Dropbox is currently running a promotion that extends the available storage space for users who use the service’s photo import feature.

Storage space is increased in 500 Megabyte chunks by a maximum of 4.5 Gigabytes. For this to work, it is necessary to run the new Dropbox 1.3.12 client. This client is experimental and only linked at the Dropbox forum and not on the main site.

It is not clear if users will keep the additional storage space forever, or if it is only available in the beta period.

During this beta period, we are also offering additional free space to test automatic uploading of photos and videos. For every 500MB of photos and videos automatically uploaded, you’ll receive another 500MB space bonus, up to 4.5GB total.

It is however likely that users will receive the space upgrade permanently.

To receive the update, users need to upload photos via the new photo import feature. If you do not have that many photos on your camera, you could simply shoot a lot of photos, connect your camera to Dropbox to get the additional 4.5 Gigabytes of online storage space.

Some users have reported that the feature is not available on their computer, even after installing the latest experimental Dropbox client. It is not clear why it is not there at this point, but there seems to be no option available to force it to appear. Dropbox also notes that photo import is currently not working under Linux or Apple Macintosh 10.4 systems.

The photo import feature relies on Autoplay, which needs to be enabled. This is done under Start Menu > Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > AutoPlay in Windows 7.

Check out the forum post and let me know if you were able to get the import option to work on your computer. (thanks Caschy)

If it works on your computer, you could use it to get an extra 4.5 Gigabyte of Dropbox storage. Not too shabby if you ask me.

Picfull is a free online image filter service that can add a variety of filters to selected photos. The service requires no registration; All it takes is to load a photo from the local computer and pick one of the available filters.

The program supports popular image formats such as jpg or png, and will display loaded images as thumbnails on the application website. A list of 20 filters, from pencil and vintage looks to aquarelle, sepia or color separation are available. A click on a filter applies it automatically to the current picture. It is alternatively possible to first select a filter and load an image afterwards, which applies the filter automatically.

Sliders to customize the selected filter are opened as well. Here it is then possible to fine tune the effect further by changing contrast, brightness or saturation values. Available parameters may differ depending on the selected filter. Only one filter can be added to a photo.

A click on Save processes the image which should not take longer than a couple of seconds. The program displays Facebook, Twitter and e-mail sharing options in an overlay on the screen. This overlay can be closed to display the direct download link instead.

Here it is then possible to download the photo to the local computer, and to start applying filters to other photos.

Image dimensions are not changed in the process. Downloads are however only provided as jpg images even if the source image was uploaded in a different image format.

Picful is an easy to use service. All it takes is one click to apply one of the available filters to an image. Sliders and selectors make customizations easy, and the undo button makes sure that you can go back if you have made a modification that you do not like.

This may have happened by accident, for instance by plugging in a SD card or connecting a smartphone full of photos, by discovering the new “Enable Dropbox Camera import” option in the settings, or by reading the what’s new section in the forum detailing the new feature.

The forum post provides information about the photo uploader. The importer is currently only available for Windows users and Mac users who do not run Os X 10.4 or lower.

Mac OS X 10.5 users may notice that some devices register as read only. While it is still possible to import photos from such devices, it is not possible to make device settings persistent at this point in time. Windows users on the other hand need to make sure that autoplay is enabled on their computer to use the feature. If it is disabled, the automatic importing won’t function.

There is also some device specific advice. Apple iPhone owners for instance can only import if the phone is unlocked and the passcode has been entered. Android users should use the connect as disk drive feature and not a synchronization feature offered by the phone’s manufacturer.

It is interesting to note that the feature is enabled by default if the operating system meets the requirements. Dropbox users who do not want to use the photo import feature can disable it in the preferences under the general tab.

The feature is currently only implemented in the latest experimental version of the Dropbox client which may explain why it has been automatically activated. Some forum users have criticized Dropbox for adding unnecessary features to the program. What’s your take on the addition?

Dropbox users who would like to try the new version with photo import can download it from the official Dropbox web forum. (via Caschy)

The flaw was first reported on the forums of BodyBuilding.com, presumably because the users of that website like taking photos of themselves and putting them online.  The bug exploits the way the offensive photograph reporting tool works.  I’m not going to detail it in too much detail here because I don’t want to encourage anybody to try and view photographs that other people have made private as they obviously want them to be kept private.  However the post does detail how the flaw works.

