The photos are plotted out using partially transparent yellow circles instead of the standard Google Map pushpin. Click on any circle and a transparent overlay will appear on the map giving you a filmstrip view of the latest photos.

What a fun way to see the what, where, and when surrounding photos uploaded from last night's New Year's Eve celebrations!

There are millions of Creative Commons photos in flickr's database, but finding the right one can take time. The new Photo Dropper plugin simplifies the process by adding a panel to the "Write Post" screen that allows you to search flickr's database for Creative Commons photos.

After entering in your keyword and clicking "search," the plugin will return photos from flickr matching your search terms. Underneath each photo are four links. Three links, "S", "M", and "L", allow you to post that size photo into your blog. The fourth link will open the flickr page in a new window, so you can double-check the licensing requirements if necessary.

The photo which is placed into your blog automatically has text appended underneath it that says "photo credit" and links to the user who is licensing the photo. The small Creative Commons logo precedes the text as well.

Photo Dropper also offers an option for commercial users. In the Options section, they can check the "commercial" check box to exclude photos whose license contains a non-commercial limitation.

You can download Photo Dropper for free from here.

Flickr already allowed third-party developers to search for photos within a certain radius, but regular users could not easily access this feature from within Flickr.

Besides the default settings, you can also choose to only see pictures taken by your contacts, or images that were taken at a certain date, and within a certain radius from the original picture.

You can access these 'nearby' pages by either adding '/nearby' to the URL of any image that has been geotagged, or by first clicking on the map link under 'Additional Information' and then 'See nearby photos and videos.' It would be nice if Flickr made it a bit easier to access this feature by just adding a link from the actual photo page.

In the announcement, Flickr also explains a number of more advanced query parameters that you can use to find nearby pictures, and it will be interesting to see what third-party developers will do with this.

This is definitely a cool new way to explore Flickr's photo collection. By default, there is a certain degree of randomness to which photos you will see, which makes using this new feature even more fun.

Flickr, by the way, celebrates its 5th birthday tomorrow and now hosts over 3 billion images.

In order to choose contributors, Picasa lets you access your Google contacts, and you can invite individual contacts or groups that you have already set up in Google Contacts (think: co-workers, family, etc.).

Sadly, you won't be able to use the Picasa desktop software to upload images to these albums if you are an invited contributor - only the actual owner of the album can. Also, if you use Internet Explorer, you can only upload five photos at a time.

For now the mobile edition of Sharpcast Photos enables users to view photo collections on their mobile phones, as well as share desktop PC and web photos, and sync camera-phone photos automatically to a user’s PC and the web. Basically photos can now be synced up for a single user across mobile phones, wireless PDA, all of a user's PCs, and their web presence with Sharpcast. This includes backing up the photos, organizing them into albums and keeping everything in sync across devices.

The company claims this is "the first instance where Blackberry-like push synchronization capability is available to the average consumer, outside of an enterprise setting." Of course, when it comes to mobile the big question is: which phones does [insert any mobile web service] support? In this case, Sharpcast Photos mobile edition currently supports Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphones, Samsung Blackjack, the Palm Treo 700w, the Motorola Q, the HTC Star Trek (Cingular 3125) the UT Starcom 6700, and "dozens of others". They say that more phone platforms will be supported in 2007. In another deal, Sharpcast announced a partnership with Alltel to distribute their technology in Windows Mobile phones.

Sync is something to watch in '07

Sharpcast is one of those web technologies that really is 'next generation'. Since we, as consumers, increasingly use a whole range of Internet-connected devices - we need some way to synch our personal data across those devices. It's an area where Microsoft is strong at (with their dominant Windows platform), but the likes of Google and Yahoo are not that far behind either - in their cases, the Web is the platform. Small startups like Sharpcast are providing a lot of innovation in this area, so keep an eye out for them and others to emerge as a force in 2007.

That's where CoolFlick comes in handy.

To begin searching for photos with CoolFlick, you can either go directly to the CoolFlick site to enter your query or you can string it into a URL like http://www.coolflick.org/index.php?q=portland. That's it. Using the search terms, CoolFlick loads up a series of matching photos. Then you can begin panning side-to-side and zooming in for more detail just like you would with Cooliris.

But here's something even better: You can take that view with you and share it with your friends. CoolFlick provides an embed code that allows you to add Cooliris viewing functionality to any site you'd like.

We first started testing CoolFlick with an eye toward browsing for photos. But there are some drawbacks to using the service that way. First and most obvious, you can only get photos ranked by relevance, not by other parameters. Second, there is no advanced search. The team here is always on the lookout for compelling photos licensed under Creative Commons. There's no way to discern that with CoolFlick. Finally, CoolFlick only provides a limited set of photos.

It would be great to see the service improve to include some of these features - or to implement other features offered through the Flickr API.

For now, we can overlook those flaws in favor of using the service to embed Cooliris views of content we find. Think of the applications: gathering event shots, sharing trip photos, compiling images by subject, displaying only images with the "coolflick" tag... the list goes on and on.

We're sure you can come up with some creative applications of this technology. To give it a try, visit CoolFlick and enter some search terms. To embed the view of the images you've found, click on the little "".

