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.
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.
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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.
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.
Flickrtoys – nice collection of handy apps
The collection of Flickr toys Big Huge Labs offers, almost makes the other mentions in this list worthless. Almost, as the other ones have all found their niche. This one is great though if you just want to spend an afternoon rendering Flickr pics into weird photos. Try the Warholizer for example, and the Magazine Cover, Movie Poster, Sunset, Hockneyizer, Badge Maker, Pocket Album or any other of the funny and handy photo-rendering tools.
Animoto – Welcome to the end of slideshows
Animoto will turn your photos into a video clip that will blow your audience away. You can upload your photos or import them from a third party. Not just imports from Flickr are supported, but also Facebook, Smugmug, Photobucket and Picasa. After importing your pics you can upload any mp3 file or choose a song from their music store, which will be the background music. Big chance you already knew this service, as they’re becoming really popular. Rest assured though, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels told that the service is perfectly scalable.
Blurb – publish your own book for the coffee table
This San Francisco-based company celebrates the good ol’ books by allowing anyone to publish customizable photo-orientated books. It launched in October 2007 and differ from competitors like Lulu with the ultra-slick look of the books. I met these guys at a pre-Web 2.0 Expo drink and was immediately impressed. You can either print a book to caress your beloved Flickr pics or sell your work for profit in the online bookstore of Blurb. The service has just opened a European office – with a printer – in Amsterdam. So the service becomes more accessible for us Europeans.
Moopix – no need to learn PHP, Ruby or Python
Although Moopix looks like another javascript-based slideshow, it actually isn’t. Moopix offers a way for you to access your public Flickr photos without doing PHP, Ruby, or Python situps. What you do with it is your prerogative. If you just want to build a simple DHTML page without server dependencies? That’s where MooPix comes in. Instead of server-side code, MooPix uses Javascript to talk to Flickr in the language of JSON (Javascript Object Notation). MooPix itself basically just formats your request, creates the request, and then it’s up to you to decide what to do with the response.
Styled flickr photostream on your blog
Is Moopix somewhat too complicated for you? Then you might consider to use the Flickr Badge. Yeah, I know it’s hideous. So I’ve looked up an tutorial for you that helps to give that Flickr Badge a sweet look.
Flickriver – browse through Flickr in an alternative way
Seth Godin once wrote that browsing through Flickr is one of the best ways to find inspiration: “when you are trying to brainstorm, Flickr is a great place to find connections between ideas that hadn’t occurred to you. Even if you don’t use the picture, the ideas are priceless. Do a search on lobster or clouds or crowds or quality and see what comes up.” Flickriver offers you eight unique way to browse through the billions of pics.
Piclens – take the Flickr slideshow to the next level
Piclens is a Firefox plugin that helps you browsing through Flickr galleries. PicLens transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing photos and videos. It’s quite astonishing and much-applauded by publications like Wired, TechCrunch and Macworld. Thanks Yves Viegen, for the tip.
Flickr Album Maker – HTML albums on the go
Do you know the web album options in Adobe Photoshop? Well, this site offers a similar service, only then with Flickr pictures. After specifying your needs – like number of pics, titles, photo selection criteria etc – Flickr Album Maker generates a HTML code which you can paste into your blog or site. Oh, and there’s a slideshow option too, but we’ve seen plenty of that already.
Kubickr – get rid of the blue overkill of WordPress blogs
If you’ve ever installed a WordPress blog, you’d know what I’m talking about when I refer to a ‘giant blue blob’. It’s the standard header of the default WordPress theme: Kubrick. Well, Owen Winkler was fed up with this overkill of light blue, so he created a tool that lets you replace the header with a nice photo from Flickr. This is how it works: “Simply type some words that relate to your blog and push Submit. Choose one of the photos from the that appears, and save the resulting file to your Default WordPress theme directory.” Pretty easy, right?
Photoscape – dressed down browser-based Photoshop
This tool is perfect for people who are not able to work with Photoshop, as it offers the basic function of the sophisticated program. You can transform your pictures into animated GIFs, divide a photo in multiple parts, adjust the brightness or the size, merging multiple photos and batch editing photos. And.., best of all: it’s free. You’ll owe a big thank you to its Korean developers! (And Pixites, who tipped me)
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