Google almost completely revamped the Google+ photo experience last week, but somehow the company didn’t get around to announcing one of the coolest photo-related features in its repertoire: Google now uses computer vision and machine learning to let you search your photos for things like sunsets, food and flowers. I also tried terms like “cars,” “beach” and “bikes” and Google consistently… → Read More
Toronto-based startup MyShoebox is facing a time in which photo sharing announcements are thick and deep; Google unveiled its updated Google+ photos experience last week at I/O, and this week we seen pretty big announcements from Yahoo! around Flickr. Does that intimate MyShoebox, a photo-focused startup launching its version 2.0 product on the tail of those bits of news? Not really, says… → Read More
Barely a month or two after launching the Y Combinator-backed photo-sharing service Popset, the team realized they were solving the wrong problem. Users weren’t struggling to share their photos with groups; they needed tools to help them organize and manage their photo libraries across a variety of platforms and services. So the company decided to change its course, and today it’s… → Read More
With years of digital exhaust now behind us – over 240 billion photos on Facebook, 8 billion on Flickr, and not to mention the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every month – we’re now transitioning to a time when we’re in need of smarter tools for organizing and accessing our personal data archives. Only a few companies so far have dared to step into this space because of the technical… → Read More
Artkive, an app designed to eliminate the overwhelming guilt you get tossing your children’s brilliant artwork into the garbage, now has another purpose, too: you can order printed out books of their creations. Instead of just hiding the child’s crumpled up drawings and precious finger-paint covered handprints that school sends home – what is now, like every day? – under… → Read More
Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.
The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section. → Read More
Google+ is getting a big update for its photos experience, which is rolling out to users now. Initial impressions show a work flow that makes it easier to tweak pictures quickly and even automatically, without requiring that you learn a huge amount about Photoshop or other editing software. → Read More
Photos have always been at the center of the Google+ experience and at I/O today, Google announce a major update to Google+ Photos that now makes use of the many of the tools the company acquired when it bought Nik Software last September. The focus of this update is squarely on automating a lot of the photo editing and sharing process. Google+ can now, for example, automatically enhance the tonal… → Read More
Pi.pe, the file transfer and synchronization service which emerged from San Francisco-based Pixelpipe, has previously served as one of the only serious utilities to move photos and other media files between all the various cloud services. Since its launch a little over a year ago, Pi.pe’s focus has been primarily on backup and sharing. But it was missing an option for ordering prints… → Read More
Thanks to Instagram, we rarely see photos taken from camera phones without some type of filter on it. Even Twitter’s photo service uses Aviary to drop an earthy overlay or black-and-white treatment onto your digital masterpiece. Google Glass users aren’t going to be left out of this craze thanks to an app aptly named Glassagram. Again, this is the type of app that we’re seeing… → Read More
Despite the ubiquity of smartphones and the insane number of photos we now save and share, surprisingly, no one has yet to figure out how to shift more personal and private photo-sharing away from old school methods like SMS and email, and into a dedicated mobile application. A number of startups, however, are trying to do just that. Cluster is one of those companies, and with today’s… → Read More
With the launch of Stocksy this week, Bruce Livingstone is officially taking another shot at building a digital stock photography service. His last attempt, iStockphoto, which he founded in 2000, has since become one of the largest resources for stock images, media and design elements on the Web. And, as a result, Livingstone has become known as one of the pioneers of “microstock” or… → Read More
There are Twitter accounts for almost everything these days. Some people I know have accounts set up for their pets, then there are toasters, beds, drones and so on. The company itself has a fun account called @Twisitor, which was a project built during one of Twitter’s quarterly hackweeks. There’s a camera in the lobby of Twitter’s new San Francisco office and it will snap a… → Read More
Today, Facebook has announced sweeping design changes to its News Feed, along with a total overhaul of its Photo experience. Photos are a huge part of what makes Facebook so engaging, and the company says that this new design is more “immersive.” Basically, the design highlights your photographs in the News Feed, your Timeline and Photo Albums. Photos from third-party apps like… → Read More
While developers scrambled to cash in on the photo-sharing gold rush while Instagram rose to prominence and then got sold to Facebook, Aviary took a different approach. Rather than build a consumer-facing app, the company decided to build a platform that allows other networks to include its photo-editing suite. It was a brilliant play and has paid off, as Aviary has announced that its platform has… → Read More
A blog post from Flickr about new updates to its iOS application went relatively unnoticed yesterday. The post announced a series of incremental improvements to an app which has so far barely managed to catch up to the competition after months of abandonment, but has yet to really impress. The latest build brings a few now-standard features like the ability to save photos to your Camera Roll… → Read More
