Facebook photos updated, now looks like Google+
Posted Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 3:34 pm by Jason Cartwright
It seems that while the company was filing their submission to go public, the engineers and designers haven’t taken their foot off the pedal. Today also marks the release of an updated photo viewer. Photos posted on users walls open to a lightbox when clicked, but instead of comments (and ads) being displayed at the bottom, they are now located to the right.
Sound familiar? Yep, those social networking sluts will know that Google+ treats photos in a very similar way. The difference being that G+ photos display larger, in more a full-screen mode, but essentially there’s a strong similarity between the two.
What do you think? Like the new style, or is this yet another change users will revolt against ?
How to: Remove Blue tint from iPhone photos
Posted Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 6:51 pm by Jason Cartwright
Many of us iPhone owners know too well how our images are being ruined by a flaw in the iPhone’s camera. When taking photos under fluorescent lights a blue tine appears on photos, radiating out from the centre as a circle. Unlike a photo with under or over-exposure, these photos can’t simply be adjusted using an image editing program. Because the tint affects only a region of the photo not a blue tint over the whole image, we can’t just use hue-adjustment techniques.
Introducing the Cam Spot Fix iPhone application. This application easily fixes the blue tint on photos.
Checkout some sample before and after photos below. While the application is A$2.49, to make a completely unusable photo into something usable can be invaluable.
Download the app via iTunes
Flickr for WP7 now available [photos]
Posted Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 5:27 pm by Jason Cartwright
While have been 3rd party Flickr apps on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace for a couple of months now, the official Flickr app is now available. So question is, was it worth the wait ?
The Flickr app is indeed a very polished experience, taking full advantage of the panorama UI available on WP7. Giving you access to all the standard web-based features your know and love. Sets, galleries, photos from your contacts, your own photostream and of course search across the entire Flickr catalogue. Naturally there’s the ability to upload photos from your WP7, complete with GPS location information.
Apparently the application does indeed feature a LiveTile, but takes some time to pull this down from Flickr, be patient.
The app is one of the best on WP7 and yeah, really was worth the wait, I hope the 3rd party Flickr apps enjoyed their time to shine, because today it ends. iPhone owners should note, that while the WP7 is pretty amazing, functionality wise, there’s really not anything your missing out on.
Gallery
Flickr for Windows Phone 7 is free and available now on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.
Someone bought new servers.. Facebook Photos get 8 times larger
Posted Friday, October 1, 2010 at 1:53 pm by Jason Cartwright
Well the start of October comes with a fresh announcement from Facebook, photos can be up to 8 times larger ! While Facebook may be a great place to share your photos with family and friends, an unfortunate downside is that it crushes your stunning images to a smidge of their original size. The size increase will now allow for photos of up to 720 pixels high and 2048 pixels wide, whichever comes first.
Where this feature will really make the most difference is viewing Facebook photos on large screens. Take the Facebook integration on the Xbox 360 for example, viewing images on a large HDTV will significantly benefit from the higher quality available. The downside is you’ll need to make sure you have a speedy internet connection to deal with all those extra bits.
Also Facebook points out in the uploader that using High Res can take up to 10x longer to upload.
Photo Viewer Improved
A short time ago Facebook made a change to photos that stopped with the pagination madness and allowed full albums to be viewed on one page just by scrolling down. Well now Facebook are taking photo album viewing a step further, adding a lightbox (see below) not only that, but they rewrote the way photos are switched from one to the next. This should result in much faster, more responsive photo viewing.
Tagging
Another important point in this announcement is a change to how people are tagged in photos. There will now be the ability to tag a person across multiple photos. Very handy when you have that friend that just won’t stop photobombing at birthday parties.
So what does this mean for services like Flickr, Zoomr and Smugmug ? It may impact them slightly, as the higher resolutions offered by those services is definitely a draw card. It is important to remember that Flickr actually stores the original file, so you get the full uncompressed image the way it came off your camera. So there is still quite a difference between Facebook photos and Flickr, but could it just be a matter of time before we no longer need Flickr ?
You can read the full blog post about higher quality photos over at Facebook.
Your Face, getting bigger. Facebook ads Bigger Photos – Finally!
Posted Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 10:49 am by Jason CartwrightIn a new post on the Facebook blog, Facebook have announced they will be rolling out a new updated photo size for ‘better viewing’.
Old photo size (left) compared to the new size. (Note that actual photos are larger; this shows scale only.)
There is a caveat for external applications that upload photos to Facebook (i.e. Windows Live Photo Grallery, iPhoto etc).
All uploads on Facebook.com will support the new photo size, but uploads made from some external applications may continue to use the previous size.
This will likely be remedied with an update to the application or plugin.
Ultimately this is a good thing, the limited photo size has been a contentious issue for many, particularly photographers eager to show off their work. Sites like Flickr allow photos to be uploaded and viewed in a variety of sizes including full resolution.