ZDNet used the flaw to show a picture from Mark Zuckerberg’s private album, taken from a dinner party where everybody seems to be having lots of fun making the food, it’s quite sweet actually as Zuckerberg clearly looks like the shy one.

Facebook have said they are looking into the issue which revolves around being able to report more than just the single photo you can see.  It’s not a bug with the system but it is quite a substantial design flaw and, oddly, surprising that nobody has noticed it before.

Facebook has been heavily criticised in the last few years for matters of privacy and so there are people who will leap on this story as yet another example of how the company simply doesn’t take its users privacy seriously.  Such problems have included a change to the terms and conditions that made all your photographs and statuses Facebook’s property and a settings change that made everything on everybody’s profile accessible to search engines by default.  Both times the change was quickly withdrawn.

ZDNet said…

Details of this flaw were examined in detail. While some browsers restrict this flaw, private photos that are hidden or inaccessible to people who are friends, can not only be accessed but enlarged to their full scale.  This flaw is open for anyone to use — and abuse. While Facebook anonymises the reports that it gets through, the user whose profile pictures can be viewed will also not know that their privacy has been invaded.

There are real problems with privacy and the Internet, much of which seems to stem from people not understanding what the Internet really is and how it works.  I have published a free Facebook Privacy Guide, though some settings have changed and the book needs a second edition when I get time.  There’s lots of advice in here though about how to keep yourself and your personal information safe and private when online, at least as safe and private as Humanly possible.

As is always the case with these things the best advice is not to put embarrassing pictures or messages online in the first place, or to remove them after they’ve been seen by close friends.  Some companies are working on solutions including one ingenious one I’m looking forward to where a picture can be programmed to expire after a specified time.  These types of technology will no doubt help all of us in the future.

The free software Photo Event Organizer is a freeware for the Windows operating system that can bring order into the chaos. Best of all, it is relatively easy and straightforward to use.

When you start the program for the first time you are asked to select a source path first. This is the folder or folder structure where all the photos are stored in. The program includes subdirectories automatically in the scan.

You start a scan with a click on the scan button after you have picked a root folder. Photo Event Organizer crawls through all folders to locate images and photos stored in the folder structure. All photos are then sorted by date folders in the interface. The program uses a gap of two days for events which you can change with the slider on top. You can furthermore add year and month folders to the structure.

The program will resort the photo structure accordingly. Event IDs and Days can be renamed. You could for instance rename Event IDs to names of holiday destinations or parties, and days to trips or places.

The left side of the interface displays all photos of the selected event or day. A slider on the right zooms in or out of the thumbnails, and a pulldown menu at the bottom loads additional pages with photos if the count exceeds 27.

A click on organize opens a menu where you can save the now organized photo structure. The program offers to move or copy the structure. I suggest to copy them into a different root folder first, so that you still have the old structure available if you need to go back to ot.

One of the things that it is missing in my opinion is the ability to move specific folders or photos into a different folder in the structure. There is no option for that, and the event gap slide is to inflexible to cover all eventualities (e.g. photos with wrong dates, or photos that are not sorted into the same event because the event gap has is to restrictive).

For users with relative distinct events, e.g. yearly holidays, graduation parties or birthdays, it can be helpful. Especially if all the photos are not ordered by event but by other criteria or not at all.

Windows users can download Photo Event Organizer from the developer website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions.

But Photo Finder could also aid users who are looking for specific photo types, for instance wide-angle or fisheye photos, or photos taken in a specific month or lightness.

Photo Finder processes Exif data that many digital cameras write automatically as meta data when photos are taken. The extension uses the vast archive of Google Images.

It adds an icon to Chrome’s address bar. A left-click on the icon displays a search form and menus to customize the photo search. It is not necessary to use the menus at all, which means that the extension can also be used as a quick way to search for photos on Google Images.

A digital camera manufacturer or model can be entered in the leftmost menu. You can for instance search for all photos taken with Canon cameras, or for photos that have been taken with Nikon’s D7000 digital camera. Once you start typing suggestions are made automatically by the extension.

The second and third menu are used to make changes to the camera’s zoom level and lightness. The fourth and final menu can be used to select a specific month for the photos. Want to find Statue of Liberty, Central Park or Golden Gate Bridge photos in Winter? Just select one of the Winter months and you are good to go.

