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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.

Twitter has just announced the rollout of user galleries for tweeted images. Galleries will show images shared using all the major services supported by Twitter, including yFrog, TwitPic, Instagram and Twitter's new native images. Galleries can be found on the user's profile page through the Web interface. They will display up to 100 recent images in chronological order. They won't display video, nor will they show images tweeted before January 1, 2010.

Twitter profile pages will now display thumbnails of the user's four most recent tweeted photos on the right sidebar, right under their vital Twitter statistics, and clicking 'View All' opens the user's gallery in the current window. This is the first new feature Twitter has built upon its native image sharing, which launched this summer. Until that launch, third-party services handled image sharing on Twitter. The new user galleries will support those services, but the galleries themselves will only be available from Twitter's website.

Should photographers be concerned about Google Plus? This is the subject on an ongoing debate right now, due to the wording Google uses in its Terms of Service - specifically parts that seem to indicate it will have rights to photos posted on the new social network. But some folks, including both professional photographers and an intellectual property attorney say the reaction is overblown. The issue is not a "Google" problem - it's something to consider before posting your images online, anywhere on the Web.

This week, the lawyers at stock photography leader Getty Images have decided to weigh in on the situation, too, as it relates to the company's Flickr Collection contributors. Getty's verdict? "We're OK with Google+," it says.

"Google Plus may carry dangers for photographers," reads the headline on The Washington Post. While we agree that the Google Plus Terms of Service could use clearer wording (in fact, all Terms of Service, everywhere, could!) and we applaud those who have taken the time to actually read through the darned thing, the conclusions we're going to draw are different.

Should professional photographers stay away from Google Plus? Is Google going to steal the rights to your photos and stop you from making money from them? No, they're not.

"Mobile video is shaky by definition," says Norman Winarsky, VP at SRI Ventures, part of Silcon Valley-based SRI International, a nonprofit performing sponsored R&D for governments, foundations and businesses. "A shaky image affects bandwidth and reduces the experience," he explains.

But with the technology Google has licensed from SRI, image stabilization will no longer be a concern ... at least on Android. Google is implementing the SRI tech in its Google Talk application, to deliver better video on Android 3.0+ devices. And that may be only the beginning of Google's computer vision plans.

There's a lot to like about Google Plus, the new social network from everyone's favorite search engine: the design, the thoughtfully created and easy-to-use privacy settings (Circles), the built in mobile chatting (Huddles) and video chatting (Hangouts) features, the smart news reader (Sparks), and more. But if Google Plus had one "killer" feature, it would definitely be the instant photo uploads from Android.

Why is this? Because it's the one feature that will actually encourage adoption.

I very rarely review a single mobile app these days - we prefer to do mobile app round-ups here on ReadWriteWeb - but I'm going to make an exception this time for Photogram. This new iPhone application, launched just yesterday, is deserving of a mention, if only for catching my attention among a sea of mobile photo app startups.

From the description, the app seems somewhat basic, maybe even a little boring: share photos via Facebook, Twitter or email. But it does so with a simplicity, elegance and ease that I've often found lacking elsewhere.

Popular iPhone photo sharing app Instagram captured the hearts of nearly five million users this year despite, or perhaps because of, a surprising lack of features. The super-simple photo app let you apply filters and post out to other networks. It didn't let you do much more than that.

The company has slowly added features over recent months and today unveiled a new version of its app with three big new features that could make a big difference in the ways we use Instagram. Those changes are upgraded user biographies, hashtag autocomplete and a new page to view all the photos you've clicked "Like" on in the past. Can Instagram keep its clean simplicity while adding more and more features? Time will tell, but these changes look to me like good ones so far.

Twitter will launch its own photo sharing feature very soon, according to a purported scoop by Alexia Tsotsis today at TechCrunch. (Similarly loose lips confirmed the same to AllThingsD's Liz Gannes later today.) After years of struggles to stay online and apparently giving up any hope of retrieving archival messages in text for its users, a move into photo hosting and sharing would be another show of confidence by Twitter in its newfound architectural stability.

But would you trust Twitter to host your photos? Twitter, the network for fleeting thoughts, in short form? The service that has let so much history pass through its fingers with so little agony voiced over its barely accessible archives and shallow search? I don't know if I, or others, will trust Twitter to host photos. I want mine cross-posted to Flickr, just for safety's sake. I asked, on Twitter, if other people would trust Twitter with their photos and got a resounding No. Tweets are Tweets, but photos are something special.

Facebook announced today that it is launching a feature where users can tag Pages in photos. That means users can now tag brands, businesses, musicians and personalities in their photo streams. Take a picture of your friend holding Pabst Blue Ribbon while dancing at the club? You can now tag your friend and the beer.

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.