by Michelle Lentz

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.

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by Brian Solis

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’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story…

Somewhere between Palm Springs and San Francisco

San Jose, California

San Jose, California

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

Moffett Field, Mountain View

Silicon Valley

These pictures are part of my ongoing photographic series, “A Passenger’s View of the World.” Please visit my album on flickr for additional views.

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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

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.

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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

I discovered PixelPipe this morning via ReadWriteWeb, which is also where I acquired a beta invite (so, thanks RWW!). I love the idea of being able to post photos to multiple sites at once. I tend to use Flickr for all my photos, which makes it hard to share things via Facebook. I only have so much patience for uploading.

PixelPipe lets you pick as many places, or “pipes”, as you want and it will upload your photos to all of those locations. It’s rather speedy as well. I tried it with one photo and it quickly posted it to Twitpic, Flickr, Facebook, 4 Typepad blogs, and bub.blicio.us, which runs on WordPress. (I deleted it from most of those locations however.)

It uploads to your blogs and immediately creates a new post (XYZ via PixelPipe). My preference would be to upload the photo as a draft post to my blogs. I would also like to select which of my pipes the photo will go to – in other words, I might not want to upload the same photos to bub.blicio.us that I do to my Wine Blog.

However, I can certainly see, for now, setting up a couple different Pixelpipe accounts. One that uploads to Flickr and Facebook, for example, and another that uploads to my technology blogs.

Pixelpipe currently supports 33 different photo and video sharing sites. You can upload via a custom email address, directly through Pixelpipe, or use one of their desktop-based tools. These include Mac (including an iPhoto plug-in), Windows, and Linux tools. I downloaded the full Mac application and found it easy to use. In fact, if you’ve ever used the Flickr uploading tool, you’ll find this one remarkably familiar. An iPhone app and a Firefox plug-in are forthcoming.

PixelPipe is a free service that solves a problem most of us now have – how to share our photos with everyone we know.

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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

I was standing in my storage facility this weekend, trying to decide what I could trash. My husband found a box, and then another box, filled with old scrapbooks. This is why I love digital cameras – I’ve eliminated the need for physical scrapbooks that eventually gather dust in my storage facility.

Of course, there are now as many options for creating online digital albums as there are for creating physical ones. I probably have albums mouldering out in cyberspace now. There’s Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, PhotoBucket and too many more to count. The newest of the bunch, PicWing, has a twist or two that make it stand out in the crowd a bit.

PicWing, allows you to email or upload photos to your albums. Like any photo site, you can always access and share your albums via a web address. It’s the widgets that make the difference.

The first nifty widget works with your Chumby? Don’t have a Chumby? Neither do I, although at the moment I sort of want one. The Chumby is a little gadget that pulls down information from the Internet (sports, weather, etc) and now, it retrieves photos from your PicWing album. Of course, the Chumby requires a wireless network, which sort of eliminates me giving this little item to my Grandma, but I still like the idea.

The next nifty widget is a digital picture frame. I like the idea of this, but I feel the execution is a bit flawed. Right now, because it’s a beta frame, the PicWing team is putting these frames together by hand. Their frame, which costs $249, look identical to my own digital frame that I picked up one Christmas for $65.  Of course, my frame doesn’t receive over the air updates from PicWing, displaying all my online photo albums. It’s a great idea, but I’m a little wary about the price point considering other frames on the market.

Finally, you can also install a simple desktop widget – sort of a digital picture frame for the desktop. Since my Mom has a computer, I could conceivably install the widget on her machine. Whenever I uploaded new photos, they’d appear in her desktop widget.

While I’m not ready to jump Flickr-ship yet, I like the ideas that PicWing is implementing – daring to get away from the computer.

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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.