photos

Though carriers have loosened some of the reins in the last couple of years, it still can be a tricky process to get photos off your camera phone. The most common method, sending your snaps as a multimedia message to an e-mail address, costs money. Sure, you can offset individual messaging fees with a messaging plan, but that too will add a few dollars to your monthly bill. A Bluetooth file transfer is a better (and free) option, but you'll need Bluetooth on both ends. Also, up until recently some carriers restricted Bluetooth use so they wouldn't lose … Read more

I take a lot of pictures with my digital camera at birthdays, family gatherings, and other events, so I'm always on the lookout for new ways to share the photos. As new programs hit the scene and older programs evolve over time, my favorites change because of various factors like ease of use, number of features, and of course, the king of all reasons: price.

One of the best ways I've found to share pictures with friends and family is to make them as accessible as possible by creating Web albums. With the right software, you can lay … Read more

Want to learn the secrets to creating beautiful HDR photographs? xTrain, a provider of online video training courses has announced a new high dynamic range (HDR) Mastery online video course by Photoshop expert Ben Willmore. HDR is the process of taking a sequence of exposures, allowing you to lighten the underexposed areas and darken the overexposed areas of a digital image to better simulate what the human eye would actually see.

The online course shows learners step-by-step the best practices of creating HDR photos. Students learn how to best choose subjects for HDR, such as watching for movement and clouds, … Read more

I've been on a bit of a de-cluttering jag over the past year or so. Too much paper, too much "stuff" around the house. So I've been slowly dumping the junk and selling or donating the rest.

This includes photographs. I had stacks of snapshots of family, friends, places, and so forth sitting around in various drawers and boxes. I had made a half-hearted effort to digitize some of the old slides previously, but scanning is really tedious work. Scanning the hundreds of photos involved here was just more than I realistically felt like tackling.

Over … Read more

The preponderance of digital photo frames has been a standard rant in this space, and for good reason. Not only are they overproduced and overmarketed in every iteration, from keychains to cubes, but they can also be found in practically every size imaginable.

Yet here's one that may prove to be a good idea despite its original pedestrian concept: a tiny digital magnet for the refrigerator door. Rather than having a virtually useless display all of 2.4 inches and 320 x 240 resolution, we've got a far more practical application. If you're trying to lose weight, … Read more

Flickr announced today that they now support video sharing to go along with their popular photo sharing services. The option is only available to "Pro" accounts, however, so those using the service on the free level will not have the option. Adding video support not only encourages the upgrade to the pro account, but it also takes an obvious swipe at YouTube.

Says the announcement on the Flickr Blog, "If you're a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream...90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary … Read more

It's a virtual arms race among Web-based photo editors. Each one is trying to partner with as many third-party services as possible in an attempt to gain mass appeal. This morning Picnik, which has already begun to get some traction as the primary editing tool for Flickr has teamed up with Photobox, another large photo host in the United Kingdom.

Photobox is about a fifth of the size of Flickr in active users, and the two have very different services. Photobox provides 1,000MB of storage and gives users more space each time they order prints while Flickr operates … Read more

It's hard to say whether this is innovative or just another company jumping on the touch-based gesture bandwagon, but Pandigital's announced a new line of digital photo frames with "intuitive" touch controls. Not surprisingly, the line's called PanTouch, but what's weird about it is that the whole touch part doesn't apply to the screen itself but the frame around the display.

What's this mean exactly? Well, check out the image and you'll notice that good looking index finger is touching the edge of the frame, not the screen itself. The press … Read more

I'm pretty excited about Vringo's new Facebook app for a number of reasons. First, I'm a big fan of Vringo's video caller ID service, which lets users choose a video ringtone (vringo) that plays on their friends' phone when they initiate a call to said friend. Second, this new app carries Vringo's concept of personalizing the moment of phone-to-phone contact by syncing your address book with your friends' Facebook profile photos.

It takes about 5 minutes and quite a few steps to set up the service, but the directions are clear and fairly straightforward. You … Read more