Flickr

iPhone is the camera used most in millions of photos on Flickr

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iPhone Camera
You could grab your DSLR. Nah, the iPhone will do the job.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

Once again, the world’s most popular camera is a phone.

Smartphones, led by Apple’s iPhone, was the type of camera used most by photographers in 2016 on the photo-sharing site Flickr, according its annual analysis of EXIF data on pictures uploaded to the site.

The iPhone was in the hands of shooters for 47 percent of the pictures uploaded to Flickr. Canon and Nikon were second and third with 24 and 18 percent.

2015: The year photography moved (and moved us)

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More than a trillion photos were captured in 2015.
More than a trillion photos were captured in 2015.
Photo: HypeBeast

We were too busy taking our own pictures in 2015 to notice that something about photography had changed.

This was the year the photo moved. It shed its flat, two-dimensional constraints and showed a life once left to the imagination.

The movement could be slight, as in Apple’s Live Photos, a new feature on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus camera that records a snippet of video before and after the frozen moment to add an extra dimension.

iPhone is most popular camera among Flickr’s 112 million photographers

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Canon cameras
The iPhone has been the top choice among Flickr photographers beginning in 2015.
Photo: Flickr

The longtime Kings of the Camera must know their kingdoms are shrinking. If Canon or Nikon need further evidence, Flickr’s 2015 Year in Review shows the popular tool of choice for an engaged and global photography community is not a dedicated camera. It’s first and foremost a phone.

Apple’s iPhone was the popular device used by the Flickr community, according to an analysis of the EXIF data on pictures uploaded to the site. iPhone cameras accounted for 42 percent of the photos on the site, compared to the DSLRs of Canon, 27 percent, and the Nikon, 16 percent.

Flickr’s lame auto-tagging feature infuriates users

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Auschwitz
Above: A jungle gym, according to Flickr's highly questionable tagging robots.
Photo: History.com

Photo-hosting site Flickr is taking some heat today over some unfortunate tags automatically showing up on users’ pictures. Specifically, the auto-tagging program has described people (of various races) as “animals” and identified concentration camps as “jungle gyms” and “sport.”

The auto-tag system remains in place, but some users want it gone.

We’re all suckers for filtered photos

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Get more interest in your photos with filters.
Get more interest in your photos with filters.
Photo: Wikipedia Commons

The researchers at Yahoo labs have just quantified the use of filters on digital photos. Say what you want about the death of the art of photography – filters will get your photos noticed.

“We find two groups of serious and casual photographers among filter users,” write the researchers at Yahoo Labs. “The serious see filters as correction tools and prefer milder effects. Casual photographers, by contrast, use filters to significantly transform their photos with bolder effects.”

The best filters for engagement, however, tended to be the ones that increase warmth, exposure, and contrast, rather than the cooler, more obscuring ones.

This is big news if you’re looking to get popular on sites like Flickr and Instagram.

How to nuke pesky location data from your iPhone photos

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"You were in Vegas without me!?" Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

These days, any photo you shoot with your iPhone or other smartphone will typically contain location data (unless you have that feature turned off) to allow apps like iPhoto to place your images on a map.

Even photo-sharing services use this data, with some — like Flickr — posting it prominently on your photo pages (along with all the other EXIF data, like shutter speed and f-stop).

If you don’t want the location of your photos to be known, the Yosemite version of OS X’s Preview can take care of it for you. Let’s strip that location data before we post that photo to the Web, OK?

Flickr boosts chances to make money from your iPhone pics

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Flickr

Flickr has just jumped into the photo licensing market with both feet, hoping to help you sell your stunning photos to a variety of “photo agencies, editors, bloggers and other creative minds.”

Image licensing isn’t a new idea for Flickr, long a repository for the best in high-quality photos posted by professional and amateur photographers alike. Flickr’s always allowed photographers easy access to creative commons licensing to tell editorial staffers which photos could be used, and for what purposes. It also allowed creators the ability to license their photos professionally via Getty Images and get paid, though the specific deal with Getty was discontinued back in March of this year.

Now, though, the list of places that you can sell the images you take on your iPhone to is even larger.

Sci-fi toys spring to life in filmic photos

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Who said Greedo doesn't fire first?
Who said Greedo doesn't fire first?

By day, Robert Larner works for an investment firm. By night he directs Stormtroopers, Transformers and Daleks.

Using toys, camera tricks and a keen sense of story, the photographer delights Flickr and Instagram fans with movie stills. But the movies don’t exist.

The Scotsman grew up a discerning cineaste with a taste for the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Ghostbusters movie franchises, but his greatest inspiration — in film and toys — was Star Wars.

“I could probably track my interest in toys via Star Wars,” Larner says. “When I was a kid in the early ’80s, I was completely swept up by the original Kenner 3.75-inch range. Then, in the ’90s, the remastered movies came out along with whispers of the prequels so the Star Wars toy range was reintroduced, so that caught my interest again. However, it was when Lego had the bright idea of making Star Wars Lego sets in 1999 that I really got sucked in and I haven’t looked back since!”