The loading of the results page is not delayed by the selections. The selection may however have an impact on the quality of the results. Let me give you an example. If you select a camera that is not really that popular, you may up with unrelated or no photo results at all.

Photo Finder is nevertheless a handy extension for Chrome users. The extension can be downloaded and installed directly from the extension’s Chrome Web Store page.

Sending photos as email attachments is still limited by the email providers maximum email limit. And while some providers like Hotmail circumvent this by using file hosting capabilities to artificially increase the limit, it is not something that can be ignored right now.

The same is true for publishing photos on the Internet. Larger images take longer to load which means that some visitors may close the tab if it takes to long to open. And the webmaster benefits from a faster page loading time as well by getting a few extra points if the images are optimized. Not to forget that some services limit the space that users can use for their media files.

JPEGmini is a new online server to optimize photos in the jpg format. The issue here is that the service currently is only offered online without api or external tools. This means that it is relatively cumbersome to upload photos to the service.

JPEGmini displays the original and optimized version of the photo next to each other after the image optimization. This way it is directly possible to compare the two image versions on screen. Both file sizes and the photo size reduction factor are displayed on that screen as well. A vertical slider is available to displays more or less from one of the images on the screen.

I’m no expert but I cannot really see a difference between the original and optimized photo. I ran the photo through the photo optimizer RIOT as well and came to the same conclusion.

JPEGmini can be used in situations where you cannot install or run third party software, but need to reduce the size of a picture. This can be for example in an Internet Cafe during holidays, or on a computer at work.

Unregistered users can only upload, process and download one photo at a time. Registered users can upload full albums and get other benefits like sharing the photo on photo hosting services such as Picasa or Flickr.

The current photo viewer on the social networking site has caused lots of controversy since its introduction. Facebook users who did not like the photo viewers interface or functionality at all may be glad to hear that Facebook changes the layout and functionality of the Facebook photo viewer once again.

The company introduced the new features on the official Facebook blog. To sum it up: Three core changes are introduced in the new photo viewer.

Photos can now be shared with a resolution of up to 960 pixels in width, which does not look like much on first glance when compared to the existing solution of 720 pixels. Take a look at the photo below to see the difference in action.

Even better: Despite the increase in size, loading times of photos have been cut in half. Photos on average should load now twice as fast as before which means that Facebook users can access larger resolution images faster on the site.

Photos that have already been uploaded by the user will automatically be displayed in the new higher resolution.

The third and final change is a new photo viewer which on first glance looks a lot better than the current viewer. The new viewer puts the focus on the image. Instead of displaying the image on a black background, it now displays on white which is a lot easier on the eyes.

The clean interface is still displaying comments and other options (like tagging) below the photo on the photo viewer page. Here is a sample shot.

I personally like the new photo viewer and the fact that photos now load faster on Facebook.

The features are currently being rolled out to all users. It make take a few days before you get access to them in your account.

Image Sorter needs to be installed before it can be used. The program interface looks nearly identical to the one back in 2007, that’s however not a problem considering that it worked well in 2007. One new feature is the ability to load images and photos not only from the computer’s hard drive or a connected storage device, but also from Flickr or Yahoo.

This is done by entering a keyword, title or tag in the search form on the right side after selecting Yahoo or Flickr as the source. Image Sorter will then pull data from the online services and display them in its interface.

If you select hard drive as the source you can use the Explorer module on the left to pick a root folder to display its photos directly in the interface. You need to enable Subdirectories under Options if you want them to be included in the search. Multiple root folders can be selected by holding down Shift or Ctrl.

Images are displayed and sorted based on the selected sorting options and filters. All photos are sorted by color by default, which can be changed to name, size, date or similarity instead. The latter are only available for local images, and not for images that are found at Flickr or Yahoo.

Controls are available to zoom in and out, to display the sorted images in fullscreen mode or to change the background color of the display. Fullscreen reduces the width of the left and right column to give more room for the column displaying the sorted photos. The program window itself retains its size.

File filters and visual filters are listed on the right side. These need to be configured before a folder is selected on the computer’s hard drive.

File Filters:

• Filename – Only display images that contain the characters entered into this form.
• Filetype – Only include photos of a specific type, for instance png, jpg or tif
• File Size – Sort by file size, low, medium and large file filters are available.
• Colors – Filter by colored or black and white photos.
• Orientation – Filter landscape or portraits.

