flickr

What do you do when you can use the Internet to data-mine a collection of billions of photos?

Find out whether cats are more popular than dogs, of course. Or whether good outdoes evil. Or the Yankees beat the Mets.

The FlickrTrends application takes advantage first of the API (application programming interface) at Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr, which can show how many photos have been tagged with a particular word over a period of time. Second, it uses Google App Engine to present the relative popularity of two tags in chart form to show what's waxing and waning. … Read more

BumpTop replaces your desktop with a visual environment unlike any you've used. It's a bit like a futuristic gesture-based interface, but it's tied to your mouse. Were it capable of simultaneous Web browsing, its utility would be much more apparent.

BumpTop makes the items on your computer's desktop more like their real-world counterparts. Icons and folders are assigned a virtual weight based on the amount of memory they take up and their importance to you. You can move them by click-and-drag, or fling them across the BumpTop space. The program determines their importance based on how … Read more

Supr Flickr is a new Firefox extension that's a hodgepodge of small changes that make the site better suited for power users. I like it because it quietly brings many of Flickr's deeper features front and center, keeping you from having to dig around too much to get at them. Things like viewing multiple sizes of a shot, remembering formatting tags when writing descriptions and replying to comments, and grabbing a photo's source link are all made simpler.

Among its handier features, the add-on includes quick links to the third-party Hivemind search engine, which offers search filters … Read more

Gmail has four new items in its labs section, all of which enhance the links people have included in their messages. You're now able to flip on support for Yelp, Flickr, Picasa Web albums, and YouTube. Doing so will turn a link from one of those sites into a full-quality preview of the content you'd find on that site.

For instance, if someone has included a YouTube link, it simply shows up at the bottom of a message, just as if they had included it as an attachment. (You are less likely to get Rickrolled, that way.) The … Read more

If you're a Flickr user who delights in the simplicity of using TwitPic to take pictures in various mobile Twitter applications, you'll dig TwitPickr. This simple tool lets you republish any shots you've sent to TwitPic over to your Flickr account.

To begin, you simply drop in your Twitter username and it pulls up all the shots you've posted to TwitPic. Then you just check off the ones you want to publish to your Flickr photostream and it copies them over in one click.

As a future feature I'd love to automatically have photos from … Read more

Getty Images, one of the stock photography powerhouses, has switched on a program by which selected Flickr photographers can license their images to paying customers.

In earlier days of the microstock business, in which photographers license images over the Internet for relatively low prices through sites including Getty's iStockphoto, there was speculation Flickr might jump into the market. After all, there's plenty of good material, and it's often already tagged for easier categorization.

Instead, though, Flickr and Getty announced a partnership in which Getty taps Flickr photographers it believes have potential to sell their photos through Getty. … Read more

Social tool Radar.net has added support for Flickr on all its mobile applications, including the iPhone. Radar users who are also Flickr users can plug-in their account credentials and get the latest photos from their contacts filtered into Radar's activity feed. Likewise, if one of your Radar.net friends has a Flickr account their Flickr photos will begin to show up too.

At first glance, the iPhone version of Radar's app for photo viewing is not quite as good Flickr's mobile page, but it packs a punch. You can take a photo with your phone and … Read more

A little under a year ago, Flickr began hosting video alongside its online photo service. One of its shortcomings was that it did not support high-definition video, which in the past year has become a major feature on point-and-shoot and digital SLR cameras, as well as popping up on major video-hosting services like YouTube. Video was also only available to Flickr users who were subscribed to its $25 annual professional membership.

On Monday, both of these limitations have been lifted. HD is now available to paying pro users, whose previously uploaded clips will be re-processed to fit inside the new … Read more

The partnership between Flickr and Getty Images is finally moving forward. Early Wednesday the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing service announced that invitations from Getty have been going out in high numbers. Some members who have had one or more of their images chosen to be on Getty's sale site could have gotten notice as early as last week.

Originally announced in July, the special Flickr-branded Getty collection will be launching in early March. It's the first official move by Flickr where users can sell their images, although all the purchasing and organization will be done on Getty's end. In … Read more