants to see what a place looks like through a picture or video, they can submit a request and put a dollar amount to how much they’re willing to pay for the community to do deliver it to them.

If you’re paying for a photo you can make a deposit to the app in any amount using a credit card. If you’ve gotten paid for taking photos, you can ‘cash out’ using Paypal, or by receiving a check.

The only thing I’ve thought of that makes sense for this feature is if you’re apartment hunting and you’re out of town. Perhaps someone can go for you, take a picture or shoot a walkthrough video for you. I’m not sure how much that’s worth though, and we suppose that crowdmug is willing to find out.

Here is a video demo of crowdmug:

You can follow cities, and check out all of the media being shared in real-time if you like. Say you’re homesick to see Philadelphia, perhaps you could check in and hope that people are posting things. There’s not a lot of content yet, as the app hasn’t gotten a lot of traction as of yet. crowdmug promises that an Android version is coming soon. It’s going to take a pretty good sized userbase to get crowdmug off of the ground.

22 wedding pictures you probably didn’t end up with after your big day. Enjoy!

Via: koningwoning