Visual Filters:

• Example Images – Pick images by dragging and dropping them from the image area to the example images module. Image Sorter will only display images that look similar to the selected images.
• Sketch – You can draw in this module to only include images that include a similar pattern.
• Color – Pick up to four colors that should be included in the images.

Images can be selected with the left mouse button. A thumbnail preview is displayed in the interface along with information like the file name, size and dimensions.

A double-click opens the selected image in the default photo viewer. The mouse wheel offers to zoom in and out of the image preview area to take a closer look at multiple images at once.

Left-clicks on images select all of them which is handy as it is possible to copy, move or delete selected images with a right-click and a selection of the desired action in the context menu.

The Options menu at the top contains several interesting preference. It is possible to increase or decrease the amount of images pulled from the Internet (default 150), configure previews on mouse over instead of mouse click or change the spacing between images in the image area.

So what can you use Image Sorter for?

• Find all photos showing a specific person, building or landmark.
• Find themed images, for instance based on color.
• Find photos and images that look similar to a sample image.
• Make pre-selections by loading all photos into the program and using the copy or move option.

Image Sorter offers many different possibilities. The processing speed depends mostly on the performance of the computer, the selected images and filters.

Are there any negative aspects? It would be great if the application would support additional image formats, RAW image formats for instance or Adobe Photoshop PSD files come to mind. It could use a few improvements usability wise as well, for instance by adding an option to apply filters directly to the already sorted images.

All in all however, it is one of the best programs of its kind. Image Sorter worked fine on a 64-bit Windows 7 Pro test system. It is compatible with most versions and editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Interested users can download the application from the developer website.

Twitter was originally a text-only messaging service but this didn’t stop users from utilizing third-party services to share photos. Twitpic, Instagram and yFrog are just a few examples of such services whose future is now uncertain. In an attempt to control the revenue stream and ensure a more streamlined, consistent experience for users, Twitter is also putting the “smack-down” on third-party client for photo-sharing services. The company has already acquired Tweetie and re-released it as the official Twitter client on OS X. Recently, it was announced that Twitter had acquired Tweet Deck.

His goal in acquiring these programs, says Costolo, is to encourage app developers to “move up on the value chain.” Citing an app the Red Cross is utilizing along with the app Klout as examples of his point, he talked about adding value to the Twitter ecosystem.

Costolo is the current CEO of Twitter, following Evan Williams, who stepped down as CEO last year after almost exactly 2 years in that position.
Not only is Twitter launching its own photo-sharing service; it’s also improving the search engine it employs. The goal is to have results become more personalized making search queries come back with different content depending on who the user is and which people are on their personal network. Twitter plans to have videos and photos come back on the results page, as well.

The company behind the scene, so to speak, is Photobucket which delivers the storage and infrastructure to host these photos. The new photo service is currently rolled out, users can expect it to become available in the coming weeks.

Twitter, developed in March of ’06 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year, has gained popularity in leaps and bounds since its launch. In July of 2007 it had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter. In only a year, this number grew to 100 million posts per quarter and now, with an estimated user base of over 200 million people worldwide, users of Twitter purportedly issue around a billion tweets every six days. The company reports 13 billion API requests coming in every single day. Despite being censored in Iran, China, Egypt and South Korea, Twitter continues to see rapid growth and it is generally felt that this is due to the company’s commitment to keeping up with their user base and constantly striving to improve the service and its relevance to the user community.

But hold on a moment…that feature is not built into your favorite file manager (at least not yet). You have to build it in. But don’t worry, the process isn’t difficult – if you know what you’re doing. Let me hip you to the process of adding this functionality to Nautilus now.

What you need

Obviously you need a working installation of Linux (I am using Ubuntu 10.10) and a GNOME desktop. You will also need a Facebook account. Outside of that, the only thing you need is the file that can be downloaded from the bottom of this page. Once you have that file, you are ready to begin.

The installation

Here are the steps for the installation:

1. Unpack the Facebook_XXX.targ.gz file (where XXX is the release number) by right-clicking it in Nautilus and selecting “Extract Here”.
2. Move into the newly created folder.
3. Double click on the install.sh file and, when prompted, select “Run in Terminal”.
4. When prompted (inside of the newly opened terminal) enter your sudo password.
5. Let the installation complete.

That’s it for the installation. Now it’s time for the authentication.

