Textify.it is a neat little web and iPhone app that recreates photographs using colored text. Simply drag and drop a photograph from your computer onto the page to get started. The image above is a photograph of Crater Lake that we turned into text using the letters from “PetaPixel”.
Textify.it (via kottke.org)
It seems every time we feature a fun or useful phone app, it’s for the iPhone. If you’re an Android user (there’s more and more of you out there), here’s one for you: Photo Tools is a free app that offers a pretty large number of useful photography tools bundled into a single application. In it you’ll find everything from a digital gray card to a sunset/sunrise calculator.
Photo Tools (via Reddit)
Microsoft’s jaw-dropping Photosynth technology has arrived on the iPhone as an app that allows you to easily create immersive 360-degree panoramas. All you need to do is load up the app and sweep your camera around in every direction, and the app automatically snaps photographs filling in the panoramic image (you can also tap it if it gets sluggish with its snapping).
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As the world of photography collides with the world of computing in smart phones, we will undoubtedly be seeing many mind-boggling applications (e.g. augmented reality translation) that utilize cell phone cameras in the near future. A new app called Meal Snap fits that description — it’s an app that analyzes photos you take of food, telling you both the ingredients and the number of calories you’ll be consuming. It’s only available for iOS 4+ and costs $3 from the App Store.
With the way consumer cameras are going, we wouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of feature built into future cameras!
We may soon be using software that can easily recreate 3D models of objects and locations using only a series of photographs taken from various perspectives. Researchers in Microsoft’s Interactive Visual Media Group have created an application that does this, generating smooth and seamless 3D views of things using photos taken while walking around the object. In the demo above, we see what the software can do with 40 images shot while walking around a car. It’s pretty amazing.
creepy is a desktop application written by Yiannis Kakavas that demonstrates how the geotagging features found in newer cameras and phones can violate your privacy. Simply provide it with a Flickr username and it will map the places and times photos were taken conveniently on a map.
If you don’t want to allow people to track you in this way, you can turn off your geotagging features — which saves power too — or look into “scrubbing” the location data from your photos.
creepy (via Download Squad)
Tag clouds are a neat way of visualizing what content is about, and Tagerator is a simple program that generates them for your Flickr photo tags. Created by Jeremy Brooks (the guy behind SuperSetr), the simple Java app will run on any computer that has Java 1.6 installed. Besides its ability to generate the tag clouds for you, it stores the tag information gleaned from your account to disk, allowing you to use the tag/count information however you’d like.
Tagerator (via Thomas Hawk)
If you use GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, but would like a free program to handle the processing of Raw image files as well, check out RawTherapee. It’s a free raw image processing program that has a polished user interface and a solid list of features. Unless you want to compile the source code yourself, you can download the latest version of the program from this page. It’s available for Linux and Windows, though Mac OSX versions are available too (though they might not be as stable).
Late last week we reported that Facebook had acquired the young photo sharing startup, Divvyshot, and will be shutting the service down.
Troovi is a service that’s similar in functionality — one that focuses more on exchanging photographs than it does on providing a permanent way to share them online.
Rather than provide permanent photo sharing and storage, it’s geared more towards collaborative private albums (called collections) that your family and friends can all contribute to. While services like Flickr or Facebook are great for sharing photographs from a particular trip or event, they don’t provide efficient collaboration features or ways to download entire albums at full resolution.
Troovi allows up to 250 photographs per collection, and one click downloading of the entire collection at full resolution as a ZIP file. This is great for people looking to quickly exchange photographs rather than simply view them.
Free collections are supported by advertising and expire after 30 days of inactivity, while premium collections start at $1.49, expire after 90 inactive days, and allow an unlimited number of photos per collection.
While it looks like Facebook is attempt to make exchanging photos easier with its Photos application, it’s unlikely it will rival Troovi in allowing you to download hundreds of full resolution photographs from events, since Facebook doesn’t store full resolution versions of uploaded images.
An unofficial iPad Flickr app called “Flickr Photos” has been approved for the iPad app store. The $2.99 app, created by Garlic Dumpling, allows you to do download and view both your own photos and your contacts’ photos in a minimalistic interface. There’s no word on whether the official Flickr application will be ready for the iPad when the store launches, but the iTunes preview page for the official Flickr app already states “Flickr for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store”.
The official app has an average rating of only 3.5 stars, so if a third party app can come along and offer a better experience for using Flickr, it might just take off and strike big in this upcoming “gold rush”.
(via MacStories)
