This Week's Sponsor:

PowerPhotos

The Ultimate Toolbox for Photos on the Mac

Posts tagged with "photos"

Turn Your iPhone Into A Vintage Polaroid

If your iPhone, besides being a phone, also happens to have become your best camera and you fancy some old-style gadgetry in your pockets, perhaps you’d like to consider Ryan Astle’s Photoroid skins.

Available in iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Evo models, the skin costs $15 for the iPhone and $20 for the tablet. It’s made of 2 pieces of art for the front and back of the iPhone, it really resembles an old Polaroid camera and, personally, I think it’s got something that reminds me of the Instagram icon as well.

With all these apps that apply vintage effects to your photos (and videos, too), the Photoroid skin seems appropriate. [Gizmodo via Infectious]

This iPhone App Snaps Pictures With The Volume Buttons

Remember when Camera+ was removed from the App Store because the developers hid a feature in it that allowed you to snap pictures using the iPhone’s volume buttons? Apple didn’t want that and as far as I know they’re still going against apps that modify iOS’ standard functionalities such as volume adjustment. But then why is there an app in the App Store that lets you do just that? Quick Snap, available at $1.99 and released two weeks ago, enables you to take pictures using the physical volume buttons. I just bought the app and it works.

Not only does Quick Snap take pictures with the “+” volume button, it also triggers a timed shot with the other button. I don’t know how this app made its way into the App Store, also considering how much the developers promote the feature on the app’s description page. But other than that, the app isn’t really great. It’s got a less than decent UI and its animations when changing from portrait to landscape mode are slow. It saves pics to the camera roll, but it hasn’t got basic camera features such as zoom or tap to focus.

But hey, it’s got the volume buttons thing. If $1.99 is a good price for such functionality, then go ahead and buy it before Apple pulls it. I’m just surprised the App Review Team missed this one.

Update: And just as we expected, the app is gone. It wasn’t that great anyway.

Camera+ 2.0 Is Live In The App Store

As announced by tap tap tap yesterday, here comes a new version of Camera +. Camera + 2.0 is a major update that contains a huge list of new features and interface improvements, such as a redesigned lightbox, faster start-up times, a timer shooting mode, lots of new modes and effects. From a first look at the app, it looks like one massive update – which is free for existing users.

I’m testing the app right now and I can already say the tap tap tap developers really did a great job in optimizing everything to make the app faster. The SLR screen has been removed to let Camera+ start up directly to the camera UI, just like Apple’s own Camera app. The various shooting modes are accessible from a popover menu next to the camera button, timer shooting mode will let you choose between different intervals before shooting a picture. It’s really nice. The lightbox animations are faster, each photo has its own details such as ISO and location, there are several new effects available under the in-app purchase “I love Analog” pack. You can adjust these effects with a slider, and preview them as demo.

Everything feels new and improved in Camera+ 2.0. From a first quick run, I’m seriously impressed by what tap tap tap has achieved with “just an iPhone app”. The interface design elements on screen sport some beautiful pixels, too. Most of all, Camera+ doesn’t “force you” to share anything, I see it more as a full-featured replacement of the default Camera app that allows me to edit and apply neat effects to my photos, or not. Camera+ 2.0 – but this was a strong selling point of the first version, too – lets you decide whether you want to shoot, edit and share, or just shoot better (thanks to its multiple modes) and forget about it. I like choices.

The app is available here. Expect a detailed review soon on MacStories. Full changelog and screenshots below. Read more

Confirmed: Instagram Reaches 1 Million Users

We speculated several times in the past about social photo sharing service Instagram (which doesn’t have a website, it only comes as an iPhone app) to have reached and passed the 1 million users milestone, now it’s official. Instagram has gained more than a million users since its original release in early October.

As co-founder of Instagram Kevin Systrom told The New York Times:

Instagram, a social photo-sharing company that opened its shutters to iPhone owners just two months ago, announced Tuesday that it passed a major milestone of 1 million registered users.

“We’ve just been amazed at the growth of the service,” Mr. Systrom said in a phone interview. “My partner and I had a bet the first day about how many downloads we would get and I was off by an order magnitude.”

According to Mr. Systrom, Instagram users are “collectively uploading approximately three photos a second and tens of millions of photos have been shared on the service.”

