Twitter, Google+, and Facebook are one step closer to becoming clones of each other (at least when it comes to photo sharing) — Twitter has rolled out photo galleries that display the 100 most recent images Tweeted by users in chronological order.

The images included in user galleries can come from Twitter, yFrog, TwitPic, Instagram and other image sharing services supported in Twitter’s details pane. [#]

To view a user’s gallery, simply visit their Twitter page and click the thumbnails on the sidebar.

Clicking an image in the gallery brings up a higher resolution version (screenshot is of Trey Ratcliff’s gallery):

If you don’t see the galleries yet, it’ll probably be rolled out to you within the next day.

All About User Galleries (via TechCrunch via PopPhoto)

The photo sharing feature on Twitter that we first reported on a couple months ago is now live for all users. This nudges the service a little more closer towards what Facebook and Google+ offer, allowing users to upload and share photos directly through Twitter. Third-party photo-sharing services geared towards Twitter users can’t be too happy about this — the founder of TwitPic turned down a $10 million offer back in 2009, only to have Twitter drink its milkshake a couple years later.

Update: Apparently TwitPic’s founder is striking back by launching a competitor to Twitter called Heello. This is getting interesting…

Last year map geek Eric Fischer created heat maps showing where Flickr photos are taken in large cities and comparing tourist vs. local hotspots. Now he’s back again with beautiful maps showing geotagged Flickr photos and Twitter Tweets, and the maps aren’t limited to cities — there’s maps for continents (see North America above) and even the whole world! The orange dots show photos, the blue ones indicate Tweets, and a white one means both were found in that location.

Europe

New York

San Francisco

London

Head on over to the Flickr set, titled “See something or say something“, for the complete collection.

See something or say something (via Laughing Squid)

Image credits: Images by Eric Fischer

Twitter has just announced that they will be launching their own photo-sharing service that will let you attach photographs directly to Tweets, competing with services like TwitPic. Rather than host the images themselves using their own servers or Amazon’s S3 storage, they’ve decided to partner with photo-sharing giant Photobucket. It’ll be interesting to see whether photographers feel more comfortable sharing their images on Twitter now that the functionality will be baked into the service itself, especially after recent brouhahas involving third party services.

Here’s a short teaser they made that was included in the announcement:

(via Twitter Blog)

Apparently Sigma was aiming for a much lower price when developing the SD1 DSLR, but was forced to price it high after putting in whole bunch of “great stuff”. The company’s Chief Operating Officer Kazuto Yamaki is responding to user complaints on Twitter with some apologetic Tweets, saying the company had missed the price range that they had originally targeted. Perhaps the SD1 wasn’t designed as a halo product after all…

(via 1001 Noisy Cameras)

Since launching in 2008, TwitPic has been at the center of quite a few copyright controversies and legal battles, especially when disasters strike and Twitter users are able to publish photos of things that are happening well before major news outlets. Back in early 2010 photographer Daniel Morel had an iconic photograph taken during the Haiti earthquake widely republished in newspapers across the world without his permission after he uploaded the photos to TwitPic, then later that year Twitter’s decision to display TwitPic photos directly on their website caused a brouhaha. TwitPic has finally decided to update their Terms of Service to make it clear that users of the service retain the copyright of everything they upload.

In a post today on the company blog titled “Your content, your copyrights“, founder Noah Everett writes,

To clarify our ToS regarding ownership, you the user retain all copyrights to your photos and videos, it’s your content. Our terms state by uploading content to Twitpic you allow us to distribute that content on twitpic.com and our affiliated partners. This is standard among most user-generated content sites (including Twitter). If you delete a photo or video from Twitpic, that content is no longer viewable.

As we’ve grown, Twitpic has been a tool for the spread of breaking news and events. Since then we’ve seen this content being taken without permission and misused. We’ve partnered with organizations to help us combat this and to distribute newsworthy content in the appropriate manner. This has been done to protect your content from organizations who have in the past taken content without permission. As recently as last month, a Twitpic user uploaded newsworthy images of an incident on a plane, and many commercial entities took the image from Twitpic and used it without the user’s permission.

To sum everything up, you the user retain all copyrights to your photos/videos and we are very sorry by the confusion our old updated terms of service caused.

It’s good news, but might not do much to prevent future infringements from happening — past cases generally weren’t due to news outlets being confused about TwitPic’s Terms of Service.

Your content, your copyrights (via ReadWriteWeb)

Image credit: Large copyright graffiti sign on cream colored wall by Horia Varlan

Earlier this year photographer Daniel Morel was shocked when a photograph he captured during the devastating earthquake in Haiti and posted to TwitPic was distributed by Agency France Presse (AFP) and published on the front page of newspapers around the world — all without his permission.