As one would expect, Live Photos integrates directly with Microsoft's Photo Gallery. This integration is similar to Google's combination of Picasa Web Albums and the Picasa desktop application. You can upload photos, manage your galleries, and keep albums in sync. Live Photos will also be directly integrated into the new Live Toolbar, which will display previews of pictures that you and your friends have shared on the service.

Features

The web interface lets you see your photos as thumbnails, thumbnails with additional information, or as very small icons. The overall interface is similar to Flickr's, with a photo-strip for navigating your album at the top right of the screen. Underneath the strip is the general information about the photo you are currently looking at, as well as the individual web address for this photo.

One of the niftier features of Live Photos is the Slideshow function, which changes its background color depending on the dominant color of the current photo. This is a subtle effect, but it shows that Microsoft spent a lot of time on getting the details of this new product right.

You can share your albums with very granular permissions, and also share individual photos. Every photo can be tagged and your visitors can also leave comments.

Very Few Negatives

Overall, the Live Photos team did a great job in developing a product that would appeal to most mainstream users. We did not run into any real problems during our tests, but we came across a few functions that were still missing from the product.

It would, for example, be nice if you could choose the picture to represent your album on the front page. Currently, the first picture in every album is automatically set to represent this album across Windows Live.

Also, it would be nice to see how much space you have left on your SkyDrive account while uploading your pictures.

Verdict

These negatives, however, are indeed minor and the combination of the Windows Live Photo Gallery with the Live Photo service looks like a winner to us, especially in combination with SkyDrive, which now features 25GB of online storage.

In combination with the new Live Profiles and Live Groups, Microsoft has created a very comprehensive suite of social online sharing tools and matching desktop applications.

The app lets you listen to the movie's sound track, see photos, watch trailers and best of all - interact with an on-screen image of the monster Carol. Carol can be tickled, hit, he'll throw things at you, you can put him to sleep at night and he'll eat photos of the contacts on your phone.

Either way, there's something I think all of us can enjoy about listening to Karen O sing in the background while watching a big cuddly monster eat photos of people we know from our phone.

Flickr, meanwhile, has gained on Yahoo!'s main photo property, jumping from the #6 photo website last year, to the #3 position today. According to Charlene Li of Forrester Research, the move is a no-brainer.

Because Flickr has tools that allow users to embed metadata -- tags, EXIF info, etc. -- directly into photos, Flickr images tend to be easier for photo search engines to index, says Li. Yahoo! had no choice but to make this move, she told USA Today.

Yahoo! plans to move users off of the Photos property over the next three months, but will be taking an unorthodox approach and not forcing people to Flickr. Users will be given the option of exporting their images to other sites, including competitors Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish and Photobucket. Exporting to Flickr will be a one-click process, according to Yahoo!

Flickr generally offers most of the tools that Yahoo! Photos offers. One area in which Yahoo! currently trumps Flickr, however, is prints. While Flickr has started to offer some printed products, such as photo cards via a partnership with Moo, Yahoo! Photos offers a full range of photo printing options, such as mugs, aprons, posters, and even custom bottles of wine via the mail and for in store pick-up at Target department stores. I would guess that this might be an important feature for many users, especially since Yahoo! Photos generally caters to an older audience, which Yahoo! will need to move over to Flickr.

It is interesting to note that comScore reports a different story on traffic to photo websites than does Hitwise. According to March comScore data, Yahoo! Photos and Flickr both trump Photobucket for worldwide traffic and in the US, Flickr just overtook Yahoo! Photos for the first time. Together, they would by far equate to the largest photo website by traffic.

Conclusion

So what does this all mean? At one time, Yahoo! Photos was the place to share photos online, and it still hosts many more photos than Flickr (about 2 billion versus 500 million), but Yahoo!'s homegrown property was never able to match the buzz that Flickr created. Flickr has soared among a younger demographic, and merging the two competing properties was inevitable. Everyone expected it when Yahoo! bought Flickr in March 2005 (the way we all expect del.icio.us to eventually kill off MyWeb), it was just a matter of which site would eat the other.

This appears to be the famed "Peanut Butter Manifesto" in action as Yahoo! consolidates some of its redundant services (in fact, Brad Garlinghouse, SVP of Yahoo! and author of the memo, told Rafe Needleman last night he was "eating his own peanut butter"). But, Bill Tancer of Hitwise expects that Yahoo! will lose some users in the switch. What do you think?

To chose a CC license as the default for your photo uploads, you have to scroll down towards the bottom of your privacy settings page. Searching for CC photos requires that you scroll to the very bottom of the Advanced Search page or start at this page. There would be a whole lot more CC photos on Flickr if those options were given better placement on the site. In 2006 13% of the photos uploaded to Flickr were given a CC license; today that number is 4%. Flickr is much bigger and now includes the perhaps more cautious former users of Yahoo Photos as well. Only about 1% of the photos on Flickr can be used in a commercial setting (like this blog) even with attribution given; otherwise, explicit permission is needed. That's a real loss.

More collaboration equals more creativity equals more communication equals a better world - and more photography for Flickr. It certainly seems in their interests to promote CC more as well.