Use these apps to get iOS 8’s great new photo features now

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iOS 8 packs in a bunch of great new photo features, in both the Camera app and the Photos app. You now get a lot more control over your photography at the front end, with manual exposure and even a time-lapse mode, and you can edit and find your photos with a little more precision than before.

iOS 8 is still a few months out, but you don’t have to wait: Use these currently available apps to add all these new functions to your iPhone (or iPad) today.

Flickr update adds new sharing and tagging options

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Yahoo’s iOS Flickr client got a revamp this morning, adding several handy features — including new options related to sharing, tagging, and describing your photo albums.

Users now have the ability to share their albums via Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter, in addition to Mail and SMS. The update also provides users with the chance to add and edit both tags and descriptions of their photos from inside the app.

Add GPS to your dumb camera photos using your iOS device

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Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Apart from letting you quickly edit and share photos (and always sitting, ready to go, in your pocket), the iPhone camera has one other great feature: It geotags every photo and video you shoot with the place you captured the imagery. You might not care about that now, but in the future when you wonder, “Where did I take that naked self-portrait?” or decide to take a look at your old vacation snaps, you’ll love geotagging.

Hell, half the time I use a map to find a photo — I can usually remember where I was better than when I was.

Lack of geotagging is perhaps the main reason I don’t take my regular camera out as often as I’d like, so I decided to do something about that. I’m using a combination of the iOS GeoTagr app on iPhone and iPad, plus a Fujifilm X100S camera and a Garmin EDGE 500 GPS bike computer.

Let’s take a look.

iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite will change the way you do photography

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Apple finally fixed photography on iOS. Or rather, it’s fixed organizing your photos, wherever they might be. The iPhone is already a great camera. The problem was everything that happened after you tapped the shutter.

Now, in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, you’ll never have to worry about organizing your photos again — they’ll be everywhere, all the time. And best of all? It looks like you’re never going to need iPhoto again, on the Mac or on your iPad.

Sync your iOS Photo Stream with Flickr, Dropbox or anything else

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I have at least three apps set to auto-upload my iPhone photos whenever I reach a Wi-Fi connection. That’s three apps running in the background and using bandwidth to send my pictures up to the cloud, and they all run in addition to Apple’s own Photo Stream.

There’s nothing really wrong with this system: After all, bandwidth over Wi-Fi isn’t limited, and redundancy is good. But what if you could somehow consolidate all these services, and at the same save all your iPhone photos to a folder on your Mac? That’s what we’ll do today, with PhotoStream2Folder and a few other apps. We’ll take your Photo Stream, grab all the photos and save them to a folder on your Mac, then auto-upload them to Flickr, Dropbox and anywhere else you want.

F-Stop, The Best Flickr Bulk Uploader For The Mac

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I just got through uploading every last one of my photos to Flickr over the weekend, with an Ethernet cable snaking across the floor from the router to my iMac, and a new app on that iMac to do the work. The app is called F-Stop, and while it’s a little glitchy in its UI, it was rock solid where it counted: pushing around 22,000 JPG files up to Flickr.

How To Get All Of Your Photos Into Flickr And Forget Everpix Forever [How To]

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Flickr can become the central home for all your photos.
Flickr can become the central home for all your photos.

Intro

After the recent Everpix shutdown, I moved all my photos to Flickr. If you read my roundup of Everpix alternatives, you’ll know that Flickr wasn’t my first choice, but it turns out that neither is it my only choice. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Everpix was great because it just sucked in all your photos, whether you kept them in iPhoto, on your iPhone, in a weird beardo folder structure on your Mac, or even if you took all of your photos using Instagram. It was far from perfect, but it was the best. And then it went away.

Everpix Has Gone: What The Hell Can We Use To Replace It?

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Everpix. Goodbye.
Everpix. Goodbye.

When Everpix announced its shutdown this week, the Internet Sadness Factor spun the dial up to its highest point since the original demise of Del.icio.us, and the euthanization of Loren Brichter’s Tweetie for iPad. I was a lover of the service, and now I, like you, am searching for an alternative.

The good news is that there are plenty of services trying to solve the same problem as Everpix: how to organize your overwhelming mountain of digital photos. The bad news is that none of them is as easy to use as Everpix.

If you want a great head-to-head comparison of the alternatives, take a look at The Verge’s article from the end of August. This article won’t be a feature-for-feature rundown. Instead I’m going to look at some of the good and bad points of the remaining competition. Hopefully I can help you to find something you’ll like.

Photojojo’s PhotoTimeCapsule Fills An Everpix-Flashback-Shaped Gap

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Last year I was checking out the then-new iPad mini.
Last year I was checking out the then-new iPad mini.

Everpix was euthanized yesterday, and is currently in read-only mode until the developers can figure out how to let users download their archives. Everpix, for those who don’t know, was an amazing service that slurped up all of your photos from your iPhone, your Flickr, your Instagram, your Gmail (!) and more, and put them all in one place. It removed duplicates, send you a daily mail showing you pictures from the same day in the past, and was generally the best solution to the problem of digital photo overload.

I’m working on a piece about alternatives (I have been using a few other services along with Everpix for the last few months), but until then I thought I’d remind you about Photojojo’s PhotoTimeCapsule, a semi-replacement for the Everpix Flashback.