If you've ever taken a bunch of pictures on your phone and not immediately uploaded them then you're well aware of the problem - now they're essentially stuck on your phone. If you want to upload them to Facebook, you'll have to send them one at a time. Or you'll have to take the time to get all those photos off of your phone and onto your home computer.

Chute handles this by letting you quickly choose a number of photos and either share them with your friends or archive them online, making sure you never lose your photos again.

Chute, he explained, helps you to wirelessly share photos with different groups of your friends and family. Once you have a bunch of photos stuck on your phone, sharing them can be painful. Chute lets you choose groups of photos, select a group of your friends, and share the photos with them. If you use sites like Facebook, Twitter or Flickr to do this normally, that isn't a problem, explained Narain. Any of these sites can be directly integrated with Chute so that, as you upload your photos to Chute, you can also share them on one of these sites.

Here's how it works: When you upload photos to share with these friends, if they have the Chute app, they'll get a push notification. If they don't, however, they get an email with the photos embedded and attached to the email. And if they have the desktop app, they can download the photos and organize them offline.

The difference with Chute is that everything can happen wirelessly and the basic idea, said Narain, is that you can get all of your photos off of your phone and either shared or stored in the cloud, that way you never have to worry about losing your photos by losing your phone, having the hard drive go bad or anything like that.

"It's the simplest way," explained Narain, "to get to 'photo zero.'"

Chute will be available for iPhone and Android some time in March 2011.

Today, Facebook begins rolling out several improvements to Photos that will make the site much better for sharing high-quality photos. The new features include some UI changes to make browsing and uploading easier, as well as upping the pixel size for photos so that Facebook can handle higher resolution images.

Facebook will support print-quality, high resolution photos, increasing the size of photos stored from the current 720 pixels to 2048 pixels - an eight-fold increase.

Better Viewer for Browsing

The new viewer will make it easier to navigate photos and albums. Rather than going to a new page, photos will open in a light box in the center of the screen.

Easier Uploads and Tagging

In the blog post announcing the upgrades, Sam Odio, product manger for Facebook Photos, notes that the Photos feature on Facebook was initially a small project, run by only two staff members. With the popularity of photo-sharing via Facebook, it's clear that Facebook is working to make the site more photo-friendly. How this will play out for other photo sites, such as Flickr, remains to be seen.

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!

"Broadcasting to the world. Anti Mubarak demonstration at Tahiri Sq. Feb 1 2011." Flickr CC photo by darkroom productions

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Jan. 29, San Francisco. Flickr CC photo by Steve Rhodes

Feb. 1. Flickr CC photo by monasosh

The site had been in testing since mid-June by more than 800,000 members, but now the final version is available to all.

Flickr has also worked to streamline navigation, making it easier to browse photos or switch from one function to another. The most interesting part, to us at least, is the background story for each photo that is now included. Josh Nguyen describes the changes in a post on the Flickr blog:

Your photos already carry the narrative elements of who, what, where, when and how whenever you upload them to Flickr. Browse Flickr and you'll see stories within stories - photos within photostreams within groups or any kinds of combinations. So we've made it easier to find when a photo was taken, it's location, camera/exif info and your name in one location to the right of the image, along with the title and description. We think that photosharing will increasingly become story-sharing.

At the same time, we would caution users to make sure that they understand what information they are sharing when putting their photos online. Much of this can be altered or hidden, rather that unwittingly sharing location information along with your photos. For example, under the iPhone's settings, including location information in photographs can be toggled on or off. Although many of us often share location information with all of our photos, this new feature will highlight this information, making it more prominent.

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.

Well, rest easy. A U.S. District Court has decided that the AFP (and anyone else for that matter) does not have open rights to content you post to Twitter or photos to you post to Twitpic.

AFP argued that it did not need to pay up, as it had re-use rights to the photos because of Twitter's Terms of Service. According to the AFP lawyers, "this broad re-use is evidenced every day when Twitter/TwitPic posts are copied, reprinted, quoted, and republished by third parties."

U.S. District Court Judge William Pauley disagreed, and in his decision says that "the provision that Twitter 'encourage[s] and permit[s] broad re-use of Content' does not clearly confer a right on other users to re-use copyrighted postings."

Morel's copyright claim can now move forward (and content creators can be a little less panicky about what they've agreed to with Twitter's ToS).

