I’ve been alerted to a couple of new options for creating photo collages. It’s now much easier than dragging things around in Photoshop.
Photovisi is a web-based app that creates collages for your computer wallpaper. You can import up to 30 photos and select a pre-defined pattern from 18 different options. You can pull your photos from your local drive or from Flickr (although the latter didn’t work for me).
Alternatively, there is ShapeCollage, a free downloadable app by Vincent Cheung. ShapeCollage can automatically create photo collages in different shapes, like a heart, cat, or as WordArt. It created this collage of 200 photos of Vincent’s cat in under a minute.
There are two things I really like about ShapeCollage: it allows you to create your own shapes, and it’s nondiscriminatory. It’s available for Mac, Linux, and Windows. According to Vincent, he was never satisfied with available collage tools. “I created a program that automatically creates photo collages and attempts to optimally place the photos in the collage. I then realized that my program was not restricted to merely creating
rectangular collages like every other collage making software or website. I have created collages where the photos are placed so that they look like a heart, flower, cat, snowman, text, or different logos.”
ShapeCollages can be saved as JPGs, PNGs, or PhotoShop PSDs if you want to exert more control and edit the files yourself.
As I was returning from the DEMO09 conference held in Palm Desert, California, I was struck by the beauty of the blue skies I was leaving behind for the rain that would greet me in Silicon Valley.
The flight turned into a photographic journey as the weather transformed along the way. However, I was not welcomed by the showers that were anticipated, instead, I was met with sunshine and parting rain clouds that hovered above Northern California, creating a dramatic backdrop worth sharing.
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.
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.
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.
Shwup is yet another online photo-sharing tool. Shwup, however, is sort of the anti-Flickr. I doubt they’re shooting for that moniker, of course. But they do consider privacy before they consider sharing, which is pretty cool.
Shwup lets you upload your photos and then set the privacy levels for each album. In fact, viewing albums on Shwup is strictly invitation-only, sort of a velvet rope for your latest photo album. This way you can have different invitees to different albums.
For instance, you can upload a few work-related albums and invite your co-workers. But your co-workers won’t be able to see the photos from your wild night out on the town without an invite, and vice versa. Shwup calls this some-to-some sharing.
Each email invite comes with a personalized link. The invitee need not sign up for Shwup to view the album, but they need to follow their specific link. You can also invite your friends to add their own media to the album. All they need to do, if you’ve set up the permissions, is reply to their invite email with the photos attached.
Shwup can read all the major image formats, including JPG, BMP, GIF, and PNG as well as videos in MPG, MPEG, WMV, MOV, AVI, QT, 3GP and MP4. Videos take a little time to display because Shwup converts them to FLV files first. Shwup also reads ZIP files, which makes it easier to email attached photos. During the beta period at least, you can upload as many photos and videos as you want. The multi-file uploader accepts photos of any dimension. When you add photos in the file-by-file uploader or by e-mail, they can be a maximum dimension of 3000×3000. Each file can be a max of 100MB. Shwup can also import from Flickr, Facebook, or a specific URL.
