If you're a Mac user who's considering giving iPhoto a try, and you're also a fan of sharing photos on Flickr, you might want to give FlickrImport a try. On its face, it's just a utility that imports your Flickr images into iPhoto, but there's more to this little gem than meets the eye. It preserves photo info, including EXIF and TIFF metadata.

Even better, FlickrImport works for more than just your own account. You can also use it to import photos from your contacts accounts, as long as those photos are visible to you. If you have more than one Flickr account, for some reason, you can add yourself as a contact and import from both accounts that way. One caveat: FlickrImport doesn't play nicely with Snow Leopard. To make it work, do a Get Info on the app and check the "Open with Rosetta" box.

Nikon, never satisfied with merely standing still, have brought out a lovely new iPhone app that acts as an always-there photography guide. If you're an amateur, semi-pro, or even a professional wondering how certain effects or styles are pulled off -- this app would make a great addition to your iPhone's arsenal.

This new app, Learn And Explore, allows you to hunt for professional examples to show you what's possible in a given situation. There are guides that will show you how to take photos in tricky conditions -- indors, outdoors, low-light, long-exposure -- it's al lhere.

They're promising continuos updates and access to their Nikon World magazine through the app.

No reason this would only be of use to a Nikon user either -- though if there's any kind of Nikon branding on the software, I'm not sure a Canon user would be seen dead with it...

[via CNET]

I'm not a photographer by any means (although I hear Download Squad's newest blogger, Sebastian, is!), and the iPhone's built-in camera isn't exactly the greatest piece of photography equipment around, but the TiltShift Generator iPhone app doesn't really care!

This neat little 99-cent app applies cool toy-camera (think 'dollhouse miniatures') effects and vignetting to any photo, and makes even the crummiest iPhone photographers look good. It can apply two styles of adjustable blur, some color controls and, of course, those hot-looking dark edges.

We've covered ways to fake a tilt-shift effect before on Download Squad - yes, you could just buy a special lens, but software can provide a cheaper approximation - but this is the first on-the-go option I've tried. iPhone features include applying effects to photos you've already taken, saving new photos you take with the app, and sharing via email or Twitter.

If you're not sure where to start with tiltshift photos, try shooting a cluster of objects from above - the creator of the app has done some great-looking stuff with houses and parking lots. Even if you're not too confident in your photographic abilities, shell out a dollar for this app and see what you can do. You might be surprised!

Google Labs has been putting together some great new search technology lately. They just introduced Social Search, and now the Similar Images feature has graduated from Labs and become a permanent part of Google Image Search. When you search for an image, you'll see "find similar images" links below most of the results: clicking it gives you a pretty accurate collection of images of the same subject.

I tested out similar images on some easy stuff (umbrellas) and some tougher stuff (celebrities), and found that it worked really well. Similar Images is good at matching backgrounds, and even manages to find similarly-posed photos if you're searching for an animal or a person. It obviously doesn't do as well when the subject is obscure or abstract, or there aren't a lot of photos of it in the database. In cases like that, it'll be more likely to match your image's color scheme than to find a picture of the same person or thing.

Similar Images isn't made to find identical images hosted on different sites. If you're trying to determine where an image came from, try putting it into TinEye instead.

Until April 30th 2010 -- six whole months! -- Adobe Lightroom 3 is available for public beta testing.

In the last week there's been a lot of news regarding Lightroom 3's advanced feature, and now here's your chance to actually give it a whirl!

Lightroom is great for every kind of photographer -- casual, avid snapper or professional. It's not a full-featured editing suite like Photoshop, but it does have most functionality that photographers (note: not 'digital artists') might require -- but if you're the kind of artist or photographer that likes to airbrush his works into submission, Lightroom isn't for you. It is a 'digital darkroom and presentation' tool -- so from downloading photos, to sorting through them and producing pretty presentations/contact sheets, Lightroom's the program to use.

For those of you that have used it before, and are wondering why it might be a good time to upgrade (or at least try the beta), here are the new or enhanced features that Adobe are touting:

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio-designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

And if those bullets got your juices flowing, here's the download link again: Adobe Lightroom 3 Public Beta

John Nack at Adobe recently posted a demo video of a hot new project in the works from Adobe Labs: content-aware fill in Photoshop. Where the current spot-healing tool in Photoshop (up to CS4) replaces the selected area using information from one other part of the image, the new content-aware version uses a technology called PatchMatch to fill in the hole using info from multiple surrounding points. The upshot is that you get a much more convincing automatic heal.

