This Week's Sponsor:

PowerPhotos

The Ultimate Toolbox for Photos on the Mac

Posts tagged with "photos"

Instamap for iPad Lets You Browse Instagram Photos By Location, Tags

Ever since the release of Instagallery in March, there haven’t been many Instagram clients coming to the iPad. Whilst the platform has seen an explosion of iPhone-connected applications, Mac and web tools aimed at enhancing the regular Instragram experience with features like postcard printing and screensavers, the iPad feels like it’s been left behind in the race to shipping the ultimate third-party Instagram app to browse photo streams with the comfort of a 9.7-inch screen. Instamap, a new app by NextRoot, is probably the nicest and simplest use of Instagram’s API that I’ve seen on the iPad so far. Available at $1.99 on the App Store, Instamap doesn’t let you upload photos but it’s got some clever maps-related features that you can use to browse photos by location – say you want to see Instagram pictures shot in Paris, just enter “Paris, France” in the search box and hit Go. Instamap will display a new photo stack on a map (If you choose map view) or a simple (animated) grid of photos for you to tap around, like, and comment. Similarly, in the same “subscriptions” section in the sidebar, Instamap enables you to enter a tag to browse photos associated to a specific keyword, useful if you’d like to see photos sorted by context rather than location. These subscriptions can be deleted and refreshed at any time – the grid design is beautiful and the animations pretty neat.

All the way down in the sidebar, Instamap also gives you access to your stream and currently popular photos on the service. While I generally avoid the Popular tab because I don’t care about vintage kitten photos and other people’s meals, the possibility to check out my feed within Instamap is really welcome. It would be even better with native uploads. I also would like to see buttons to load more photos and “shuffle” in a future update.

At $1.99, Instamap is an elegant and lightweight Instagram client that feels good on the iPad and works well in the way it can group photos by tag or location. Get the app here.

Echofon Releases Photofon: See Photos From Your Twitter Timeline

Released a few minutes ago in the App Store, Photofon is a new app by Echofon, makers of a popular Twitter client for Mac and iOS devices, that strips away all content from your Twitter timeline to display photos shared by people you follow. More often than not, especially if you follow hundreds of users, there’s a chance photos are skipped when checking out news on Twitter because either a) you don’t care about what people are eating or b) you’re just following that guy for the news he posts, and you don’t want to see his cat. For as much as we like cats (and puppies in general) here at MacStories, I agree that sometimes people I follow share photos I really don’t care about or don’t add anything to the experience of being on Twitter to discover interesting new content, and not kittens. But other times, these people share some beautiful iPhone photography that I don’t want to miss, yet I do because I don’t have a proper client that’s solely focused on media, rather than tweets.

Photofon is a Twitter client built around photos. Whether they’re shared on Instagram, img.ly, the omnipresent Twitpic, Flickr or yfrog (I haven’t been able to test other services), these photos will show up against a minimal dark background that doesn’t distract, and makes colors truly shine on the iPhone 4’s Retina Display. The original tweet is displayed alongside buttons to fave and retweet, so you won’t forget about sharing or saving that photo you really loved. Pinch and zoom gestures allow you to see a photo in greater detail, and pull-to-refresh at the top does just what you expect. I’ve noticed the app loaded around 30 photos from my timeline, and I’d definitely like to see a button to load more, because if I’m going to fire up a client only to see photos, I want to see them all.

Photofon is free and available here. It’s not universal, but it’s a neat way to check out Twitter’s photography on your iPhone without getting lost amidst news and trends.

Instagram 1.8 Released: New Comment Screen, Autocomplete, Speed

A few days after announcing 4.25 million users in 7 months and roughly two weeks after the latest 1.7 update, Instagram just released version 1.8 in the App Store, adding the usual speed and stability optimizations and a couple of new interesting features. The app went under some speed-related updates before, but now it feels snappier than ever, really: I’m sure the future version 1.9 will make this statement obsolete, but Instagram 1.8 is fast at opening new screens, loading photos and comments. Speaking of which, the team reorganized the comment section to make it faster and more interactive – check out the screenshot above or simply try to leave a comment to a photo and see how it works for you. You get full access to a comment interface that, if you’re viewing your own photo, allows you to delete comment with a swipe or by hitting the gear icon in the upper right corner. In the text entry field, Instagram now comes with username autocompletion for faster writing and replies – just type the “@” symbol and Instagram will retrieve a list of users you can address a reply to. But more importantly, version 1.8 now lets me double-tap on photos to like them, which is incredibly more intuitive than hitting a dedicated heart-shaped button. Overall, it’s (once again) a nice update.

Get Instagram 1.8 in the App Store.

Instagram: 4.25 Million Users In 7 Months

With the launch of an official API and hundreds of connected applications proliferating in Apple’s iOS and Mac App Stores, there was little doubt photo sharing service Instagram was off to a great success after a few months. Back in December, two months after public launch, it was reported the service had reached 1 million users – a pretty big milestone considering the app was (and still is) just an iPhone app to snap and share pictures. Instagram still doesn’t have an online interface to customize profiles and browse users, but thanks to the API it’s seen lots of different implementations the developers probably couldn’t even imagine last year.