Wedding Party, the mobile app that allows wedding guests, friends and family to contribute to a shared, digital album of photos and notes which can later be posted directly to the couple’s Facebook timeline, has raised $1 million in seed funding in a round jointly led by NEA and Felicis Ventures. Also participating were a number of angel investors, including early Dropbox investor Pejman… → Read More
Moment.me, a startup that debuted its automatic, social albums application for iPhone this past fall, has made its way to Android. The app allows users to combine not only photos, but also video, as well as updates from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram and Google+, into one album. These albums are also augmented with content shared by friends and others who posted… → Read More
Crashworks, a new Idealab-backed travel startup, is today coming out of its semi-stealth mode with a fun mobile application called Crash and accompanying website for unique, crowdsourced tourist attractions. The difference between what Crash offers compared with more robust travel guides, is that it’s not focused on recommending hotels, transportation, restaurants or bars – it’s only about the… → Read More
Photo editing focused company Aviary has had the best six months ever in the tech space, snatching partnership deals with companies like Yahoo! and Flickr and most recently Twitter. What is becoming apparent is that there is an absolute need for a solid photo editing experience in many apps, and Aviary’s tools are there to serve the need. That’s a really good place to be in. It’s… → Read More
Instagram has just announced that its full feed has made its way to the web, meaning that users no longer have to access through the dedicated mobile apps to check out all of their content, and participate in the conversation around posted photos. The web-based feed comes in both desktop- and mobile-optimized flavors, meaning you’re set if you’re using something like BlackBerry not yet graced by… → Read More
Look out, Google, Facebook and Dropbox? Amazon has now added automatic mobile photo uploads to its Amazon Cloud Drive Photos Android app, in an update released yesterday evening. The functionality makes the otherwise fairly bare bones photos app more of a competitor in the space, given that Google (via its Google+ app), Dropbox, and Facebook (iOS-only for now), have all recently eased the… → Read More
Photo and personal publishing company Shutterfly is continuing to refresh its mobile products with today’s relaunch of its Treat application for iOS, which follows the December overhaul of the company’s flagship app for photo gifts and prints. Treat, which originally launched in April of last year, then came to mobile in October, is a competitor to Apple’s Cards app, Sincerely Ink, Red Stamp… → Read More
Google+ came out of its holiday slumber today with an addition to its Photo section of the service. The team has added pan and zoom functionality to let you explore small areas of high-resolution photographs. This comes after a hot-and-heavy feature push right before the holiday season. Google’s social feature set has attracted artists of all types, especially professional photographers. → Read More
Sometimes startups shut down fast, and in the case of new online scrapbooking maker Irrive, which only launched this past September, the company had barely even gotten started before closing up shop. According to CEO Steven Cohn, who sold his last startup to LivingSocial, he made the decision to quickly pivot (his word, not mine, by the way), because even though Irrive’s metrics were good, the… → Read More
Confirming TechCrunch’s earlier report, photo and personal publishing company Shutterfly is announcing this morning that it is acquiring the cloud-based photo and video organization platform ThisLife. The company will integrate ThisLife’s technology into its own core products, allowing users to upload, organize, store, share and create physical and digital products using both web and mobile… → Read More
Toshiba is intent on making a camera sensor for smartphones and tablets that borrows a trick from Lytro and allows users to select a focus area in their photos after having taken them. Not only that, but it’ll also allow users to put the whole photo in focus, as well as work with video shot on the device, potentially one-upping the pioneering Lytro camera in a form factor designed for use in… → Read More
Shutterfly, the photo and personal publishing company founded in 1999, is today making good on its September acquisition of Penguin Digital, with today’s launch of a new iPhone application for photo prints and gifts. The app has been completely redesigned from the version released a few years ago, and now includes everything from photo uploads and storage to mobile ordering of prints and gifts… → Read More
Less than one week after Dropbox acqui-hired Audiogalaxy to beef up its cloud music ambitions, today comes news of another acquisition, this time focused on another form of media, photos: the cloud-storage giant is buying Snapjoy – like Dropbox, a Y Combinator-alum — which lets users aggregate, archive and view all of their digital photos from their cameras, phones and popular apps like… → Read More
As great as the allure of its filters may be, Facebook didn’t spend $1 billion on Instagram for its digital photo effects. No, it was because Instagram was mobile-first, growing like a weed, had just launched on Android, and because it had created (with a small team) the first good-looking, mobile-centric social network for photos — location-tagged photos to boot. Launching a major redesign of… → Read More
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