What do you think? Should Flickr do more to promote Creative Commons or ought we simply be grateful for everything they've done already?

iLovePhotos is desktop software for the Mac only (Windows version coming...well...maybe one day). Designed to compete primarily with iPhoto , iLovePhotos aims to make it easier to organize and share your photos with family and friends.

According to the company, the software "automatically detects the faces of individuals in each picture." That's true to a point, but that statement implies that the software is recognizing faces and associating names to go along with them after an initial bit of training. At least, that's what we think "facial recognition" should mean. But that is not the case with iLovePhotos.

Instead, iLovePhotos recognizes the faces of various people in a photo and draws a box around them. Then, in a special view (the "tagger" view) which displays just the faces, you can identify a face as belonging to a name and then quickly tag the rest of the faces that are of that same person. But get this straight - it's you that's doing the tagging, not iLovePhotos. The software just has an interface that makes that process less painful than before.

Facial Recognition in iLovePhotos

Besides people's names, photos can be tagged with other words, too, like "vacation," "beach," "dogs," "party," "wedding," etc., just as you would any photo on flickr. Tagged collections of photos are represented with an image of your choosing and display in the right sidebar of the app. After you've tagged your photos, you can easily pull up all the photos associated with that tag by dragging and dropping the photo representing that tag into the toolbar at the top of the app. Drag other tags alongside it to narrow your results. For example, drag a tag for a person and a tag for an event into the toolbar and the app displays all the photos of that person at the event.

But Sharing Is Automatic!

The tagging aspect to iLovePhotos is easier than in some other applications, but it's not ideal. Automatic facial recognition would be so much better. They tell us that they hope to include that in a later release, though.

Something that is automatic about the app is its sharing feature. You can specify that all photos with a particular tag are automatically emailed - you don't have to do anything beyond the initial configuration. Now that's an automated feature we like.

Setting Up Sharing

Slideshows Are Automatic, Too...And Smart

Finally, the software creates personalized "intelligent" slideshows which can be embedded on any site or watched on your iPhone, iPod, or AppleTV. These slideshows use an algorithm to determine what photos you haven't seen lately and displays them for you. If you have just uploaded new photos, you may see those in the slideshow, but even if your collection has been static for a while, the app knows to show you those photos you haven't seen for some time.

Would You Use It?

Because your computer is often the midway point between camera and cloud, desktop software for organizing your photos can still be a useful tool. But does iLovePhotos offer enough features to make it something you would want to try? Let us know what you think.

The tie-in with this post is that Sharpcast is a promising new company building synchronization software. We wrote about it previously on Read/WriteWeb:

"In a nutshell Sharpcast enables you to synch your data across the Web, multiple PCs and your mobile phone. It's a real-time synchronisation engine and photos is just the first application of this - soon Sharpcast will be extended to all types of files. Indeed the platform was always intended to go well beyond photos."

Today Sharpcast released a further upgrade to their Photos app, making the sync functionality more powerful and offering a 5GB free account.

Screenshot of the desktop client

“The future of all applications lies in the seamless integration of the desktop and the web so that your files and data are always backed up for you, and you can access them wherever you are, on whatever device you’re using and whether you’re online or offline. Sharpcast Photos is the first example of how powerful this type of universal synchronization can be.”

It's a lovely piece of software, but what's most interesting to me is the potential to use the syncing technology in business settings.

Sharpcast for all your files by end of '06

I spoke to Sharpcast CEO Gibu Thomas about their future direction. He's said previously that Sharpcast is using their Photos app to "nail the user experience before we extend it to other data types". So I asked him how far away are they from nailing it? 

He said it's "more that the online/offline seamless user experience is not something that people are used to [...] it's an experience that people don't expect outside of a corporate Exchange environment." So with Photos, Sharpcast is trying to get people (i.e. consumers) used to the beauty of that seamless experience - it's an education process.

Gibu also told me they had to build a lot of the technology from scratch, so it's an ongoing and iterative process with the technology too. But he promises that by the end of the year the Sharpcast experience will be extended "beyond photos and to any type of file - basically Sharpcast for all your stuff."

Very exciting! I think Sharpcast is one of the more innovative web companies around currently, and so I'll write more about my talk with Gibu in a future post. For now, I recommend you check out the new Sharpcast Photos beta.

Presto has launched a photo service which is focused on helping get photos to people who are not online. This might not be a spicy web 2.0 ajax application, but it solves a big problem and does it very well. Here is how it works. Say your grand mother is not web savvy. For $149.99 you purchase an HP Printing Mailbox and then signup for the Presto service, which is $9.99 per month. You install the device in your grandma's house and then login onto Presto.com.

You then create an email address, like mygrandma@presto.com. To ensure that no spam can get in, you add a list of emails that are allowed to send emails to your grandma. That's all. Now anyone with their email address on the list can simply send pictures to e.g. mygrandma@presto.com. The photos are extracted and automatically sent to the Presto device at your grandma's house. If you are busy, then you are done. If you have some more time, you can customize each photo by selecting from numerous templates that add flare and spice to each picture.

This is an example of technology going through several iterations and ending up with really simple and elegant solution.