First upload

Figure 1

To upload a photo to your Facebook account you simply have to right-click a photo and select Scripts > Upload to Facebook. When you go to upload your first photo to Facebook from Nautilus you will have to authenticate to your Facebook account. This is done by a window opening requiring you to paste a URL into a text area. The URL you need to paste will be opened in your default web browser AFTER you click the Allow button in the Facebook authentication page. Once you have that URL paste into the window you see shown in Figure 1 and click OK.

Once you’ve done that click the Refresh button and you will be prompted for your Facebook username. NOTE: This is NOT your email addresss. Once you have done that all of your photo albums will be listed and you are ready to start uploading photos.

From this manager you can also add new photo albums as well as go directly to that album.

Uploading

When you have completed the setup, you can start uploading photos. The process is quite simple:

1. Open up Nautilus to the directory containing the photo you want to upload.
2. Right click the photo and select Scripts > Upload to Facebook.
3. When the FUploader opens click the Refresh button.
4. Select the specific album you want upload the photo to.
5. Click the Upload button.
6. Close the manager.

You can select multiple photos (holding down the Ctrl button as you click them) and do the same process listed above.

The problem with geotagging is that the information can be read by anyone. If you upload a geotagged photo to the Internet then anyone with the ability to view the photo can check the location the photo was taken.

While that often is not a problem, some users may want to avoid this from happening because of privacy concerns. In addition, there is a chance that criminals exploit the photo information as well, either to find out that you are on holiday currently and not at home, or to locate you or the people on the photo in the world.

Geotag Security is a free software program for Windows that can remove geotags from photos. The program displays a simple wizard that walks the user through the removal of geotags in selected photos.

It starts with the selection of a folder that contains photos and images that should be processed by the software program.

The program scans the folder for images and displays the number of photos found, the files with secure geotags and the files with non-secure geotags that have been secured by Geotag Security. Subfolders are automatically included in the scan.

A log is displayed that displays scan and photo processing information. The log displays a list of all scans performed by the program.

The next window is only available for users who have purchased Geotag Security Pro. The commercial version can monitor folders for new photos to process them automatically.

Users who want to download Geotag Security can download the program at the developer website. (via)

Professionals use image editors to remove those objects from their photos. They do it that well that it is often not determinable if the photo has been edited or not. Most hobbyists on the other hand lack the required skills to remove objects using – often expensive – photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop.

An online service like Web In Paint may be exactly what they need to remove objects from their photos.

The service requires the latest Adobe Flash plugin. But that’s the only requirement, it can be used without registration. The page shows some ads on the sides and top, and a one-time popup is displayed advertising the desktop version.

A photo is loaded into the web application via the Load Image button. The service supports large photos, some test 2 Megabyte images were accepted without problems.

Zoom in and out controls are available, ideal for displaying large photos on the screen without scrolling. A left click on the photo adds marker to the image. This area will later be removed by the application and replaced with what the algorithm believes is the best fit for that location.

This works pretty well for small objects on large photos. If you zoom in you notice the manipulation though. A second path usually optimizes the result further.

Web In Paint lacks an undo. You have to start over if you accidentally left-click on the photo. The online service otherwise offers a straightforward way of removing objects from photos. It is easy to use and the results are solid most of the time.

Whatever your reason, you want that screensaver to be just right. In Linux there are plenty of these innocuous beasts to choose from. But did you know you can set up a nice slide show, using your own photos, with the help of F-Spot? It’s actually quite simple and in this how-to I am going to show you just how to do that.

Pre-requisite

Before you actually get into the act of configuring this screensaver, you must have F-Spot installed. I have covered that (and a bit more) in my article “Manager your photo collection with F-Spot“. Once you have that installed, and you’ve imported your photos, you are ready to start configuring. Let’s take a look to see how this is done.

Favorites

Figure 1

In order to use F-Spot managed photos in a screen saver slide show, you have to tag the pics you want as Favorites. This is quite simple if you follow these steps:

Open up F-Spot by clicking Applications > Graphics > F-Spot.

Select all of the files you want to use in your screensaver (hold down CTRL while selecting to select multiple files).

Right-click one of the selected files and then click Attach Tag > Favorites.

Set up the screensaver

Figure 2

Now it’s time to configure the screensaver. Click on System > Preferences > Screensaver and, in this new window (see Figure 2) scroll down until you see the F-Spot photos entry. Select that and then click the Preview button to make sure this works for you.

