Remember all of those photos that caught your eye in your Facebook news feed? Probably not. But startup Pixable wants to help change that. On Thursday, it added a “my likes & comments” category to its photo-sharing apps.
The iPhone, iPad and browser apps connect with Facebook and sort you and your friends’ photos into categories like “most popular” or “family updates.” It also makes piles of the most popular Flickr and Instagram photos.
With the new category, users also get a log of what was most interesting to them in real time on Facebook. Since I’m personally a fairly conservative liker on Facebook, the collection of photos in the pile turned out to be something of a highlight reel.
Pixable is one of the only photo startups that is focusing on aggregating and browsing online photos rather creating a photo service of its own — a smart strategy in a crowded startup space that big players like Twitter have recently entered.
More About: photo app, Pixable, startup
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With smartphones projected to take over feature phones in the United States this year, there are a lot of people walking around with cameras in their pockets.
And so, an abundance of apps has launched recently to cater to all the smartphone owners who might want to snap a quick shot as they roam the city streets. It’s now easier to take, tweak, share and display photos than it ever was in the pre-app world. These are some of our favorites.
Instagram and Picplz have virtually identical functionality for adding effects to photos and sharing them with friends. Both allow you to add filters after you take photos, share them to Facebook and Twitter, view popular photos from other users, and follow friends to see their photos from a news feed. Even the interfaces of the two apps are so similar that at first glance you might mistake them for each other.
The biggest difference between the two free photo sharing services is that PicPlz has an Android app while Instagram does not (neither has a BlackBerry app). Picplz also gives its users slightly more control of camera settings in its Android app than Instagram does in its iPhone app, and it recently added a “collection” feature that easily adds photos to a group file (Instagram accomplishes this function via hashtag).
If you’re an iPhone user and have the option to choose between the two (Android users, also check out Vignette), the best way to decide between them comes down to which network most of your friends use. You can scope out the situation on each app by connecting your Twitter and/or Facebook profiles to the photo app.
Hipstamatic, $1.99, is another similar option for iPhone. While its more expansive filter collection produces beautiful effects, it doesn’t integrate social sharing like Instagram and PicPlz do.
Chances are that all 600 of your Facebook friends are not interested in seeing your life documented. Nor are you probably interested in sharing all of those photos. But for a close group of friends, access to your photo diary is an interesting way to stay in touch.
Path, which launched in November, aims to personalize photo sharing. The app asks you to create a network of fewer than 50 people. Each time you take a photo using the app, you have an option to tag it with three simple things: people, places and things. Each photo can be shared to just your Path friends, individual friends, or your Facebook wall.
If your Path friends have push notifications set, they’ll get a message when you share it with them, and your photo posts will also show up on their Facebook newsfeeds (only visible to friends who you’ve selected).
As you take and share photos, you create a timeline or “path” of your life. As of March, you can alter shots with Instagram-like photo lenses. There’s also an option to add 10-second video clips to this timeline.
Using multiple photo apps can easily result in photo overload, but there are several apps that address this very problem by organizing and streamlining your pics.
Browser app Memolane takes social media activity, including photos from Instagram and Facebook, and automatically plots it in a searchable scrapbook. When you want to remember, let’s say, a vacation, you can search for that point in the timeline to see Foursquare checkins, photos, videos and updates you made during that time period.
Gramframe, a $1.99 iPad app, uses Instagram’s public API to create iPad photo gallery screensavers for its users. If you want to put your friend’s photos into the mix, Pixable’s Photofeed iPad app has a slideshow feature that can accomplish something similar with friend’s Facebook photos, though the iPad will still go black after its normal sleep time.
Photofeed browser, iPhone and iPad apps also allow you to follow photo updates from specific Facebook friends and sorts photos into categories like “most popular,” “family updates” and “new profile photos.”
If you want to bring things into the physical world, you have your pick of services for creating albums from digital photos — SnapFish, Shutterfly, MyPublisher and Apple’s photo book service are some of the most popular. Then there’s Instaprint, which prints Instagram photos with a retro Polaroid camera look.
