fotojournal is a new photoblogging service by Canadian company Robot Republic geared towards professional photographers, allowing them to showcase their work in a blog format.
They just had their launch party a couple days ago, and the pay-as-you-go service will soon be fully open to the public (they’re currently in invite-only private beta). No word on what their pricing model is.
The site is well designed, and allows you to display your photographs in various templates without requiring HTML knowledge. Among the templates is one that features your photographs at a large Big Picture-esque resolution:
The photo hosting and sharing space is chock-full of competition, but fotojournal might be able to find a niche with its clean design and flexible format.
Flixtime is a website launched recently by Stock photography service Fotolia that helps you easily transform your photos, videos, and text into short 60-second flash video clips.
Creating a video requires an account, and you can choose to either use your own photographs, or stock photographs provided by Fotolia. Once the video is created, you can either share it online or download it to your computer. Generic animations can be added to your video, which can be saved in a large number of video formats.
If you need to create a short video clip for whatever reason, Flixtime is a pretty fast way to get it done.
Showzey is a web app that helps you collect and organize your photographs from various places on the web in once place.
One of its interesting features is the ability to collect all the attachments in your Gmail account and either save them to your Showzey account, or transfer them directly to a photo service like Flickr or Picasa (Facebook supported too). Here’s how you would collect the photos from your Gmail:
I don’t know about you guys, but usually when I receive a photo attachment in an email that I don’t save to my computer, I never see it again. This might be an interesting way to explore all the various photos you’ve been sent over the years.
P.S. Showzey seems heavily inspired design-wise by Mint
Fotobabble is a newly launched service that allows you to add a short audio clip to photographs via either your computer or iPhone (using their free application).
Here’s the description on their website:
Fotobabble lets you create talking photos in two clicks. Simply upload a photo and then record your voice directly through your computer to create a talking photo. You can easily share it by e-mail, Facebook, Twitter or embed it into a blog or website.
It’s free and all completely web-based. No software to download, just register and get started in seconds.
Here’s an example Fotobabble found on the website that we embedded into this post:
If you’re an amateur photographer looking to go pro, finding clients is often a difficult task. Snapm aims to make it easier by offering comparison shopping to people looking for high quality photography by amateur photographers.
It may have never occurred to you to hire a photographer for any reason before because it was always so expensive to hire a professional, and inconvenient to find an amateur. But Snapm opens the doors to the idea of hiring an affordable amateur photographer…
To get listed in the searches, you need to sign up for the service and create a portfolio, which looks like this:
Snapm embraces the startup mantra of “release early, release often”, so many of the features offered aren’t very polished yet. For example, while search returns a list of photographers near you, you cannot currently filter or sort by rate or reviews. However, if Snapm does begin to take off, it might become a great way to land your next gig.
3D technology was featured somewhat prominently this year at CES, with companies unveiling televisions and cameras built for capturing and displaying 3D media. If you can’t wait to get started with 3D media, you can do so right now with just two photographs.
Launched about a month ago, Start 3D is an online service that allows you to create and share 3D images without requiring special glasses to view them. You simply take two photographs 3 inches apart, and the service will do the rest, creating the following 3D effect:
As you can see, the resulting image is simply one image transitioning to the other. However, the frames in between are automatically generated by a patent-pending technology, called “Piku-Piku”.
While embedding the images is possible, there currently isn’t a one-click way of doing so. They should probably make this a simple feature on the image pages if they would like to see YouTube or Flickr-style growth.
The service is currently free while in public beta, but the home page indicates that more than 20 uploads per month will require a membership fee.
SnapSort is a new web application that’s super simple but surprisingly useful. Give it two camera models and it will give you a side by side comparison of the specs, as well as pick a winner for you. In addition, it lists pros, cons, and similar cameras for each camera.
The service was created by a team of four — two programmers, a CS professor, and a “serial entrepreneur”. Here’s a screenshot of a camera comparison:
The website states that the service will eventually turn into a personal camera recommendation service. There’s no word on how SnapShot plans to generate revenue, but this type of application can do well with both advertising and affiliate sale business models (much like Flickr’s Camera Finder).
I’m pretty interested in seeing where this service goes, especially with such a large team behind it. If you’re currently in the market for a digital camera, give SnapSort a try!
Back in September we wrote an article discussing how difficult it is to keep digital photographs safe for a really, really long time. We mentioned that storing your images with a reliable service like Amazon is probably much safer than trying to archive data yourself, since you’re probably not an expert at doing so.
The problem is, although services like Amazon’s S3 storage service are probably among the safest options you have, the companies behind them don’t guarantee that your data won’t be lost. If your data is lost or damaged, the only thing companies like Amazon lose is their reputation and probably you as a customer.
Swiss Data Group, another data storage company, is offering a photo storage service in which they put their eggs in the same basket as yours: SnapHaven. They guarantee the lifetime storage of your data (99 years), and will return double your money in the case of any data loss or corruption. This might not seem like a good deal, but it’s much more than what Amazon guarantees, and the first photo storage service of its kind. I can’t see how they’d offer more than double money-back, since that might be making a promise they can’t possibly keep.
What’s even more attractive for photographers is the pricing model that SnapHaven offers. Rather than charge a recurring fee for storage and additional fees for data transfer like Amazon and similar cloud services, SnapHaven charges a one time fee of 3¢ per image for lifetime storage.
If you’re looking for a service to safely store your images for an extended period of time, you now have a pretty appealing alternative to Amazon and Rackspace.
Just launched today, FocalPop is a new online marketplace that tries to harness the power of crowd-sourcing. The concept is very similar to thematic photo competitions such as Photo Friday or DPChallenge, where a keyword or theme is provided, and photographers submit suitable photographs to the competition.
The difference is that buyers looking for a particular kind of photograph are the ones submitting the keywords and themes, and are ultimately the ones that choose which photograph “wins”. The photographer behind the winning image releases the high-res version of the image to the buyer, and receives 70% of the price that the buyer placed on the competition.
Here’s a screenshot of a completed competition where the buyer paid $142 for a photograph of a “Happy Dog” (while we’re on the topic of happy dogs, check out this comic strip by Dinosaur Comics):
I think the idea is pretty interesting and executed well from what I’ve seen so far. The design of the service reminds me a little of threadless, with brightish colors and a distinctly Web 2.0 feel.
If you’re a tennis player in the San Francisco bay area, check out ahathereitis. This interesting new web application (though it lacks a logo and design) aims to find things for you through satellite photographs and image recognition technology.
If you’re nerdy and so inclined, you can read about how the technology behind the application works. The image recognition isn’t done real time, so you won’t be able to use the service yet if you’re outside the Bay Area (try 94704 for Berkeley, CA).
I think this is an interesting example of how the way we make, manipulate, and consume photographs will become more and more advanced as technology improves. As evidenced by the domain name and the “More coming soon” option in the drop-down menu, this app won’t be limited to finding tennis courts.
The question is, what other interesting things could it eventually help us find in satellite photographs? Any ideas?
fotojournal is a new photoblogging service by Canadian company Robot Republic geared towards professional photographers, allowing them to showcase their work in a blog format.
