As long as we’re taking one trip down memory lane, we might as well continue the theme. People today just have no patience, you know: everything’s about instant gratification. When I was a kid, when we took pictures, we had to wait. None of this looking at them instantly. Well, unless you had a Polaroid camera, and even then, there was an arcane ritual that had to be completed first.
If you miss those days of shaking and waiting for photos to develop, check out the free Poladroid. It recreates all the fun of Polaroid pictures with any digital photos you’ve got handy. Just drag and drop your pics onto the camera icon and it’ll convert them—in authentic brown-colored slow-mo revelation—into Polaroid snapshots that you can print, upload, or do whatever your heart desires—once they’ve finished developing, of course. And yes, before you ask, you can shake the pictures to get them to develop faster.
It’s a fun and silly little application, that can potentially produce some pretty cool images. Best of all it’s simple and free, so give it a look, especially if you’re a vintage photo-nut.
[via Lifehacker]
Itching for an Apple software update? That’s an usual response, so consider consulting a trained medical professional—though, admittedly, if it’s sort of a spider sense thing, it could be useful; give us a call.
Today, that tingling can mean only one thing: iPhoto 7.1.5 is out in the wild, bringing in its 9MB payload critical improvements to “the printing quality of books, cards and calendars ordered via the iPhoto printing service.”
Of course, you’ll need iPhoto 7.1.4 and at least OS X 10.4.11 in order to use the new hotness that is 7.1.5. In the meantime, enjoy this little composition:
Printing quality
Is to fall like the colors
Of autumn leaves
You’ve got your photos backed up, right? I mean, of all the data that you keep on your hard drive, your digital pictures are probably among the most precious—and the most irreplaceable. So keeping a backup of your pictures on an external drive is a good start, but what if the unthinkable happens, and you lose that backup too, thanks to fire, flood, or meteor strike?
It’s times like that—hopefully few and far between—that an offsite backup is crucial. 24x7digital’s new PhotoCopy application aims to make the process of backing up your photos easy, by using tools already at your disposal: iPhoto and photo-sharing site Flickr. PhotoCopy can automatically copy iPhoto albums of your choice, arranging them in sets and retaining keywords, titles, dates, descriptions, etc. Furthermore, any changes made to your iPhoto library will be automatically reflected in the backups on Flickr, so if you edit, add, or delete a photo, that will happen in your backup as well (though I presume there’s some way to safeguard against accidentally deleting your entire primary and backup, right?).
A license for PhotoCopy costs $20, and you’ll need a Pro Flickr account to take the most of it. If you want to give it a try, you can run the demo version, which has most of the same features, but watermarks your pictures until you purchase a license.
I have to admit, the idea of uploading pictures to the web directly from my digital camera, without having to do the USB cable/memory card dance seems like the future to me. And while I haven’t used the Eye-Fi card that makes this future into the present, it still seemed worthwhile to bring the device’s latest improvements to your attention.
Specifically, it may behoove you to know that the new version of the Eye-Fi adds compatibility for MobileMe. That’s in addition to improvements that claim to bump the upload speed of photos to twice as fast as the original card (an enhancement that will apply to original Eye-Fi owners as well). Eye-Fi card users will also be able to add additional services that aren’t included in their card, such as hotspot access, geotagging, and web sharing for annual fees of $15, $15, and $10 respectively.
The cards themselves run between $79 and $129—they’re all 2GB cards, so the price differential is just what services they come with. So ask yourself: what price the future, my friends?
Apparently Tuesday is the new photo-cataloging application update day. Both Apple and Adobe have rolled out new versions of their high-end photo apps, so no matter what you use to keep track of your pictures, it’s time to check the old update queue.
Of the two, Adobe’s update is the weightier: it’s Photoshop Lightroom 2 (The Revenge!). Lightroom 2 has been in beta since April (and has supposedly been downloaded 130,000 times); it boasts the notable achievement of being Adobe’s first 64-bit OS X app. It’ll run $299 or $99 as an upgrade if you already own Lightroom.
What else does numero dos offer that’s new? Well, you can organize your photos across multiple hard drives; there’s a Suggested Keyword feature that should take some of the pain out of assigning keywords; a Local Adjustment Brush which lets you adjust qualities like color and exposure in certain areas without affecting the overall image; dual-monitor capability; and improved support for Raw images using the DNG Profile Editor and Camera Raw 4.5 which are also dropping today.