The Digital Photo and Film Series is supported by the Adobe® Photoshop® Elements product team. Adobe’s® photo-editing software delivers powerful options that make it easy to create extraordinary photos, unique print creations, quickly share memories in online albums, and automatically organize and help protect your photos. Download a free trial of Adobe® Photoshop® Elements® 9 to try it out!
– iPhotography: 10 Pro Tips for Snapping Perfect iPhone Photos
– 15 Incredible iPhone Dog Photographs
– 7 Superb Short Films Shot With Cellphones
– 10 Essential Websites for iPhone Photographers
– 10 Incredible iPhone Portrait Photographs
More About: Digital Photo and Film Series, gramframe, hipstamatic, instagram, iphotography, memolane, Path, photo apps, Photos, picplz, Pixable
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With smartphones projected to take over feature phones in the United States this year, there are a lot of people walking around with cameras in their pockets.
And so, an abundance of apps has launched recently to cater to all the smartphone owners who might want to snap a quick shot as they roam the city streets. It’s now easier to take, tweak, share and display photos than it ever was in the pre-app world. These are some of our favorites.
Instagram and Picplz have virtually identical functionality for adding effects to photos and sharing them with friends. Both allow you to add filters after you take photos, share them to Facebook and Twitter, view popular photos from other users, and follow friends to see their photos from a news feed. Even the interfaces of the two apps are so similar that at first glance you might mistake them for each other.
The biggest difference between the two free photo sharing services is that PicPlz has an Android app while Instagram does not (neither has a BlackBerry app). Picplz also gives its users slightly more control of camera settings in its Android app than Instagram does in its iPhone app, and it recently added a “collection” feature that easily adds photos to a group file (Instagram accomplishes this function via hashtag).
If you’re an iPhone user and have the option to choose between the two (Android users, also check out Vignette), the best way to decide between them comes down to which network most of your friends use. You can scope out the situation on each app by connecting your Twitter and/or Facebook profiles to the photo app.
Hipstamatic, $1.99, is another similar option for iPhone. While its more expansive filter collection produces beautiful effects, it doesn’t integrate social sharing like Instagram and PicPlz do.
Chances are that all 600 of your Facebook friends are not interested in seeing your life documented. Nor are you probably interested in sharing all of those photos. But for a close group of friends, access to your photo diary is an interesting way to stay in touch.
Path, which launched in November, aims to personalize photo sharing. The app asks you to create a network of fewer than 50 people. Each time you take a photo using the app, you have an option to tag it with three simple things: people, places and things. Each photo can be shared to just your Path friends, individual friends, or your Facebook wall.
If your Path friends have push notifications set, they’ll get a message when you share it with them, and your photo posts will also show up on their Facebook newsfeeds (only visible to friends who you’ve selected).
As you take and share photos, you create a timeline or “path” of your life. As of March, you can alter shots with Instagram-like photo lenses. There’s also an option to add 10-second video clips to this timeline.
Using multiple photo apps can easily result in photo overload, but there are several apps that address this very problem by organizing and streamlining your pics.
Browser app Memolane takes social media activity, including photos from Instagram and Facebook, and automatically plots it in a searchable scrapbook. When you want to remember, let’s say, a vacation, you can search for that point in the timeline to see Foursquare checkins, photos, videos and updates you made during that time period.
Gramframe, a $1.99 iPad app, uses Instagram’s public API to create iPad photo gallery screensavers for its users. If you want to put your friend’s photos into the mix, Pixable’s Photofeed iPad app has a slideshow feature that can accomplish something similar with friend’s Facebook photos, though the iPad will still go black after its normal sleep time.
Photofeed browser, iPhone and iPad apps also allow you to follow photo updates from specific Facebook friends and sorts photos into categories like “most popular,” “family updates” and “new profile photos.”
If you want to bring things into the physical world, you have your pick of services for creating albums from digital photos — SnapFish, Shutterfly, MyPublisher and Apple’s photo book service are some of the most popular. Then there’s Instaprint, which prints Instagram photos with a retro Polaroid camera look.