The tags will appear on the "photo" tag on the Facebook Page, not on the walls and can be tagged by anyone on Facebook, not just people who have liked that page. For the start of the feature, only Facebook Pages with the "brands & products" or "people" categories can be tagged in photos. Facebook will look to expand that to more page categories over time.

This seems like a smart play by Facebook as it tries to become a stronger destination for companies and brands online. Marketers could focus viral ad campaigns around photo tagging like "show us the weirdest place you ever drank a Pepsi and win a trip to Bonnaroo" or something of that nature.

Are you going to start tagging brands in your Facebook photos? Let us know in the comments.

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.

YouTellYou is a fun and simple tool that allows users to grab, annotate, tag and share their pictures in an online magazine-type format. Users can pull in photos from Smugmug, Facebook, Flickr or one's own computer, then go to town in a frenzy of sequences, captions and true pictorial story-weaving.

When we published, we were pleased to see links with each photo to enlarge it or to find the original URL for each pic. The finished product also has a thorough commenting system and the option to share zines via email and Twitter.

Our wishlist for this app would be a drag-and-drop interface for pulling photos into the magazine, Facebook Connect for easier account creation, some kind of theming for finished zines, the ability to add photos from other users and the ability to reblog or share the content we created in more ways. Finally, the site navigation and overall design needs improvement; however, for a free app with no advertising, we can't complain too much.

We're torn on whether we personally would use the app again - for most on the RWW team, it'd be worth the effort to just build a webpage from scratch. But for end users, this kind of tool is indicative of a trend for amateur content creation and sharing in more polished ways than a simple Flickr slideshow or Facebook set.

What do you think - would you use YouTellYou to tell a story with your photos? Let us know what you think of the app in the comments.

And there's another nifty feature involving photo-tagging, too - your Google+ friends can now tag your Picasa photos.

According to a FAQ on Picasa's support site, the photo-sharing service provides up to 1 GB of free storage for photos and videos to its users. But since Google+ actively encourages storing and sharing photos - its Android app even offers an "instant upload" option - there may have been some concern about storage limits among Picasa users.

As it turns out, there's nothing to worry about. If you're signed up for Google+, photos up to 2048x2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes long won't count towards this free storage limit. And Google will automatically resize photos for you when you upload them to Google+, so they stay under the free size limit.

That means only photos uploaded directly to Picasa Web Albums over the 2048x2048 size will count towards the 1 GB of free storage, explains Google. And when that limit is reached, photos will be automatically resized.

Meanwhile, for non-Google+ users, there are slightly stricter rules: photos up to 800x800 and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards free storage. Again, when the 1 GB limit is reached, larger photos will be resized down.

Simply put, this means that whether you're on Google+ or not, Picasa offers unlimited free storage for photos and videos (under 15 minutes). The difference is that Google+ users can upload higher resolution photos to Plus/Picasa without being penalized.

Photo Tagging, Too!

There are a few other integrations between Google Plus and Picasa to take note of as well, for example, photo tagging.

This very Facebook-like feature lets anyone in your extended network in Google+ tag people in your public photos.  The person tagged is given the option to view the album and share it. If you've been tagged by someone in your Circles, the tag is automatically approved. You can remove tags on the photos homepage in Google+ or the Photos tab on your Google Profile. And if you would rather have more control, you can adjust this setting to enable manual approval of tags.

For those who were already using tagging in Picasa previously, all existing name tags in Picasa remain when you join Google+.

Additional source, re: storage - Ryo Cook, via Google Plus, of course; Above photo - it's never too early to be tagged, right Josie?

In collaboration with the Internet Archive, NASA already makes thousands of images and thousands of hours of video available on NASAimages.org. There, however, users can't comment on pictures.

"An Opportunity for the Public to Participate in the Process of Discovery"

According to Debbie Rivera, the lead for the NASA Images project at the agency's headquarters in Washington, the agency hopes that this new collaboration will provide "an opportunity for the public to participate in the process of discovery. In addition, the public can help the agency capture historical knowledge about missions and programs through this new resource and make it available for future generations."

NASA plans to release additional photo sets over time.

Lighting up the Sky

Launch of Friendship 7

Construction of Hangar One at NAS Sunnyvale circa 1931 - 1934

Dr. Robert H. Goddard at His Launch Control Shack