To add insult to injury, he was then sued by AFP when he sent cease and desist letters in response to the copyright infringement. The dispute has turned into a legal battle over whether images uploaded to TwitPic and shared on Twitter can be freely republished by third parties. In what might be an indication of things to come, a federal court has denied AFP’s pre-trial request to have the case thrown out.

AFP’s lawyers had argued that the re-use was acceptable according to the TOS of the services, writing,

This broad re-use is evidenced every day when Twitter/TwitPic posts are copied, reprinted, quoted, and republished by third parties,

However, U.S. District Court Judge William Pauley disagreed with this, writing in his opinion that,

the provision that Twitter ‘encourage[s] and permit[s] broad re-use of Content’ does not clearly confer a right on other users to re-use copyrighted postings.

You can read more about this latest development in this article by PDN. It’ll be interesting to see how this very important case plays out. Stay tuned.

Twitter sees hundreds or thousands of Tweets published every second, and many of these are photos of things happening real-time. Hashalbum is a new website that aims to help you browse this constant stream of images in real time by allowing you to do a simple search by hashtag, returning images that are found in Tweets containing that hashtag.

Hashalbum (via Lifehacker)

Last week Scott Bourne published an article on Photofocus titled, “Photos On Twitter – What You Should Know“. In it, he claimed that Twitter’s terms of service (TOS) forced photographers to give Twitter a license to do whatever they wanted with photos shared through the service. The argument centered around a couple paragraphs found in the document:

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

This was used to argue that Twitter owns a license to photos shared through the service. The second snippet is this one:

You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.

Bourne writes,

As a professional photographer, I can’t sell “exclusive” rights to any image I decide to publish on Twitter. The reason is that once it is published on Twitter, there is no exclusivity left.

Today ReadWriteWeb covered the story, bringing into the tech/business blogosphere. While the snippets referenced by Bourne seem like a big deal upon first glance, the argument is flawed because it’s based around an erroneous understanding of the word “Content”. This comment by Michael Owens on the ReadWriteWeb article explains it best:

This article, and all of the other articles that this stemmed from, contains a fundamental misunderstanding about the definition of “Content” in the context of Twitter. Twitter’s “Content” is the 140 characters and any metadata stored and served by Twitter. Anything that requires a URL to access (i.e. a link shared on Twitter) is not considered “Content” in the context of Twitter’s ToS (from http://twitter.com/tos “any information, text, graphics, or other materials uploaded, downloaded or appearing on the Services (collectively referred to as ‘Content’)”).

This may become an issue if Twitter were to—say for example—buy TwitPic or create their own Photo Sharing tool. And yes, there is potential legal concern with the way that their Media Pane system works in the #newtwitter UI design, as it does state “appearing on” but for their license to apply to the content of their Media Pane, it would require that the license from the service allowing their content to be displayed to be sub-licensed. Prior to the Media Pane in #newtwitter, I would have said this is a complete non-issue. Now, it’s just something to “watch” and, if you’re really worried about it, don’t use services that work in the Media Pane.

This is the Media Pane Owens is referring to:

Thus, prior to the new Twitter design, “Content” pretty much referred exclusively to Tweet text (as well as profile and background images). Even with the new Media Pane, it doesn’t appear that Twitter is claiming a license for the photographs displayed. Twitter even notes in a “tip” immediately following the controversial TOS section — this isn’t mentioned in any of the articles — that it’s simply meant to allow them to display your Tweets:

Since Twitter doesn’t currently have an photo uploading feature that stores images on their servers besides avatars and background images, there isn’t a way to “publish” images to Twitter.

If you’re still worried about images that appear in the Media Pane, just avoid linking to services (i.e. Flickr and TwitPic) that show a low res version in the pane. Photos that are linked to from Twitter but stored on third party services or your own servers don’t count as “Content” and the controversial sections of the TOS don’t apply.

The second controversial section regarding making your content available to third parties has to do with providing an API through which your data can be accessed. For example, if you use a third-party client like TweetDeck you’re using this API.

In summary, as long as your photographs aren’t uploaded directly to Twitter and they don’t appear in the new Media Pane that expands, your linked-to photographs are completely safe and not licensed to Twitter at all.

Image credit: scream and shout by mdanys

The golden ratio is used by nature, photographers, and now… Twitter! Did you notice it in the new Twitter design?

After studying the ratio extensively, German psychologist Adolf Zeising wrote in 1854,

The Golden Ratio is a universal law in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.

Even if you’ve never heard of the golden ratio, you’ve probably heard of the rule of thirds. The two concepts are similar and related. Here’s an interesting article discussing them.

(via Laughing Squid)