The Digital Photo and Film Series is supported by the Adobe® Photoshop® Elements product team. Adobe’s® photo-editing software delivers powerful options that make it easy to create extraordinary photos, unique print creations, quickly share memories in online albums, and automatically organize and help protect your photos. Download a free trial of Adobe® Photoshop® Elements® 9 to try it out!
– iPhotography: 10 Pro Tips for Snapping Perfect iPhone Photos
– 15 Incredible iPhone Dog Photographs
– 7 Superb Short Films Shot With Cellphones
– 10 Essential Websites for iPhone Photographers
– 10 Incredible iPhone Portrait Photographs
More About: Digital Photo and Film Series, gramframe, hipstamatic, instagram, iphotography, memolane, Path, photo apps, Photos, picplz, Pixable
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Pixable, a photo app that launched for iPhone on Wednesday, might have surfaced with one of the only strategies that can still compete in such a crowded space: aggregating photos from other platforms.
You may have noticed there’s a bit of a photo app showdown going on. Social photo apps such as Picplz and Instagram are taking off, and every serious contender in the group messaging space has also entered the group photo-sharing space. Meanwhile, photo app Color has earned a staggering $41 million in funding and a disproportionate number of headlines with its location-based photo-sharing concept.
Pixable first settled on its sorting (rather than sharing) focus when it launched its Photofeed browser app in January. The app connects with Facebook to help users track Facebook photos that are important to them. They can browse categories such as “most popular” and get updates when friends upload new photos. In February, Photofeed launched an iPad app with similar features; together, the apps have been installed more than 300,000 times.
A month before its iPhone launch, Pixable broadened its focus beyond Facebook photos, adding a category for popular photos on Flickr. The startup has since added a category for the most popular Instagram photos and plans to continue expanding to other services indefinitely.
The iPhone version of Photofeed is similar to the desktop and iPad versions. Users can browse different categories of Facebook photos their friends have uploaded (i.e. most popular, new profile pictures), view popular Instagram and Flickr photos, and get push notifications when friends update photos. When viewing Facebook photos, they can still comment on and Like photos as if they were viewing them on Facebook.
Eventually, Pixable co-founder Andres Blank sees the app developing into a personalized photo newsfeed for both friends and events. In his vision, integrations such as Flickr and Instagram will be personalized to show users the most popular photos from their friends on those platforms, and users will also have options to see photos surrounding news events or a specific celebrity without jumping from website to website.
“We’re trying to understand where the important photos from different subjects are coming from, and how do we aggregate them in a smart way,” Blank says.
What do you think of this photo-aggregation tool?
More About: hipstamatic, instagram, mobile apps, photo apps, picplz, Pixable
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Startup Pixable launched Monday an iPad version of Photofeed, its web app for organizing and sorting Facebook photos.
The app allows users to see all of their friends’ photos without jumping from profile to profile, view photos deemed most popular by a proprietary algorithm, sort photos by categories like “family updates,” and get updates when specific friends add or are tagged in new photos — all while maintaining Facebook “like” and comment functionality.
On the iPad, Pixable’s Photofeed also has a slideshow feature that displays photos in a manner similar to a digital frame. Pixable co-founder Andres Blank stopped by Mashable HQ recently to give this demo below.
More About: facebook, Photos, Pixable, startup
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Facebook has a larger photo collection than any other site on the web. According to an extrapolation of photo upload data reported by Facebook, the site now houses about 60 billion photos compared to Photobucket’s 8 billion, Picasa’s 7 billion and Flickr’s 5 billion.
Photo organizing Facebook app Pixable has used data from a sample of 100,000 of its users to give some insight into the contents of Facebook’s huge photo collection.
According to the data, weekends are the most popular days for uploading photos. Middle-aged users and those in their twenties upload comparable numbers of photos, but the older group uses significantly fewer tags. Women upload about twice as many photos as men — which might be good for everybody, as recent research suggests photos with women in them are generally preferred.
“Guys prefer photos with girls. Girls prefer photos with girls. Pretty much everyone prefers photos with girls,” explained Pixable CEO Inaki Berenguer at a recent Social Media Week panel.
More About: facebook, facebook photos, Photos, Pixable, trending
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