If you’ve ever edited your Flickr photographs using the default image editor provided by Flickr, then you’ve used the web-based image editing software developed by Picnik.

Whenever you click the “Edit Photo” button above one of your photographs, it opens up the image in the Picnik editor.

Well, Picnik announced today on its blog that it has been acquired by Google. There aren’t many details available regarding the acquisition itself, but the web is abuzz now with speculation as to what Flickr will do.

Thomas Hawk suggests today’s purchase may signal that Google is trying to dethrone Flickr as image-sharing king of the web:

What else makes me think this? Google Buzz. While I consider Flickr superior in a lot of ways to Picasa today, the biggest advantage that Flickr has always held over their competitors is how strong a grip they’ve had on the social aspect of photo sharing. But now that Buzz has arrived on the scene (and your Buzz photos go into Picasa albums by default by the way), it would appear that Google finally has a viable social network to compete with Flickr’s own internal social network inside of Flickr. By combining the social power of buzz, with an enhanced version of Picasa, Google could mount a formidable competing offering to Yahoo’s Flickr.

It’s interesting that Flickr let Picnik slip into Google’s hands after partnering with them for so long.

What do you think today’s news means for Google’s Picasa and for Yahoo’s Flickr?

ImageStamper is an online tool that acts as your witness when it comes to image rights.

If you’re a photographer, it can verify when you uploaded a photograph, and if you use creative commons images, it can help document the license of the image when you used it in case the owner decides to change the license or remove the photograph in the future.

The service currently only handles photographs uploaded to Flickr, but they’re planning to add support for other photo services as well.

There also isn’t currently an automated way to have your photographs “stamped”, so you’ll have to manually enter them into the ImageStamper system. This is pretty related to the poll we posted yesterday, titled “Have You Ever Had Photographs Stolen?“.

Do you think the extra work required by this service is worth it? Would you use it to protect yourself and/or your photographs?

Some of you might know that popular photo sharing service Flickr was originally a set of tools built for a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. In November of 2009 we also reported that Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, had left Flickr and was returning to his original project, Game Neverending.

With a group of former Flickr employees, Butterfield started a small company called Tiny Speck, which just unveiled Glitch, a massively multiplayer game played through a browser. Here’s a trailer they’ve released:

It’s called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the “glitch” — a grave danger of disemprobablization.

This results in a time-traveling effort at saving the future, going back into the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and hum the world into existence and … you know what? You’ll probably just have to wait and play the game :)

Here’s a side by side comparison between an old screenshot of Game Neverending (left) and a new screenshot of Glitch (right):

We’re not sure how a game like this spawned Flickr, but it doesn’t seem as though Glitch will have anything to do with photography. Perhaps the tools were originally used for in-game images and graphics rather than photographs…

Glitch will be free of charge and available by the end of the year.

(via Thomas Hawk)

ffffl*ckr is a new Flickr web application that’s based around the idea that the people whose work you like probably also like photographs that you’d like as well. The app aims to make finding quality photography less of a chore:

Unless your idea of art is a painting of a hotrod on velvet, explore is useless. Groups aren’t much better, since they require people to self-promote. The interface for checking them is pretty useless too. Contacts are pretty cool except that it’s impossible to actually find new photographers.

The page starts with 20 photographs — these are either someone else’s favorites, or your own if you authenticate. Then you simply click a photograph to load the last 20 favorite photographs of that photographer. Once you authenticate your Flickr account, you can favorite new photographs straight from the app.

FlickrPoet is a neat little web-app built by Thomas Sturm that turns text into photographs using Flickr’s API. Though the concept is extremely simple and only somewhat novel, the results can be quite beautiful.

Feed it some poetry, song lyrics, or even random text, and watch the photographs begin to fade into existence. Here’s a screenshot made with the help of the quick brown fox (not a poem, I know).

The only change I would suggest to Sturm would be to provide permanent links to result pages so people can share their “FlickrPoems” with one another.

If you find any text that returns interesting results, please share it with us in the comments!

FlickrPoet

In a move that might spark another Internet debate, Flickr has added India to the list of countries unable to view content rated moderate and/or restricted.

Flickr user crazydude2006 posted a topic to the help forums titled, “i can not see the photos of my contacts.” After a few other users chimed in with their suggestions on how to fix the problem, staff member zyrcster posted the following response:

As you are coming in from a Yahoo! ID in India, and we just localized our site to India, you won’t be able to view moderate or restricted content.

Here’s a screenshot of the thread:

A quick look at the help page for content filters reveals the following updated lines:

Note: If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Hong Kong, India or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service (this means you won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off). If your Yahoo! ID is based in Germany you are not able to view restricted content due to your local Terms of Service.

Thus, if you’re based in India and noticed recently that you can no longer access certain photographs, now you know why. It likely won’t do much good to complain to Flickr, however, since they need to abide by the laws of each country in order to continue providing their service there.

(via Thomas Hawk)

Many many years ago, in 2005, the rapidly expanding social photo-sharing domain, Flickr was purchased by the larger web empire, Yahoo!

Three years afterwards, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield left his kingdom, returning to his original life as a “tin-smith,” as he called himself in his resignation letter.

Now, Butterfield’s back in the game–literally.

According to reports by Canada’s Globe and Mail and the Business Insider, Butterfield’s revisiting his original project, Game Neverending, which is a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG).

Apparently, Butterfield and his group, Ludicorp, now Tiny Speck Inc., dreamed up the game and even had a closed Beta version up and running a year before Flickr launched.

Flickr was originally going to be an element of the gameplay, says the Business Insider–but whether the photo-sharing feature will exist in the new version is unknown.

