flickr

Flickr upgrades slide shows, commence eye candy

Flickr quietly launched a new version of its slide show feature today. The new design forgoes the once small black box and takes over your entire browser window with full-sized photos that fade into one another. Also tweaked is the speed control, which has gone from a slow to fast slider to one-click options for slow, medium, and fast. Flickr decided to retool the slide show feature based on user feedback, as the previous version would restrict photos down to small size, even on large monitors or browsers set to full screen. The new version will simply resize itself to … Read more

Tomorrow: Use Flickr, be in a book

Many Yahoo photos users will soon be making the exodus to Flickr, so we thought we'd give everyone the heads up on a fairly cool "event" going on tomorrow. It's called 24 Hours of Flickr, and it's challenging people to go take pictures all day Saturday and then upload their favorite shots to a Flickr group specifically created for the day.

Flickr editors will go through the photos, pick some of the best, and add them to a coffee-table book (designed using Blurb) that will be made available for purchase this summer.

Anyone who gets … Read more

Yahoo Photos shutting down. Flickr is the new hotness.

Brad Garlinghouse, SVP of Yahoo and author of the famous "Peanut Butter Manifesto," in which he told people inside Yahoo that the company was spread too thin, told me tonight at a dinner that "I'm eating my own peanut butter." On Friday, he said, Yahoo will begin to close down Yahoo Photos, in favor of Flickr, the competing photo sharing site the company bought about two years ago.

Yahoo Photos users will be given the opportunity to move their pictures over to Flickr. But Garlinghouse admits that Flickr isn't the right sharing site for … Read more

Hands-on with Flektor's content creator

Flektor is a new Flash-based content mashup tool. Users can pull in photos from several hosting services like flickr, MySpace, and Photobucket to make slick-looking, embeddable media slide shows for blogs, Web sites or social networks. It's a lot like Mixercast, and other media mashup services like RockYou and SplashCast.

Flektor's interface is drag-and-drop, and has a very short learning curve. To add media to your show, just drag imported media files down to a timeline at the bottom of the screen, where they can be rearranged or removed at any time. There are also "Flidgets" which can be inserted into your show to add live chat, a live broadcast from your Webcam, or cliched film effects like color bars or static. What's really neat is the ability to edit any picture with some easy-to-use sliders that let you do simple, on-the-fly alterations to your photographs--something you'd find on a Web-based photo editing tool like Picnik.

To add a little flair to your show, there are nearly 100 transitions, effects, and filters that can be put on top of or in between your media. You can also edit each effect and change its appearance. Out of the many transitions I've seen on some of these Flash editors (Photobucket's Remix in particular), Flektor has some really snappy and good-looking effects.

The main hindrance in using Flektor is how long it takes to communicate with the third-party services. Flickr in particular takes quite a while to sync up photos from various albums. On the upside, the MySpace integration is very simple; just give it a username and it will pull up photos members have uploaded in addition to any images that have been embedded in user comments. It's also easy to embed your Flektor player on a number of services, with a handy export page that provides special embedding codes for a dozen services (including Google's Orkut).

I've embedded a sample "Flek" I put together using some photo and video clips. For screenshots of the editing interface, keep reading.

[via Mashable]

DivShare adds video to file-hosting service

File-hosting service DivShare quietly launched a video-hosting service this morning. Designed to help users share short video clips, DivShare is taking a slightly different approach, letting people upload video files, up to 200MB, which can then be shared on social networks, blogs, and Web sites. Users can upload files anonymously or register so they can keep track of every file they've ever uploaded to the service. (Those file, according to DivShare, will "never" be removed.) Each time you upload a file, you're also given a direct download link that can be shared with others.

I wouldn'… Read more

2view: Flickr-style notes + StumbleUpon voting

2view is a neat little tool that lets you add Flickr-like notes to any photo online. If you're unfamiliar with Flickr's note system, a) you should read our Newbie's Guide, and b) you're really missing out on some fun to be had with photos that are shared online. Flickr's Notes feature lets users add their two cents to a picture, and mark certain things of interest with a very specifically placed caption. It's the Web equivalent of a sharpie marker, although a little less permanent.

To use 2view, just plug in any old … Read more

Wiredness: Quick and familiar Web-based photo editing

Wiredness is a new Web-based photo-editing tool. There are a ton of these out there now, and they just keep getting closer in functionality to their desktop counterparts. What makes Wiredness easy to use is its interface, which has file, edit, and tool menus you'd find on a desktop app like Picasa or Photoshop Elements.

For casual photo work flow, you can either upload a photo from your hard drive or pull it in from a URL. The max size for files is 5MB. The service handled my 7.2-megapixel test photo without a problem. There are tools for … Read more

Google Talk widget gets better

Google pushed out a nice update to the Web version of their Talk application earlier this week. Users can now have more than four conversations at once, embed Flickr slide shows into chat, and my personal favorite, pop out the chat list as its own window.

The Flickr slide show implementation is pretty slick, although I got a little confused trying to paste in the slide show URL, only to get a dead-end. Users need only paste in an album URL, and Google Talk will automatically convert it into a slide show for you. You can shuffle back-and-forth between photos, … Read more

The Coop brings social networking to Firefox

The Mozilla Foundation's Labs has launched The Coop, a project that will let people keep track of their friend's online activities. The add-on will create a row or column of friends' photos. When a photo glows, the user can see that a friends has a new link, photo, blog, or video to share from content-sharing services such as del.icio.us and Flickr. The project planners envision using RSS or another mechanism to move the data between people's browsers. For more information, check out this News.com article.

Newbie's Guide to Flickr

Flickr is a popular photo-sharing and hosting service with advanced and powerful features. It supports an active and engaged community where people share and explore each other's photos. You can share and host hundreds of your own pictures on Flickr without paying a dime. There's also a pro service that gets you unlimited storage and sharing for about $2 a month, making it one of the cheapest hosting sites around (more on that later).

Flickr was created by a small Canadian development team in 2002 before being acquired by Yahoo a year later. Many other photo sites (including Yahoo Photos) are easier to use, but none offer Flickr's interesting features or its cohesive community of enthusiasts.

Adding your photos to Flickr

First step: Get your photos into the service. Flickr has a few options to get photos from your camera into your account, the easiest one being a little uploader app you can install on your PC or Mac (there's also a Linux version.) When it's installed on a PC, you can right-click on any photo and send it straight to Flickr. You also can use this uploader to create albums (Flickr calls albums sets) for your pictures. You can install software that lets you publish from any folder in Windows XP, without the need to use the uploading program. If you're using a Mac, there's also a plug-in for iPhoto.

If you're not keen on downloading a piece of software, Flickr lets you upload six individual photos at a time. This might work for some weekend shots, but if you've got more than 20 shots it's worth trying out the batch uploader. We recommend using the downloader software, or if you've got Yahoo's Widgets Engine installed, the latest version comes with a widget that doubles as a photo viewer and uploading tool.

Continue reading to learn how to tag and organize photos, add notes, geotag, create albums, find out if you need a premium membership, and our list of Flickr users worth checking out.