The past two months have been a great run for Instagram, which launched its iPhone app with only a few selected users who had the privilege to try the app on board. Since then, usage of the service skyrocketed with the developers being busy keeping the servers up and running. The app reached another important milestone when Twitter announced support for Instagram photos in its inline media viewer on Twitter.com. The app also received a few updates to fix bugs and introduce more filters and Posterous integration.

Almost three months after launch and with “just an iPhone app” out in the wild, we think great things will come for Instagram in 2011. One million users is a solid foundation to start with.

Instagram Adds Two New Filters, Suggested Users and More Languages

It looks like the Instagram developers won’t stop adding features to their amazingly popular “app service” anytime soon. It was only 10 days ago that they added new sharing features and Posterous integration; today, two new filters and more languages have found their way to the app, together with a new “suggested users” option that lets you easily follow popular Instagrammers.

The new filters are cool, but I don’t really spot much difference from the existing ones. Maybe they just need to grow on me a little more. So, filters and international localizations aside, the suggested users section: it’s pretty. To access it after sign up, you’ll have to open your profile setting page, tap on Find Friends then Suggested Users. In this page you’ll see folk such as Robert Scoble and Kevin Rose that, according to Instagram, deserve a follow. What’s cool is that their photos are animated and rotate – neat effect. As you follow these people, new ones will be recommended to you.

Other changes in this version include bug fixes, improved performances and better handling of long comment threads. In case you don’t know (how could you?) Instagram is free and available here.

MacStories’ 2010 Roundup: Top 10 iPhone Camera Apps

Welcome to MacStories’ 2010 Roundup! In this new series, we collect the best apps released in 2010 for the Mac, iPhone and iPad — apps we have probably already featured here on MacStories. Only the best apps, both free and paid. Apps you shouldn’t miss.

For me, 2010 has been the year of the iPhone camera. Since I bought my French iPhone 4 in June for a whoppin’ 800 Euros (don’t even ask), I’ve been shooting photos like never before. Sure, I know the iPhone 4 is still a cellphone and true photos don’t come from a phone. I’m OK with that. But I’m no professional photographer, nor am I willing to spend money on a DSLR. Not because I disdain quality – I just wouldn’t know how to fully enjoy it. Leave the pro tools to the pros. For me, the iPhone 4’s camera is good enough to provide photos I like, that I can share with my friends.

Which leads me to apps. The iPhone’s camera is great, but apps are there to enrich its functionalities. Apps with built-in sharing features, apps with filters, apps that rely on their own social network, apps aimed at completely replacing the stock camera…the selection is huge. Photography is, indeed, one of the best selling categories in the App Store right behind Games and Productivity.

In this second MacStories’ 2010 Roundup we have collected the top 10 camera apps for the iPhone. We could have included more, but these are the ones that in our opinion really stood out this year. So head past the break, and check out the Top 10 iPhone Camera Apps of 2010. Read more

Fotopedia Heritage 3.0: Instant Slideshows, Suggestions, iOS 4.2 Support

Fotopedia Heritage is one of those iOS apps (universal, free) that keeps on getting better on each release. First they released a 1.0 version that aimed at becoming the digital encyclopedia for humanity. Version 2.0 added support for the Retina Display, 25,000 more photos and shuffle mode. Today, with the release of Fotopedia 3.0, the developers re-imagined the app from the ground up and redesigned the whole experience to make it more intuitive, fast and beautiful. Read more

Lab For iPhone Gives You Detailed Information About Your Photos

They say the best camera is the one that’s always with you, and there’s no question the iPhone has become the best camera for many. The iPhone is with us all the time, whether we’re on the go checking in venues with Foursquare or at home, playing some Infinity Blade. Most of all, the iPhone 4 provides a very good picture quality thanks to its 5MP lens, flash and shiny Retina Display.

If the iPhone is our best camera, there must be an app for that, right? I’m not talking about the stock camera app, or the hundreds of popular alternatives such as CameraBag, Instagram or Camera+. I’m talking about an app to manage photos shot with the best camera.

We have talked about Cydia tweaks that enable photo management on-device through some Camera Roll hacks. Lab by LateNiteSoft is a $0.99 app available here that, with a beautiful user interface, provides a quick and elegant way to scroll through your photos and get detailed information about them. Read more