Now you might want to tweak the settings a little bit here. You will want to make sure the “Activate screensaver when computer is idle” check box is checked. If you want to password protect your screensaver check the box associated with “Lock screen when screensaver is active”. You can also configure how many minutes before the screensaver is activated.

If this is a laptop, you can also configure Power Management by click the associated button.

Once you are done with the setup, click the close button and your new slide show screen saver is ready to entertain your fellow workers and brighten up that otherwise dim cubicle or office.

Final thoughts

Screensavers do little to make us more productive. But they can serve a purpose in certain situations – whether that situation is a necessity to lock a screen or to show off your company’s work when a computer is idle. No matter why – you can set up your Linux box screensaver as a slide show thanks to the ever-handy F-Spot photo manager application.

Element Photo Gallery is a desktop application for Windows that is not as heavyweight as Picasa or Windows live Photo Gallery. The 2 Megabyte program can manage multiple albums on the system easily.

New photos are loaded by selecting a folder or photos directly. Import works pretty much automated from that point on. Users with photos in many different folders will notice that an option to crawl subfolders is missing during import, each folder has to be selected separately.

element photo gallery

Photos are scanned and displayed as thumbnails in the program interface. A double-click opens a larger view of the selected photo, with options to change or edit the title, time taken or description. The same menu offers basic photo editing options like adjusting the colors, size or dimensions of the photo. And the notorious red eye removal is available as well.

photo editing

The photo preview window offers additional options to zoom in and out of the current photo, rotate it or navigate to the next or previous photo in the photo album.

On the publishing side, there are options to burn photo albums to CD or DVD, post images to Flickr or Facebook, email them to other users, create a basic HTML web gallery or print them on a local printer.

Finally, there are options to search the photo collection and to view a slideshow of the photos in the selected album.

Element Photo Gallery is a lightweight photo management software for the Windows operating system. It offers a lot that users want to see, without going overboard with the feature set.

It is probably best suited for medium sized photo collections. The program can be downloaded directly from the developer website over at Element Software. The program requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 installed.

In this article I am going to introduce you to the GNOME Flickr uploader Postr. It’s simple to install and simple to use.

Features

Postr offers some fairly straight-forward features such as:

• Simple user interface.
• Common attributes for photos.
• Nautilus integration.
• Session management.

Installation

Installation is simple, thanks to the fact that Postr is located in your standard repositories. Just follow these directions:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool (such as Synaptic, Ubuntu Software Center, Packagekit, etc).
2. Search for “postr” (no quotes).
3. Mark Postr for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it! You are ready to set up Postr.

Linking to your account

This of course assumes you already have a Flickr account. To open Postr click on Applications > Graphics > Flickr Uploader and Postr will open. When you first run Postr a small window will appear with a link asking you to Login to Flickr. Click that link and your web browser will open to the Flickr login page. You have to walk through a couple of steps on that page. If you do not finish the authorization steps on the Flickr site Postr will not gain access and will return an error 108. Once you have done that click the Continue button on the Postr window. You will know you have successfully linked to your Flickr account when the Upload button on Postr is no longer grayed out.

Adding and uploading photos

Figure 1

This is very simple. To add and upload photos follow these steps:

1. Click the “+” symbol (see Figure 1).
2. Navigate to the directory housing your photos.
3. Select the photo(s) you want to upload (use the <Ctrl> button to add multiple photos).
4. Click Open.
5. Click the Upload button.

Your photos will then upload to your Flickr account.

There are, of course, other methods of uploading to Flickr. Thanks to Postr’s Nautilus integration you can also upload like this:

1. Open up Nautilus.
2. Navigate to the location of your photos.
3. Right click a photo you want to upload.
4. Select Upload to Flickr.
5. When Postr opens click the Upload button.

That’s it!

You can of course add information to your photos before you upload them. You can also add photos to sets, send them to groups, and set privacy settings from within Postr. NOTE: You can not create sets from within Postr. You will have to create those on your Flickr page. Once you have sets created, you can then add photos to the sets before you upload them.

Final thoughts

If you are a frequent Flickr user, you should do yourself a favor and start using Postr. It’s simple to use and will save you time.

The digital photo organizer can come in handy in numerous occasions but in particular when a user wants to sort and structure a photo collection or create a chronologically sorted photo collection.

The program is configured in its main interface. All it actually takes to initiate the sorting and copying is to select a source and destination folder. The software then sorts the photos based on their EXIF data and the sorting order.

