photos

Flickr's free terabyte not big enough

Eight years after buying Flickr, Yahoo hopes to entice people to take a fresh look at the photo service it let languish, with a fresh coat of paint and a free terabyte of space. Too bad today's photo-sharer has found a home elsewhere and is already accustomed to free.

Monday at a press event in New York, Yahoo announced major changes to Flickr to make the product "awesome again." The biggest change was the addition of a free terabyte of storage, a shift that transforms Flickr from a very restrictive subscription service to something that a majority … Read more

Order vintage-style photo prints from your iPhone

It's one thing to share your photos on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but sometimes you just want old-fashioned prints. You know, the kind you can stick to your fridge, clip to a board, hang on a wall, and so on. That's especially true if you want to share fond memories with friends or family members. You know, the kind you get from a wedding, vacation, birthday party, and so on.

Printic turns your iPhone photos into Polaroid-style prints, then delivers them to one or more recipients. It's a simple concept, done well.… Read more

The Week in Pictures: Google's utopia to a stem cell burger

The technology world was buzzing with news this week. From Google's annual I/O conference to some very tiny robotics, these are the images from the week's tech stories that stood out.

Google CEO Larry Page took the stage at Google I/O this week. He held a Q&A session at the end of the keynote presentation, during which he reinforced the idea of a technology-driven utopia and criticized anything that stood in the way of Google's vision.

Bugs, of the real and robotic kind, also saw a lot of attention. Researchers at Harvard conducted … Read more

Google Hangouts launches as a standalone app

Google Hangouts (iOS|Android) brings the group video chat features you have in Google+ to your home screen with a standalone app, but it might be one too many ways to do the same thing.

Having the app on your home screen gives you immediate access to one-on-one and group video calls formerly found by going through a couple of menus in Google+. With Hangouts, you can have a video call with up to 10 people and you can choose who will be in the hangout through a list of your contacts or by using a search field. During your … Read more

Google Hangouts launches as a standalone app

Google Hangouts (iOS|Android) brings the group video chat features you have in Google+ to your home screen with a standalone app, but it might be one too many ways to do the same thing.

Google+ gives photo lovers what Facebook doesn't

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+ photos get new tools, auto adjusts at I/O

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

Review: Process multiple images at once with Photo Sense for Mac

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

Award-winning photo isn't a fake, say specialists

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

Review: Add funk to your photos with BeFunky Photo Editor

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