Everyone's favorite photo filtering and sharing app for iOS got a significant update on Friday afternoon. Version 2.1 of Instagram adds a new filter, a tool for easily enhancing low-lit photos and a redesigned navigation.
Sierra, the latest filter to join the Instagram family, is a white-bordered filter that adds a lightened, low-contrast vintage look to photos. As far as Instagram filters go, it's pretty standard stuff, but it's always nice to have new options. The more substantial addition to the app is a feature called Lux, which lets users automatically increase the brightness of photos and boost the contrast. The option is meant to offer a way to improve underexposed photos and make them more Instagrammable.
Shutterstock.com claims it is the first such venture to reach a total of 200 million downloads of licensed images of stock photography, vector graphics and other illustrations. "Searching the word 'networking' used to return images of handshakes and business contacts; now it's all about online social networking," says Jon Oringer, Founder and CEO of the company.
Admit it. You're an amateur food porn photographer. But don't worry, you're certainly not alone.
Last week, my esteemed Internet ReadWriteWeb-y colleagues Jon Mitchell and Curt Hopkins cooked up this insanely hilarious story about the grossness of amateur food porn. Amazingly, every single photograph in his story was shot by an amateur. And every single time, the food looked totally disgusting. The amateur food photographer is not trying to make their food look gross. In fact, quite the opposite, this person is just trying to share the food that they think is delicious and beautiful. But no matter what, the food photos just don't communicate that sentiment.
"You need a light source from the side," says Stephen Hamilton, a Chicago-based professional food photographer. "You need to bring up the detail of the food, which you can't do with a single light source."
The rollout of Facebook Timeline forces you to take a look back at your own "Facebook past," and think about whether you want to add to it.
Today 1000memories launched the ShoeBox Facebook app, which gives you an opportunity to scan paper photos from the past and post them to Facebook. It brings back those "pre-Internet photos from the past."
"A Facebook Timeline-integrated app (such as ShoeBox) which lets you post photos into the past, represents a recreation of an autobiographical memory," says Dr. Ash Nadkarni of the Boston Medical Center's Department of Psychiatry. (She co-authored the study "Why Do People Use Facebook?") "There are several facets of this activity that could influence our perception of our memories -- specifically by triggering memory bias, a cognitive bias that enhances or impairs the recall of a memory."
What do you get when you combine two companies that innovate some of the best products on the Web and have a propensity to build early and ship often? Some terrific tools and superb functionality, that's what. And that's what is happening today as browser maker Dolphin is teaming with cloud storage juggernaut Evernote.
Dolphin and Evernote are teaming up to release two extensions to Dolphin's Android browser. The first and most exciting is powerful and popular Web-based image editor Skitch. The other is Evernote itself. These new functions are the first time that Evernote has reached out to a third-party Android browser.
This weekend Google announced that it was shutting down Picnik, its handy dandy free photo editing software. I've used it on a number of occasions for fast, easy jobs that didn't require anything more than simple resizing. But let's be honest: How many of those types of quick photo editing jobs are just for Facebook photos? Aviary, a photo editor for Web and mobile apps, saw this opportunity and jumped on it, launching a photo editor app today for Facebook.
The golden age of mobile photography is upon us. Smartphones are now more capable at producing high-quality photos than digital cameras were just five years ago. Editing photos has been an evolving process but a lot of great services have been released to mobile users in the last year such as filters from Instagram or full-featured suites from Aviary and Skitch. Today, Aviary is making a dramatic update to its platform to gives users a set of powerful tools to edit photos on the go.
Last night, I pulled out my phone, snapped a photo and began cycling through Instagram filters looking for the best one. Nothing unusual there. I chose to share this particular image on Twitter and Facebook as well (something many Instagrammers do somewhat judiciously, lest we be spammy), and a few moments later noticed something a little different. Suddenly, I was getting an uptick in Facebook notifications telling me that people liked my photo. Not my post but my photo. Wait, what photo?
For as long as Instagram has been around, it has published photos at unique, Instagram-hosted URLs, which were then linked to on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The link to the image could be retweeted or "liked" on Facebook, but the image itself remained off on a cold, lonely island on Instagram's servers. The only people that could interact with the photo itself were your Instagram followers who, of course, could only do so using the photo-sharing service's iOS app. Well, that just changed.
Since Instagram never bothered to build a desktop Web interface, lots of third-party sites have stepped in to fill the void. They all offer ways to browse, like and comment on your Instagram feed from the desktop. For the most part, choosing one just comes down to which visual presentation you like best.
But Ink361, formerly known as Inkstagram, has built a few original features on top of Instagram. Today, it launched a map viewer, allowing users to browse a world map displaying geotagged Instagram photos.
For a service that only exists on one platform, Instagram has been wildly successfully. The photo-sharing app for iOS is now on track to hit 15 million users, which as a post SocialFresh points out, is how many people are using Foursquare today.
Among mobile-first social services, Foursquare is arguably the biggest right now, but the geolocation check-in app is on track to be surpassed soon, despite being a year older than Instagram and being available on every major mobile platform and having a highly functional Web-based UI.