As tweeted by The New York Times’ Nick Bilton this morning, Instagram has reached 4.25 million users in roughly 7 months. The impressive result has surely been made possible by the wide adoption of Instagram by Twitter celebrities, popular brands and Apple’s features in the App Store homepage – the fact that several Twitter clients and apps like Flipboard directly integrate with Instagram also helped founder Kevin Systrom and the rest of the team getting photos shared with the service off the ground.

Instagram has reached another important milestone and we’re sure there’s more to come in the next weeks. The team has been busy updating the app recently with new features and speed optimizations, though an iPad 2 counterpart or web app are still nowhere to be seen. [via BusinessInsider]

Picturescue Recovers Photos from iOS Backups

When an iPhone or iPad gets stolen or lost, we immediately worry about our personal data stored on the device (like email, contacts, passwords and history) being accessed by someone else with no good intentions. Whilst Apple’s free Find my iPhone service allows us to easily block and wipe a device that’s no longer with us, the loss of personal media like photos and videos is something we can’t fix remotely, at least not yet. Picturescue, a new Mac app by developers Pádraig Kennedy and John Ryan, provides a dead-simple solution to recover photos from an iOS device: rather than plugging directly into an iPhone or iPad, Picturescue reads the backup stored locally on your computer to retrieve photos and export them in their original format to a new location. This means that, provided you’ve synced your device with iTunes and you’ve decided to save an unencrypted backup (Picturescue can’t read encrypted iTunes backups for now), you’ll be able to view photos and export them at any time. It’s as easy as firing up the software, selecting the device in the sidebar, and choosing the photos to export.

Picturescue can be downloaded for free if you only want to view photos found in the backup file, and a $4.99 purchase gives you the possibility to export. The lack of support for encrypted backups is a major downside, but considering iTunes defaults to unencrypted backups on Mac and Windows machines, this shouldn’t be a problem for all those people that don’t care about password-protecting their iOS device backups. Get the app here.

PhotoForge 2 Released, Brings Powerful Image Editing to iOS

Announced last week as a successor to the popular lightweight image editing software for iPhone and iPad PhotoForge (which we reviewed here), PhotoForge 2 is a complete rewrite of the original app, sporting a completely new UI, more image editing features, new export options and a faster engine to bring semi-professional editing to the iPhone. In spite of the iPad version being advertised in the launch promo video, PhotoForge 2 is available today at $0.99 on the iPhone, with the iPad version coming in the next weeks as a Universal update. The GhostBird Software developers have decided to make PhotoForge 2 a standalone app, as the App Store doesn’t come with an upgrade policy and they felt that version 2.0 was worth paying a separate price. Indeed, the app sports several new functionalities and paying $0.99 now with the promise of an iPad update for free relatively soon sounds like a great deal. Plus, once the iPad update comes out the app will be priced at $2.99 for the remainder of May, although the full retail price is $4.99. That means you can get the app now and save $4, or wait for the iPad update and still save $2. The app has started propagating this morning in iTunes and is available here.

PhotoForge 2 is a full-featured image editing app for iOS, perhaps the most powerful available on the App Store. Whilst I can’t go through all the features now as I’ve played with the iPhone app for less than an hour (but we’ll make sure to have a full review once the iPad app is released), I can say there’s a notable difference when using the PhotoForge 1 and this 2.0 update. PhotoForge 2.0 has got a whole new interface revolving around the concept of “docks” (like the standard OS X one) that are basically a list of icons and buttons to navigate through the various image editing functions. Once you load a photo from your Camera Roll and start a new project,  you can tap on the FX button in the bottom toolbar to scroll through a series of effects to apply to your photo in real-time, most of them being similar to the ones offered in apps like Instagram and Camera+. In PhotoForge 2.0, photos fit to screen by default, but you can double-tap them to edit them at full resolution looking at all pixels on screen. As I said effects are applied in real-time, with a loading bar at the top showing progress – on the iPhone 4, everything is quite smooth and responsive, though I expect the iPad 2 version to be a little snappier given the A5 processor. There’s lot of stuff to play with in PhotoForge 2.0, including layers, exposure control, brightness and contrast, or standard RGB levels. It feels like a mini Photoshop version, ported to a smaller screen with controls rewritten for multi-touch. Of course, you can’t expect all the functionalities of Photoshop to be available in PhotoForge 2.0, but this thing does undoubtedly have more options and settings than the average iOS photo editor. You can tweak opacity and blend modes, create and duplicate layers or fill a new one with color, copy and paste masks or apply sharpening and noise reduction.

