Tag Archives: images

by Michelle Lentz

I’ve always loved Life Magazine, perhaps because of my love of American pop culture. In the last decade, I’ve bought soft-cover Life “magazines” (more like picture books) that cover a year in pictures, the Kennedys, and more. I have a copy of a Life magazine from when we lost JFK and another from when we lost Jim Henson. Life captured the essence of American joy and sadness in pictures better than many writers.

Photo Credit

Of course, Life isn’t really in print anymore. But Google announced this week that they are partnering with the magazine to archive all of Life’s images. Now, I’m really not sure how this works for you, the user, when you want to legally embed these images on your blogs. (Of course, I did it anyway.)

The official, although not-ready-for-primetime, Life.com states

Welcome to the future home of LIFE.com, the most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web: 10 million photos from the legendary archives of LIFE magazine and thousands more added every day. Whatever you want to look at, whether it happened an hour ago, a century ago, or any time in between, you’ll be able to find it here quickly, easily, and for free.

If anything, you can now browse amazing pictures archived all the way from the 1860s. Not all the photos are online yet, of course, but they’re working on it. Around 20% of the collection is currently available online and over the next few months, they’ll finish adding all 10 million photos.

If you really love a photo, clicking on through will take you to a hi-res version of the image that you can purchase, suitable for framing.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email at michelle[at]writetech.net, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

PhotoJoy is a free application that lets you easily create all sorts of toys with your photos. You can create desktop widgets (toys), 3D photo screensavers, wallpaper collages.

Their theory is that we take the photos, store them in an archive somewhere or upload them to Flickr, and then never look at them. Photojoy figures you should, well, enjoy them.

Uploading your photos to PhotoJoy quick and simple, and it even works with your Flickr account. You can choose to upload photos saved on your computer or any photos from your Flickr account. In addition, PhotoJoy also offers a Web streaming option that automatically updates your PhotoToys, screensavers and wallpaper collages with new photos from Flickr as soon as they become available.

Did I mention the software was free? For an example of what you can do with PhotoJoy, here’s a great video they made featuring our own Brian Solis. And Brian, this is exactly what you get for having your photos all over the Internet.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

By Michelle Lentz

Fix Up My Pic launched in the spring. They offer to fix up your images – for free.

You can upload your photo in one of two ways. The Easy Upload, shown in the screenshot, lets you choose what effects you want applied – everything from colorizing, black and white, sepia, brightness, and contrast. The Advanced Upload lets you type out specifically what you want done – whether it’s removing a blemish or removing an ex-boyfriend from the photo.

Actual humans make the changes and then email the photo back to you within 24 hours. After an image is fixed, the url and a friendly message is sent back to the user. The image is also placed in the gallery, where it can be easily integrated with Facebook, Myspace, and other social networks, with automatically generated embed code.

If you’ve always wanted to remove the red eye or snazz up your photos and you don’t know how, Fix Up My Pic might be the best service for you. The social networking integration is a true bonus feature.

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.