By comparison, Apple’s Aperture update is a snooze—it “supports general compatibility issues, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues.” It’s a free update, though—so you got that going for you.
Even with its price tag dropped to $200, the iPhone 3G still has its fair share of missing features: voice dialing, A2DP Bluetooth stereo, MMS. But perhaps the most glaring among them is the lack of any sort of self-portrait mirror. iPhone owners who’ve tried to take a picture of themselves end up wrestling with the touch-sensitive controls, all the while unable to see exactly what they’re taking a picture of.
I’ve certainly taken my fair share of shots of my chin or one eye, but today as I tried to snap a photo, I came up with an ingenious solution. If you happen to be sitting in front of your MacBook, just fire up Photo Booth. Then you can point the iPhone’s screen at your MacBook’s iSight and see the framing of your shot. It doesn’t work perfectly—your arm can still get in the way—but it’s good enough for taking a carefully posed oh-so-casual shot.
If you don’t happen to have a MacBook or other iSight-enabled Mac, you can accomplish the same thing with a mirror. Or a window. Or a shiny piece of metal. And for those you who will inevitably complain that this won’t help you when you’re capturing your silly Friday night bar antics, may I suggest the simple, expedient solution of having someone take a picture of you?
Let it never be said that I don’t pull my weight around these parts.
If you're allergic to Facebook, skip this post. No really, we have many others at your disposal. But if social networking is up your alley, this small app called PhotoBook, by Caffeinated Cocoa Software, could be of interest to you.
In the recent months, I've come to rely on my friends--yes, I do have some!--for photographing various events in my life. That's because one, carrying a camera and taking pictures is a pain, and two, plenty of photos appear on Facebook. But right now, they stay on Facebook, which means by the time the next big social networking site comes along, I probably won't have saved them anywhere else and I'll be left empty-handed.
But wait! That's where PhotoBook comes in. Lightweight and free, it's basically a desktop Facebook photo browser. You can view albums and photos of you or of your friends in a very iPhoto-like interface. See photos full-size with a double-click, where tags and an "Open in browser" button appear. It's all very clean, efficient, and relatively fast.
However, the real boon that resolves my little issue detailed above is the ability to quickly import selected photos to iPhoto, where they'll (theoretically) live on forever. Granted, the quality isn't great--604 by 453 pixels seems to be the standard--but it's better than nothing.
PhotoBook is not particularly new, but it is to me, and I'm glad I found it. If it sounds like something you'd use, download it from here.
Mother's Day may have come and gone, but Father's Day is just around the corner, and you wouldn't want your pops to feel neglected now would you? Well Apple's making it pretty easy to slap together a nifty, full color iPhoto book in which you can lovingly include every last picture that Mom took of the Disney World family vacation last Summer.
If you order any photo book or cards by June 15, 2008, you get a 20% savings. If you want the book to arrive in time for Father's Day, you're better off ordering with express shipping at this point. So start compiling your favorite family photos—you have until June 8 to place your express order in time for Father's Day shipping. Oh, and make sure you don't include that one pic; you know, the one at the weird angle that makes him look kinda pudgy.
Those nutty folks over at the GOOG are up to it again. One of the company’s policies is that it’s employees are encouraged to work on open source projects, either full time or in the 20% time that they can work on personal projects. One of the latest Mac-based projects to hit Google’s Mac Developer Playground is Visigami.
It’s an application! It’s a screen saver! It’s a—okay, actually, that’s pretty much it. Enter a search term and choose your picture source (currently, Flickr, Picasa, or Google Image Search) and you’ll be barraged with images. You can pick how you want them displayed (in a grid, a fan, or a carousel), and alter the speed, spread, and zoom until your little heart is content. Do be aware that the animation takes up a decent amount of horsepower on some machines (it totally slowed my Growl notifications to a crawl, for example).
I also made the fatal mistake of specifying “baby panda” as my search term. The resulting overdose of cuteness almost sent me into convulsions—do not mess around with baby pandas, folks. I’ve already been contacted about doing a PSA on the subject.