The Game Neverending site is up, but outdated, with sparse information.

GNE Museum also has some cryptic information, including prototype screenshots that bring to mind 1980s video game artwork and a subway map:

According to GNE Museum, the game involves the ability to travel to cleverly named locations, a humorous array of collectible items, and paper (as in reams, sheets, etc.) currency.

While there isn’t much information on the game itself, it’s probably the most honestly titled MMORPG out there–I mean honestly, when does anyone ever ‘finish’ playing WoW or DoTA, or Mafia Wars for that matter?

In any case, casual and social gaming like Facebook apps by Playfish/EA and countless iPhone games are prolific and easily accessible to a mainstream audience more than ever nowadays.

But after letting the project sit idly for so long, only time will tell whether Butterfield’s still got what it takes to ride the waves of Internet trends.

Google Trends is an interesting service that can provide glimpses into how popular certain things are at any given time among the general public.

I thought it would be interesting to search for some photography related keywords to see what’s rising and falling in popularity. A lot of the following results probably correspond to what you’ve already observed from looking around at friends, family, and the people around you.

First off, the popularity of DSLR cameras seems to be exploding, at least with the people I know (especially at church). Everyone seems to be getting a DSLR rather than a point-and-shoot these days. Here’s what Google trends tell us about the search volume of the keyword “dslr”:

In this case, Google definitely confirms what I’ve been observing. The search volume of “dslr” this year is about four times as large as four years ago. This is even more significant given the fact that the “camera” keyword seems to be falling rather than rising.

Another keyword with a lot of momentum is “photoblog”:

Seems like the term is getting more popular, and that more and more people are starting photoblogs to share their photographs. Notice how, unlike “dslr”, the graph doesn’t really start until around 2003 or 2004. This seems to be about when the term “photoblog” began to become mainstream.

Something else that the “photoblog” keyword reveals is how popular photoblogging is in Poland. This probably isn’t common knowledge, but I also discovered this independently a while ago while working on Photoblog.com. Photoblogging service photoblog.pl is among the 50 most popular websites in Poland, and photoblog.com also has a significant number of Polish users.

Let’s move on to some more interesting photo related trends…

How about the battle between Canon and Nikon?

Seems like Canon is the clear leader in terms of popularity (sometime we’ve known, right?), but also that Nikon is slowly closing the gap… at least in terms of search volume.

Other manufacturers are a little more difficult to compare since they’re not as focused on photography equipment.

What about photo sharing? Here’s a comparison between some of the more popular services:

Not surprisingly, Flickr is the 800lb gorilla in this space (though it’s losing a little weight). SmugMug is relatively tiny, though this is probably because it’s an exclusively paid service, while a large portion of Flickr’s members use it for free.

Webshots seems to be fading away, while upstart Twitter service Twitpic has burst onto the scene in the past year.

Facebook is obviously the largest photo-sharing service in the world, but including it in the graph makes every other service appear as lines on the x-axis.

Those are some current trends in the world of photography. If you do some searches of your own and find other interesting photo-related trends, please leave a comment sharing what you find with us! Maybe I’ll append your results to the post.

One of the things I often come across when looking for interesting photography to tweet about is static Flickr image URLs. People seem to like posting these images without linking back to their original Flickr pages, while I prefer linking to Flickr pages so the photographer can get the credit for the photo.

If you’re not sure what I mean by static image URLs, here is an example of a static Flickr URL that links directly to the image and not the Flickr page of the original photograph:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3632/3811569661_f801d1837f.jpg

A while back I tweeted a link to an article teaching you how to find the original Flickr page of a static URL. I’ve found this technique very useful, but it’s a big hassle if you need to do it often, since is not exactly something you memorize.

Thus, I decided to make a really simple web application that takes you directly to the original Flickr page of any static Flickr URL. It’s called findr, and here’s what it ended up looking like:

Hopefully some of you will find this useful. It sure beats doing the process by hand. Let me know if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or bug reports.

Update: If you have any suggestions for simple apps that you would find useful, let me know!

When browsing around on Flickr, I used to be amazed by how sharp many of the photographs I came across were, and thought that the reason my web-res images weren’t as sharp was because I had poor technique or an inferior lens. However, even after I upgraded my camera equipment I still wasn’t achieving the same type of sharpness I saw on Flickr.

I eventually learned that the reason is this: Flickr applies sharpening to the smaller sized versions of your uploaded images, whether you want it or not. This is something that most people don’t realize and never think about, but it drastically improves the apparent quality of most photos. Thus, having a sharp lens and good focusing technique is only half the solution to sharp web-res photos. The other half is knowing how to sharpen your low-res images well. In this article I will describe a method of imitating Flickr’s sharpening.

As an example, here is a photograph that I resized to a 500px standard size using Adobe Photoshop:

The original image was sharp, but much of the sharpness was lost in the resizing process. When the original image is uploaded to Flickr, this is the 500px wide version that results (hover over it to compare it with the original):

As you can see, Flickr’s sharpening helps to make many of the areas of the soft areas of the resized photo sharp and seemingly detailed again.

To achieve the same sharpening with Photoshop, one possible way is to run an unsharp mask filter on it (Filter->Sharpen->Unsharp Mask) after resizing the image to your desired low resolution. I found that the following settings give a 500px resized image exactly the same sharpness as Flickr:

Amount: 400%
Radius: .2 pixels
Threshold: 0 levels

Doing this will help you to achieve sharp web-resolution photographs in addition to your sharp hi-res images. This technique should specifically be used for lower resolution photographs though (i.e. 500px). For sharper hi-resolution photographs, use techniques such as high pass sharpening, and improve your gear and focusing technique.