Photo Sharing

The newest meme on the scene takes the natural creepiness of Steve Buscemi and pairs it with hot females. Every red-blooded male’s dream.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Tennis, everyone? The Family Circle Cup tournament added a fully functional mobile site to its social media arsenal, joining its already existing presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr.

The leaked images reveal the movie’s stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in bed and were tweeted to the world. The producers removed the primary supplier. But still, the immodest images are floating here and there online, prompting the studio and its creative team to get in touch with the franchise fans.

Long ago in this very galaxy people used to imprint photographic images chemically on roll of something called film. These rolls were generally limited to 12, 24, or 36 images each. 36 photos is roughly 144MB of digital storage today. So, film was a very low capacity storage medium. An 8GB card today is roughly equivalent to 50 to 60 rolls of film with 36 photos per roll. If you shoot in RAW mode, well, that’s a different story. As soon as a roll was full, you would run down to someplace to have the film developed. Typically, it was your corner drugstore. You’d generally wait a few days (until one-hour processing arrived) and then finally see photos (most of which you had already forgotten about).

You don’t see many people standing in line to get film developed or printing photos these days (with the possible exception of holiday cards made from a digital photo). So, if people aren’t going to go to the local drugstore to print a photo, the drugstore has to come to them. That is what CVS Pharmacy has with its CVS Express Photo App. The app in this case is a Facebook app. However, since a huge number of photos posted to Facebook were created by a smartphone, you can imagine the new photo print sequence is:

Smartphone -> upload to Facebook -> use CVS Express Photo App to print a photo

You can find this Facebook app linked on CVS’s Facebook page found at:

http://www.facebook.com/CVS

With all the hype surrounding which is the best or hottest smartphone it is easy to overlook the value that they provide to society. We are now able to access a wealth of information from anywhere and we are able to contribute information from anywhere. I bet the majority of Twitter and Facebook updates are being done on smartphones, and we have seen the power that Twitter has in providing news about natural disasters and political unrest.

In a blog post about cameras in phones Hutch Carpenter writes, “The rise of cheap phone cameras is actually increasing the historical record.” Carpenter’s argument is based on the fact that because so many people are now walking around with phones that have cameras, there is a higher probability that when a meaningful moment happens someone will be able to snap a picture of it. While the quality of the cameras in most phones is not the greatest, the fact that they are in the hands of so many people makes them so much more valuable.

If I were to add one thing to Carpenter’s post it is that connectivity is also a key enabler to the increase in smartphone camera use. Most people take pictures to share with others, which means it has to be real easy to get the pictures out of the phone. The integration of Facebook and Twitter with smartphones makes it real easy for people to share the pictures that they take with their friends and the world. Without the inclusion of the software that makes picture sharing so easy I don’t think smartphones have as much possibility for improving the historical record.

Video courtesy of EyeFiCard

Eye-Fi produces remarkable little SD flash storage cards that also has built-in WiFi radio that can send photo and video files directly from a digital camera to your computer or web-based photo service. If you have one of their higher-end X2 series card, you might find the new Eye-Fi View service interesting.

Eye-Fi View, email sharing, iPad sweepstakes and more!

You can find this service at:

center.eye.fi

Eye-Fi view gives you cloud access to full resolution versions of photos you’ve taken and stored to the service in the past 7 days. Upgrading to the $50 a year Eye-Fi Premium services gives you access beyond the last 7 days. Photos stored in Eye-Fi view can be shared view email or public sites like Facebook and Flickr.

On Jan. 13, I pointed my browser at…

https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage

…and paid $50 for 200GB of online storage for a year. One reason for making this investment was to get more Google space for photos (Picasaweb) and the ability to upload files of any type to Google Docs. However, I must admit that the major reason was the offer of a free 4GB Eye-Fi SD card for my camera. The Eye-Fi card arrived less than 2 weeks later on Jan. 25.

The initial setup process seemed to go well. But, I was never asked to create an Eye-Fi account as documented. I ended up pulling the provided SD card reader (with the card in it) out of the Mac’s USB socket and reinserting it. This seemed to kick off the account creation process.

I tested it with an somewhat old Canon PowerShot A710IS. Photo uploads went as expected. So, my next step was to turn on web sharing and have the photos also uploaded to my Picasaweb account. I took another pair of photos after that configuaring and found both photos on the web as expected.

The next step was to test video upload and sharing. This turned out to be a bit of a problem since the AVI files from the camera are relatively large even for less than a minute of video. The camera shut down before the first of two AVI files was uploaded from the camera to the Mac. Restarting the file transfer process involved shutting down and restarting the Eye-Fi applet. My feeling is that uploading video is much too slow of a process that essentially serves to kill the camera’s battery. So, I’m going to turn that feature off as soon as the two test videos finish uploading to Picasaweb.

The free card offer has disappeared from the Google Storage sign-up site. However, you can still find it on Eye-Fi’s site:

http://www.eye.fi/google

Addendum: Someone asked me if the geo-tagging feature works. The answer is, yes it does and was reasonably accurate considering it is only using WiFi location to do this. I should also note that the Eye-Fi card provided with this deal comes with a code to enabled geo-tagging and web sharing for one year.

Photos courtesy of Fujifilm

If you’ve watched a few of the Star Trek The Next Generation TV show episodes, you know that one of its writers’ favorite plot devices was to use the Enterprise’s holodeck to let the crew dress up in period costumes without having to use time travel or other dimensions as a plot vehicle. While a 3D virtual world with physical properties is probably not in our near future, according to this Time magazine article…

Fujifilm’s New Dimension

…easy to create and see 3D digital photos will be available in retail stores in the next few months. The FinePix Real 3D System was actually announced way back in last fall at Photokina 2008. You can find a lot of detailed information about Fujifilm’s 3D photo technology with lots of informative diagrams in this press release from that event…

FUJIFILM FinePix Real 3D System

This technology comes with a cost though. The camera will be a slightly high but affordable $600. The real cost (as with razors and razor blades) will probably be the cost of the special 3D prints. Still, I think a lot of people will want to capture 3D images of their children, pets, friends, and family and this may be a hot product this holiday season.

Photo- and video-sharing site Photobucket and T-Mobile have launched a service that lets T-Mobile customers send photos directly from their handsets to a Photobucket album, a PC hard drive or an e-mail address.

The companies are offering a free three-week trial on select handsets, including the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl and a few Windows Mobile devices, including the Sidekick. Subscribers first need to create a Photobucket account and then link their phone to their online photo album.

Following the free trial, users continue on with the free version, which only provides access from the phone to Photobucket, or upgrade to the premium version. For a one-time fee of $19.99, the premium version is the one that lets users send photos from their phones to their PC or any e-mail address as well as to their Photobucket album.

Tiny Pictures, a mobile photo- and video-sharing service, has added Flickr integration to its flagship Radar service.

Now, Radar users can follow the path Flickr photos take and keep up with the comment stream as the photos are shared, all from within their Radar account, WirelessWeek reports. Users can access Radar through its mobile app or Web site.

Once users have connected their Radar and Flickr accounts, they just need to choose which Flickr friends to follow and their photos and comments will show up integrated with the Radar content. Conversely, comments for Flickr photos made in Radar will automatically show up on Flickr as well.