In the demo video, you can see how content-aware spot healing makes things like removing wires from a photo a whole lot easier, but there's also a new version of the fill tool for larger areas. You can use it to scrub out entire trees and big chunks of scenery, and the result seem pretty plausible.

When is this magical new feature coming to Photoshop? Maybe not ever, according to Nack's disclaimer, but it looks far enough along that I wouldn't be totally surprised to see it in the next major version.

The Mill is an award-winning visual effects studio with offices in London and New York. It should go without saying that these guys know a thing or two about color. What's surprising, though, is that they're giving away a small chunk of that expertise for absolutely free in the form of an iPhone app. Mill Colour [iTunes link] can customize the colors of your photos using a bunch of tried-and-true preset effects, and it also has powerful manual color controls.

Even if you don't go beyond the prepackaged effects in Mill Colour, it's well worth checking out. I recommend the "bleached" and "noir" looks, especially. If you start to mess around with the manual side of Mill Colour, though, you'll quickly discover how powerful it is. You can fine-tune the saturation, gamma, gain and lift of each individual RGB channel, making sure your image looks precisely the way you want it to. Did I mention it's a free download?

Yfrog, one of the most popular photo-posting services for Twitter, is making a move into video and offering webcam support. You can record and tweet, right from the Yfrog site. To get started, check the space where you'd normally see the option to upload an image or enter a URL: the new webcam option has been added right next to those. When the video window pops up, you can record a video, take a still shot, or take a still shot on a 5 second delay.

As always with Yfrog, the photos and videos you take are only a click away from being posted to Twitter. Because Yfrog is already one of the top players in the Twitter photo uploading game, and supported in several major Twitter apps, there's a good chance it could start to dominate the Twitter video arena, too. Currently, Twitvid and Twiddeo are two of the most popular options.

[via CNET]

Spectives is a new way of following sites visually, by filtering new images as they're posted. You can subscribe to one site, or create a themed collection. When the sites update, your collection will update. Clicking on any image takes you to the source page, so you can read the post that goes along with it. It's a simple idea, and the execution is well-done in terms of both usability and visual appeal.

You don't have to sign up for an account to search or browse collections, but it does have advantages. You can make your own collections and add favorites to your Spectives homepage as tabs for easy access. Although Spectives seems like an alternative to RSS, you can also get RSS feeds of your collections if you prefer to take in your visual content that way. The only minor issue I have with Spectives is that it frames sites when you click through an image to see the original post. I don't think anyone likes toolbars, so an option to open in a new tab instead would be outstanding.

UPDATE: Spectives does actually have an "open in new tab" option, if you're logged in. You can find it in your settings.

At long last, after what seems like an eternity compared to the usually-rapid pace that most social networks evolve at, Flickr has implemented people-tagging. The functionality that most consider a defining characteristic of Facebook is now available on Flickr.

We've all been there: waking up on a Saturday morning, rolling out of bed, last night's drunkenly-debauched memories slowly swimming back into focus through your rheumy, sleep-encrusted eyes. You stagger into the kitchen or your study -- maybe there's a nice cup of coffee waiting for you. You sit down at your laptop -- or turn on your iPhone -- and check your mail.

There's the usual spam, the banal good-luck chain-letters and perhaps news that your copy of Windows 7 has just been dispatched. And then you see it.

'John Doe has tagged a photo of you on Facebook!'

Suddenly you find yourself plunged back into your memories of the night before. Desperately you poke and prod at the memory, praying the holiest damn prayer you've ever prayed, hoping that you didn't do something you'd later regret... something you'd later see on your computer screen... something your mother should never, ever see...

Quickly you un-tag yourself, cursing your friend, his family and his loved ones, praying you've done it quickly enough to avoid disaster.

And now ...? And now it can happen to you on both your social networks!

But wait! No! Flickr has gone one step further than Facebook! With Flickr you block people from tagging you in photos! With Flickr you can specify that only friends or family can tag you -- or no one at all!

The only real problem of course is that people don't often use Flickr for 'wild night out' photos -- that's usually reserved for Facebook. But would it be too crazy to suggest that Flickr could tie into the Facebook API and tag your Facebook friends on Flickr? Or will Facebook simply turn around and enable similar privacy options on tagging?

[via TechCrunch]

Well, not natively, but with the free FastPictureViewer codec pack you can now view your camera's high-resolution files within Windows 7's Explorer. All in all this codec pack has almost every camera type covered, from Canon's CR2 to Sony's SRF and Nikon's NRW -- and many others.

