flickr

On our weekly Real Deal podcast today, Tom and I covered online photo sharing. It's not so much a comparison of the dozens of good photo sites we know of, but rather an overview of the issues for people confused about the whole space. Topics covered: Various services. How to pick a site. Privacy and copyrights. Online editing. And listener questions.

See also our Newbie's Guide to Flickr.

If you want to join the ongoing discussion, come on over to the Real Deal forums.

Photo-sharing site Zooomr is mostly relaunched in its version 3 incarnation, and now the two-person company has begun offering $19.95 "pro" account subscriptions in hopes of raising money.

"We do need to make at least a little money to survive," Chief Executive Thomas Hawk said in a blog posting Monday. "The community has stepped up and helped us in the most generous of ways, and we are hoping that all of you who find Zooomr meaningful will also consider helping us out by turning pro."

Those with pro accounts won't see ads … Read more

Chumby, the snuggly hybrid of stuffed animal and widget device, will be introduced next month to a small group of beta testers willing to shell out $179.95. The device, which has been in private testing for the last 10 months, lets its owners add and access all sorts of Internet-enabled widgets, including weather information, sports scores, horoscopes, and even Flickr slide shows. The team plans to make it available to everyone else later in the year.

According to Chumby's creators, part of the launch delay has been due to the inclusion of video, which required getting Adobe's Flash Lite 3 … Read more

While I was perusing the Flickr camera finder during the last couple days, I was perplexed to note that a number of previously popular models had taken a hit.

The site tracks which cameras are most widely used to upload photos in the last 30 days, but the leading contenders nearly universally got whacked. For example, take a look at the digital SLRs that are leaders with Flickrs' high-upload enthusiasts--the Canon Rebel XT, Pentax K100D, Olympus E-Volt E-500, Nikon D50. They all plunged in terms of the number of photos taken during the last month.

I thought it might be … Read more

Category: Media

Flickr is a popular photo-sharing and hosting service. 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.

Besides sharing your photos, Flickr has an API that has led to some interesting third-party mash-ups. It's also made for some neat ways to integrate Flickr shots into blogs and … Read more

Here's a fun piece of Webware that made its official launch last week. It's called Graphita Live Studio, and it's a really fun and well-done Web-based photo editor. Unlike some of the other solutions I've looked at in the past, Graphita doesn't have any grand scheme to replace your favorite desktop photo-editing software. Instead, Live Studio provides users with a way to quickly deface, or "enhance" their photos with all sorts of rasterized stamps and a trouble-making doodling tool.

To get started, users simply need to upload a photo from their hard drive. … Read more

On Monday, it becomes official. Blurb.com, which offers do-it-yourself bookmaking, and photo-sharing site Flickr are teaming up to help consumers jazz up their self-publishing efforts.

"Flickr got feedback from their members that they wanted to make books...We have already got a lot of feedback from Flickr's end users," said Eileen Gittins founder and CEO of Blurb.

Flickr community members have used the Blurb service for a couple of months now, and Flickr printed the community-contributed compilation "24 hours of Flickr" through San Francisco-based Blurb.

But starting Monday, a link to Blurb will appear … Read more

Flickr just found a downside to adding support for seven languages to its photo-sharing site: limits on photo sharing and resulting accusations of censorship.

Flickr launched sites in seven languages Wednesday, expanding beyond just English. But because of a German law, the company decided it had to restrict the photos German members could see to those that had been marked "safe" by members using Flickr's filtering ability that arrived in March. That restriction triggered a forum discussion thread, "Flickr now censoring all moderate and restricted photos from Germany," and an "Against Censorship at Flickr&… Read more

When Yahoo acquired Flickr in March of 2005 there was no doubt that it was a great move, but there was the question of what would happen to their own Yahoo Photos service. Now Yahoo has announced that they will be shutting down Yahoo Photos effective September 20th. If you still have photos in Yahoo Photos, they are offering a way to move them over to a variety of other services including Flickr and Photobucket.

The shut down will allow Yahoo to focus all of their resources on Flickr which is easily one of their hottest properties right now.