Because the feature list is huge and I’ve only been playing with the app this morning, here’s a list of functionalities for comparison’s sake:

  • Curves & Levels with RGB, CMYK and LAB colorspaces.
  • Sharpening & Noise Reduction
  • HSL & Channel Mixer controls
  • Brightness & Contrast, Exposure, Vibrance
  • White Balance, Shadows & Highlights
  • Auto Exposure & Auto White Balance
  • Precise Image Cropping and Resizing
  • Customize your film, lens, flash and much more to create amazing looking photographs with the Pop! Cam add-on
  • Great Black & White and Sepia filters
  • Lomo, Gothic, Dreamy and 3D
  • Crystallize, Pointallize and Impressionist.
  • Bulge, Pinch & Twirl

PhotoForge 2.0 is meant for both for professional and casual users (thanks to an intuitive interface), and I have a feeling the iPad counterpart, with larger real screen estate, will make image editing even better as I’ve noticed editing on the iPhone can be sometimes a little frustrating because of the smaller screen – meaning, when applying some effects or setting other options there’s a chance you won’t see the full image in front of you, and the iPad should fix this issue. However, I was impressed by the sharing functionalities of PhotoForge 2.0, which include Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter sharing, FTP and Dropbox uploading, or standard emailing and saving to the Camera Roll. The selection of services is really impressive and the Dropbox addition quite welcome, though I’d like to see direct CloudApp integration as well.

As it stands now, I think PhotoForge 2.0 is the most powerful and beautiful image editor for iPhone. The iPad version is something I’m really looking forward to, and while you wait you should get the app here at $0.99. It’s simply a great update.

WordPress iOS App Updated with Stats, Quick Photo, Fixes

The official WordPress app for iOS, available for iPhone and iPad and often criticized by many (including me) for its proverbial instability and lack of poweruser-oriented features, has been updated earlier today to include a new button to quickly insert a new photo – they call the feature Quick Photo – as well as stats for your WordPress blogs. The new Quick Photo functionality only works on the iPhone for now, and WordPress notes in the 2.8 changelog this may be the last update that supports older systems running iPhone OS 3. Quick Photo is clearly oriented to those users who maintain a photo-centric blog, as it’s meant to let you snap a picture as quickly as possible without even selecting the destination blog first. Stats, on the other hand, are a welcome addition that are enabled by default on WordPress.com blogs, but require the installation of the standalone plugin or Jetpack on self-hosted WordPress.org blogs. The WordPress developers write on the iOS blog:

Finally you’re able to check your blog’s statistics on the go. There are charts for Daily, Weekly, and Monthly page views, swipe over them to see the others. You can also see Daily Views by date, as well as top Post Views, Referrers, Search Terms, and Clicks for the past 7 days.

Last, the update also introduces localizations for 10 languages (Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, German, Dutch, French, and Croatian) and bug fixes. WordPress says they’ve fixed 3/4 of the problems reported by users in the previous version, released in March. Get the app here.

360 Panorama Gets Major Update with New UI, Social Features and More

Occipital’s 360 Panorama is an iPhone app we first reviewed in December that, through an intuitive interface, allowed you to snap a panoramic shot using your iPhone by simply panning it around to capture things around you. The concept was simple: instead of merging multiple shots into a single panoramic one like most apps do, 360 let you “paint” the panorama on screen by waving the iPhone and making sure light conditions were optimal. A few weeks later, Occipital also showcased the gyroscope support for 360 shots uploaded online and visible in Mobile Safari, thanks to the new API introduced in iOS.

360 Panorama is receiving a major update today, bringing the app to version 4.0 and introducing a new icon, a redesign interface and brand new social features to share photos online and browse panoramas shared by other users. As in the previous version, you can see a panorama being built in real-time as you move your iPhone’s camera around; panorama quality has been improved in the new version, thanks to a new algorithm used by Occipital that will also increase quality over time by processing the image synthesizing server-side. After a few tests, it really looks like Occipital has managed to find a way to create even better panoramas, which were good-looking in 360 version 3.0 but far from perfect. The interface has been redesigned and streamlined to be more intuitive, elegant and accessible; the sharing functionalities on Twitter and Facebook have been completely overhauled to make it easier to send a panorama off to your favorite social network, and Occipital also took care of implementing private uploads and deeper sharing options. On top of that, the app now supports multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts and the image saving process has been made faster to allow users to build a panorama and share it in seconds. 360 Panorama now works on the iPad 2 as well, with the engine being optimized to take advantage of the device’s dual-core CPU.

Last, Occipital is also launching an all-new online interface for panoramas called 360verse that allows users to browser for pano shots using a search functionality based on location and time of upload. Furthermore, the app now packs a new 360.io shortening system, as well as the possibility to create Occipital user accounts to check out all the photos you’ve uploaded over time.

360 Panorama 4.0 has been released a few minutes ago in the App Store and it’s available as a limited time offer at $0.99. Get it here.

Instagram 1.7 Released, Brings New Profile View

While we’re still playing with Carousel and looking at its beautiful interface for the Mac, Instagram – the official app – has received a majore update on the iPhone that reaches version 1.7 and adds a number of new features, alongside the omnipresent speed improvements and stability enhancements (for older phones this time). Instagram 1.7 brings custom notifications for likes and comments – in the Edit Profile screen, you can specify whether you want to receive notifications from everyone, people you follow, or simply turn them off. This is a welcome addition if you were being annoyed by continuous notifications and badges. In the same screen, you can now add a Bio to display on your public profile. And profiles have gotten a brand new grid view as well, which makes it easy to check out photos at a glance on profiles that have hundreds, if not thousands, of uploads.

Instagram 1.7 is available now in the App Store.