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

This isn’t related to photography, but it’s something that I’m working on, so I thought I’d share it with you all.

Visited.org is a new website that allows you to watch YouTube videos voted on by keyword. Anyone can submit a YouTube link and a single word they think describes the video (i.e. “funny”, “scary”, “amazing”, “interesting”), and others can vote on whether the keyword describes the video well.

If a video is popular enough, it gets promoted to the front page and to the keyword page. This hopefully makes it so you can just sit down and watch exactly the kind of video you want to see, without all the other noise and garbage that other websites (i.e. YouTube’s browse) are filled with.

I’m building this service for a class here at UC Berkeley, but it’s also an experiment to see if this kind of submission and voting system works well for surfacing quality videos. It’s a community-powered website, so if any of you have time to submit videos you enjoy or vote on videos other people submitted, we’d appreciate the help!

We need some early users to get this thing rolling. Feel free to share your thoughts or suggestions in the comments here.

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:

(via PhotographyBLOG)

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.

(via Lifehacker)

In a well known scene from Good Will Hunting, the main character Will drops the following gem as he defends his uneducated friend against a cocky Harvard student: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”

If you’re looking for some education in photography, another school in Cambridge, MIT, is offering the material of quite a few photography classes for free online. This includes everything from reading lists and assignments to full downloads of course materials and student projects. Here’s a quick list:

4.341 Introduction to Photography

This course also offers practical instruction in basic black and white techniques, digital imaging, fundamentals of camera operation, lighting, film exposure, development and printing. Course provides opportunity for continued exploration.

4.341 Introduction to Photography and Related Media

This course provides practical instruction in the fundamentals of analog and digital SLR and medium/large format camera operation, film exposure and development, black and white darkroom techniques, digital imaging, and studio lighting.

4.343 Photography and Related Media

Fosters a critical awareness of how images in our culture are produced and constructed. Student-initiated term project at the core of exploration. Special consideration given to the relationship of space and the photographic image. Practical instruction in basic black and white techniques, digital imaging, fundamentals of camera operation, lighting, film exposure, development, and printing.

4.A21 Stories Without Words: Photographing the First Year

The transition from high school and home to college and a new living environment can be a fascinating and interesting time, made all the more challenging and interesting by being at MIT. More than recording the first semester through a series of snapshots, this freshman seminar will attempt to teach photography as a method of seeing and a tool for better understanding new surroundings.

11.309J / 4.215J Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry

This course explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing, of investigating landscapes and expressing ideas. Readings, observations, and photographs form the basis of discussions on landscape, light, significant detail, place, poetics, narrative, and how photography can inform design and planning, among other issues.

21A.348 Photography and Truth

Photographs in anthropology serve many purposes: as primary data, illustrations of words in a book, documentation for disappearing cultures, evidence of fieldwork, material objects for museum exhibitions, and even works of art. This course explores photography as art, research tool, and communication.

Have other links to free online courses? Feel free to share with us in the comments!

(via Your Photo Tips)

Image credit: The Dome at MIT by opencontent

If you’re addicted to The Big Picture like we are, then you probably also wish they posted more than two or three times a week. You should also take a look at The Big Pictr, a neat website we just came across. Although it blatantly copies The Big Picture in its name and design, the idea behind the site is pretty interesting.

It’s basically a community generated photoblog with the large photograph style of The Big Picture. Anyone can start a new collection with a Flickr user, search term, or tags, and then share it privately or publish it to the front page. For example, here’s a collection we just created using photos from our Flickr account.

If this website takes off, it could be a great way to both browse interesting photographs and promote your own photography.

If you’ve ever wondered just how much editing goes into a particular photograph, there’s now a super easy way to find out for yourself. Image Error Level Analyser is a simple web application that takes a URL to a JPEG photo and returns an image showing differing “error levels” in the image. Here’s an example they give:

After submitting the image on the left, they return the one on the right.

Error level analysis shows differing error levels throughout this image, strongly suggesting some form of digital manipulation. Areas to note are the lips and shirt, as well as the eyes. All are at significantly different error levels than their surroundings. Presumably, colours have been altered and areas brightened.

Thus, you can now investigate any JPEG you find on the Internet to see roughly how much the photograph has been edited or manipulated. The app even gives you a permalink to the resulting image comparison. Try it out, and post your permalinks in the comments to share your findings with us!

Update: Here’s an interesting article by Wired on how researchers use this technique.

Israeli singer-songwriter Oren Lavie teamed up with photographer Eyal Landesman to create an imaginative music video for “Her Morning Elegance”, which was recently nominated for the Best Short Form Music Video Grammy award.

The video is comprised of a striking 2,096 still images strung fluidly together, according to the Her Morning Elegance Gallery website.

Photographer Landesman spent time as a photojournalist, but found his passion as a dance photographer. Landesman said in an interview with Jerusalem Post:

“I had done some work in stop motion for a project in the Acre Festival a few years ago, but I didn’t really know the term for it,” said Landesman. “When I sat with Oren, Yuval and Merav, and we worked out the storyboard and the whole concept, I began to understand – I never knew it had a title.

“As a photographer, I try to capture the moment. But what happens when the moment is 100 images per second? I had to rethink a lot of what I knew and work with a timeline, and think about what was before and what’s going to come after, and after that, for 2,000 photos. It was a totally different way of thinking.”

Landesman and company have dreamed up an interesting way to monetize and distribute his project: by deconstructing and selling each individual still image as 2,096 separate pieces of art.

Starting today, individual images can be purchased for $250 from the Her Morning Elegance Gallery site, and can be viewed in person at the physical art gallery, Space F2/Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, California.

Launched less than a week ago, SpiderPic is a new image search engine for those looking to purchase stock photography. The same stock image is often available through multiple agencies and varying prices, and SpiderPic allows you to compare these prices to choose the cheapest deal.

While this is a win for stock photography buyers, the service will likely mean lower revenue for agencies and photographers, both of which may price stock images differently based on a number of factors to maximize their income. If SpiderPic takes off, photographers will be forced to set identical prices for their images if listed at multiple agencies, and agencies will need to keep their prices competitive.

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.

(via PhotographyBLOG)