But how will this help me...? Well, if you're not a photographer, this is utterly insignificant. If you are a photographer though -- and I'd hazard a guess that most or all of us here have a digital camera -- it means that you no longer need to rely on manufacturer's own-brand image browser, or Adobe's Lightroom or Photoshop. You could now, in theory, manage your photography portfolio through Windows -- you can already tag and star-rate images, but with this codec pack there's absolutely no reason to use other tools.

And best of all it's free and devoid of any malware. It installs into the background and you'll never hear from it again. It's yet another good reason to install Windows 7...

P.S. Taken a little wind out of your sails, eh, Apple-centric photographers?

Photoshop has come to the iPhone in the form of Adobe's new Photoshop.com app. As someone with a lot of experience using Photoshop on the desktop, and a little bit of practice with Photoshop.com, I was surprised to find that the iPhone version is incredibly light. There are no layers, no brushes, and no levels ... just a lot of filters. You can touch up the exposure and saturation on your photos, add borders and vignettes, and apply a tint or a number of preset color effects. When you're done, you can save your work on your phone or upload directly to a photoshop.com account.

Honestly, I think Adobe got this one right. It would be cool to do some serious photo editing on the iPhone, but even the 3GS doesn't have the specs for the more resource-heavy features we've come to expect from Adobe's Creative Suite apps. iPhone users mostly just want to make their photos look a little better, and it's not like they're shooting with some kind of 12 megapixel DSLR. The Photoshop app delivers: just throw a little soft focus on there, fix up the colors, and you're good to go. The app also seems to be a promotional effort to get people to sign up for photoshop.com accounts, but it's not much harder to save your images and then upload them to Flickr or another photo sharing site you like.

If you're sick of uploading the same photos to 10 different sites, you'll love Dropico. It links up with several different social sites, including Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Photobucket, and lets you upload to all of them, or move existing images between accounts. You can even tweet photos from Twitpic or Yfrog from within Dropico. That's the "pic" part. The "drop" part comes from the site's easy drag n' drop interface.

Dropico supports creating and managing albums in some services, and importing either from your computer or elsewhere on the web. Dropico has an API, so other web apps will be able to take advantage of the service. A toolbar is in the works, too, so you'll be able to more easily save images you find on the web to your photo sharing accounts. Dropico is in private beta right now, with an email waiting list, so sign up now if you want to give it a try.

I'll describe PhotoSketch, but you really have to watch the demo video to believe it. If you make a living putting together composite images in Photoshop, you may want to stop reading right now, and start looking for a new line of work. Photosketch takes rough, even stick-figure-like drawings you do in Photoshop, finds real images to match, and puts together a montage that looks a lot like what you were imagining when you drew those sticks. You do need to add some text labels to the elements of your picture to help with search, but PhotoSketch does the rest. And, surprisingly, it looks pretty darn good.

You might expect something as advanced as PhotoSketch to come from a huge company like Google, but it was actually developed by a group of 5 computer science students in China. Their bandwidth isn't enough to stand up to all the hype, though, so PhotoSketch is down right now. The very impressive demo video shows a bit of how it works, though.

PhotoSketch uses a combination of your text labels and the rough shape of what you drew to find appropriate elements for your image. The results, at least the ones in the video, are incredible. The video also reveals that PhotoSketch isn't perfect - you don't want a baseball player for your Frisbee throwing scene, for example - but it generates several decent options for you to choose from, so one of them should be what you're looking for.

[via Mashable]

Xoopit is a service that turns Gmail into a powerful media browser, letting you quickly view your attachments. Since Yahoo! acquired it, though, it's been available to Yahoo! Mail users, and now Yahoo! is looking to make it exclusive. Xoopit will become the My Photos feature of Yahoo! Mail, and it's being pulled out of Gmail completely. Even the Firefox add-on and Facebook app for Gmail are being discontinued.

How does Yahoo! explain removing Xoopit from its biggest group of users? "We will not be able to keep investing in our Xoopit for Gmail product, and don't want you to end up with a lousy experience." That's going to leave a lot of Xoopit Gmail users disgruntled. Here's how this move affects you if you're one of them: your Xoopit data disappears on November 13th, but your attachments remain untouch (albeit unindexed) in your account. I don't know about other Xoopit users, but losing the service certainly doesn't make me want to sign up for an email address with the company that took it away. Bad form, Yahoo!