The photos are copied and not moved to the destination so that they remain in their source locations after they have been processed by the photo sorter.

Options are available that change the output. It is for instance possible to use filters to exclude and include specific photo formats or specify a time frame so that only photos that have been taken in that time are copied.

The program can also rename photos based on file naming templates. The photos will be named like the source images by default with options to add date and time information to the file names.

A last option that is available is to form groups of photos that have been taken in a specific date range and to include photos that have no EXIF data. This last option ensures that all photos are copied from the source to the destination folder.

Adebis Photo Sorter processes photos quickly and efficiently. It did not take longer than a few minutes to sort and copy more than 5000 photos on our test system.

The digital photo organizer can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Update: The product website is no longer available. Please check out Photo Event Organizer instead, it is a solid alternative.

Image Ripper is a standalone application that supports batch photo downloads from several Chinese photo hosting sites. It currently supports downloading images from the following image hosting sites:

• duide.com
• heels.cn
• pics100.cn
• tu11.cc
• meituiji.com
• pal.ath.cx
• tuku.keaibbs.com

The photo downloader’s interface is simplistic and easy to understand. It consists of an url field at the top which accepts urls from the sites listed above. The user needs to select a local directory as well which will be used to store the images on the local computer system. Tapping the green button to the right will initiate a page scan. Image Ripper will let the user know if it found any images on the page. The photos that are found will automatically be downloaded to the local computer system.

The program lists all downloaded photos and the current photo in the interface. Thumbnails of the photos that have already been downloaded are also available. Tapping the space bar will display only the current photo in the program window.

Downloaded photos can be uploaded right from the program to Gdrive or Picasa. The first release of Image Ripper is promising, at least for users of those Chinese photo hosting sites. Alternatives are our favorite program Bulk Image Downloader (commercial), the Firefox batch image downloader or the Java application Bilder Herunterlader.

Image Ripper can be downloaded from the project’s website at Codeplex.

The Image Error Level Analysis is an online service that offers one approach to finding out if an image is real or if it has been photoshopped. It works by pasting an image location on the Internet into the online form on the website.

“Error level analysis (ELA) works by intentionally resaving the image at a known error rate, such as 95%, and then computing the difference between the images. If there is virtually no change, then the cell has reached its local minima for error at that quality level. However, if there is a large amount of change, then the pixels are not at their local minima and are effectively original.”

How it works: Error level analysis can help you work out if a photo has been digitally altered. Photos in a jpeg file format actually lose quality each time they are resaved. We can take advantage of this to try and work out if an image has been digitally manipulated.

For instance, if you have a jpeg photo at 90% quality, and resave it, again at 90% quality, you will end up with an image at 90% of 90% (so, 81% quality). If now, you were to copy and paste an element from a different photo into your current photo, you can end up with sections of the image at differing quality levels. This happens because some parts have been resaved three times, whilst some parts may have only been saved once.

Error level analysis allows you see to see the difference in quality level, represented by brightness. Things which are very bright have been edited most recently, whilst duller parts have been resaved multiple times. This allows you to see not just which parts of the image have been changed, but in what order the changes occurred.

Different levels of brightness in a photo can be an indication that the photo has been manipulated. Go to the error analysis website to try it out. It currently works only with jpg images that need to be located on an Internet site.

It works with direct connections of the photo frame but also memory cards and other storage devices that might be used to update the photo storage on the digital photo frame.

The program itself is easy to use but not so easy to setup as it requires quite a bit of configuration before it can be used. The software comes with a configuration utility that needs to be executed during the first connection.

This tool scans the connected devices and tries to identify the digital photo frame that is connected to the PC. The user has to pick a drive letter manually if that fails.

Probably the most difficulty parts of the configuration are the selection of the frame type and setting the api key, authentication token and shared secret under Flickr Options. The developer of Flickr2Frame has published a tutorial that walks the user through the process of getting those information and entering them into the software.

The main software program will then download photos under the selected label and user account from Flickr to the designated storage space on the device. if the digital photo frame is connected directly it will automatically move them in the right directory (erasing all files in that directory first) so that they can be displayed afterwards. An option to keep the photos that are already in the directory would be really nice to avoid losing photos this way.

Flickr2Frame is available at the Codeplex website. It is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 or higher to be installed on the computer system it is being executed on.