Digital photography

LetterPop: Family newsletter 2.0

LetterPop is a new service that makes it easy to create attractive personal newsletters. It's an interesting option for creating personal pages that are not a river of text like a blog, and yet are better at telling a story than an online photo album. There are currently 14 LetterPop templates, and most are well suited for telling family stories, showing family photos, and sending recipes.The templates are a bit less suitable, however, if you want a newsletter for your small business.

The service has a simple mailing list manager you use to send your newsletters out to … Read more

Reuters offers tech to trust citizen journos' photos

News organization Reuters is working with photo editing powerhouse Adobe and camera maker Canon so changes to digital photos can be detected, Reuters CEO Tom Glocer said on his blog last week.

Reuters, the news agency whose image was tarnished earlier this year when a freelance photographer provided doctored photos of bombing in Beirut, wants to ensure such changes can be found.

"I am pleased to announce today that we are working with Adobe and Canon to create a solution that enables photo editors to view an audit trail of changes to a digital image, which is permanently embedded … Read more

Is Flickr video right around the corner?

The one holdup with Flickr's otherwise extensive photo hosting service is the 2GB monthly limit imposed on Pro members that's stymied many actual pros from using Flickr as an archiving service for their super high-resolution shots. Today that limit has been lifted, along with bumping the upload limit for free users from 20 to 100MBs per month. They're also pushing printable gift certificates for Flickr Pro memberships with a code that will upgrade standard accounts. The certificates can be e-mailed or printed out in a foldable greeting card format. Our only question is why the change now? … Read more

Tabblo prints teeny-tiny photo books

Tabblo is not the biggest photo-sharing site out there, but it wins big points with me by having a plug-in for Picasa, Google's photo-management application. There are many other good photo services out there, but I use Picasa to manage my photos, and I really don't like having to deal with separate uploaders. Picasa plus Tabblo handles it for me.

But Tabblo is also a very weird photo service. It launched with a focus on making posters of photo collections, which can be viewed online or printed. That certainly sets Tabblo apart from other sites, but how many … Read more

Four services that do cool things for camera phones

After hosting a panel on mobile Web access at the Under the Radar conference on mobility last week, I moderated the digital imaging session, where four CEOs showed off what they can make camera phones do.

Daem Interactive makes a system that lets camera phones recognize images in the real world. Primarily designed for advertisements, the idea is that if you see an ad in the wild (like on a billboard) that's part of a special promotion, when you snap a picture of it and MMS it to the system you'll be rewarded with content, a prize, or … Read more

Wake up to your widgets

Enough already with the combo clock-weather stations. They've become as commonplace as the $6.99 digital alarm clocks behind the counter at Walgreens, next to the batteries and razor blades.

This uber-clock, by contrast, gives you the stuff you really want to know when you wake up: stock news, traffic bulletins, the Monday Night Football score and the latest on Britney's divorce and sex tape scandal. And you can set your MP3 tunes or Internet radio for the alarm. As its name implies, the award-winning "WidgetStation" displays your custom widget feeds on one of its two … Read more

Riya launches Like.com, visual search for shoppers

Earlier this year, Riya launched an extremely cool face-recognition system for your family photos. Today at the Web 2.0 Conference (but not during the Launchpad sessions), Riya said it is launching its next product, Like.com, a visual catalog and search tool for consumer goods.

The site lets you search for items by keyword. Once you find a picture of one you like, you can find more that look like it. You can also adjust sliders to tell the system that color is more important to you than shape (or vice versa), and you can zoom in on a … Read more