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SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook has been the photo king since 2008, but Google just put the social network on notice.

Changes to the Google+ social network -- announced Wednesday at the Google I/O conference at the Moscone Center West here, and launching Wednesday as well -- include a new interface, some new Hangouts features, and most impressively, a series of automatic filters and hashtags for your photos. "Automatic filters," though, doesn't really do justice to how comprehensive they can be.

"Quite a lot [of the new automation] depends on the Knowledge Graph," said Dave … Read more

Google's adding some new firepower to its photo-hosting service on Google+ with features designed to save people time when dumping their photos into the cloud.

Key among them is a feature that will automatically back up photos taken on smartphones and send them to Google's cloud storage. The move follows similar efforts from Dropbox, and more recently Amazon, to provide peace of mind for people who aren't manually backing up their files.

For files that have already been uploaded, Google also has new tools to automatically edit and adjust behind the scenes. That includes a new highlight … Read more

Editing and adjusting images manually can be quite time-consuming. But what if you could process multiple images automatically? Photo Sense for Mac offers powerful yet easy-to-use tools for effective, automated, and fast photo editing. However, there's a steep price to pay for such a basic application.

Photo Sense for Mac comes with a free demo version, which is limited in features and adds a watermark to saved images. The full version costs $33.99. The app, itself, is very light, and the installation is quick and easy with the usual drag and drop. Upon running the app, a quick … Read more

It's a sign of the times, perhaps, that an award-winning news photo turns out not to have been faked.

Swedish photojournalist Paul Hansen won the World Press Photo of the Year 2012 for his shot of two children in Gaza killed by an Israeli airstrike in November. But Neal Krawetz called the photo a fake on Sunday.

"Hansen's picture is a composite," Krawetz declared, saying that metadata showed multiple photos had been combined into one image, that error level analysis (ELA) showed inconsistencies, that shadows in the scene weren't geometrically plausible.

Photography has always been … Read more

There are dozens of photo editing apps on the App Store, many of them free. But far too many of those free apps are lacking some of the basic functions that are needed for a photo editing app to be useful, or they have cluttered, hard-to-use interfaces. BeFunky Photo Editor has none of those issues, and combined with Facebook sharing, channels to view and share photos through the app, and much more, it is one of the better options on the App Store.

The BeFunky editor is a dual-purpose tool. The first role of the app is to connect you … Read more

For some audiophiles, Counting Crows and The Wallflowers will forever be associated with the mid-1990s--along with Netscape Navigator, Hotmail, and of course, Windows 95. But don't call their joint summer outing a nostalgia trip. Velvet-tongued Counting Crows vocalist Adam Duritz, hot off the heels of The Outlaw Roadshow (alongside a slew of new indie bands), prefers to view his comparatively intimate Wallflowers double bill as a much-needed respite.

Other than sharing a decade, the comradely combos have shared previous tours, a track (Duritz sang on The Wallflowers' "6th Avenue Heartache"), and even a producer (T-Bone Burnett, back … Read more

Amazon's got a new app for iOS that gives users of Apple devices a way to view and sync up with photos they have stored on Amazon's Cloud Drive, including photos they've taken on other devices.

Every time the app (iTunes) is opened up, it can tap into a user's camera roll and automatically sync up photos people have taken. Amazon is the latest company, along with Facebook, to offer such software, and the app works over both Wi-Fi and cellular connections.

Other features include the option to share stored photos on Twitter and Facebook, as … Read more

Imgur is one of those sites that becomes a huge time sink if you let it. For some reason, browsing the random photos that people upload is really addictive, and so is reading the comments on said photos.

If you like to share your own images, you probably already know there are four ways to do so: uploading from your computer, putting in a URL, dragging and dropping, or with the paste command. But if you notice that you're often sharing pictures you find online, whether they're in your Facebook Timeline or just random spots on the Web, … Read more

Photo Editor Fotolr is a unique app in many ways because it offers a very robust experience, including a number of editing tools, collage creation, and album curation--all for free. That, however, is tempered by sometimes-spotty performance issues and occasional crashes, combined with a limited and sometimes confusing menu system.

When you open Fotolr you can choose to edit an existing photo from your library or camera, create a collage on one of three templates, or create a new album. There are also sharing tools to send your photos or libraries to other users. The interface works well and the … Read more