Photos - page 7

You know how it is — you want to share that lovely photo of your new puppy, but you really don’t want the person you hand your iPhone to swiping to those over-the-top party photos from your last lost weekend.

Overswipe, a new app from developer Haley & Hughes, aims to solve that very problem in a super intuitive way. All you do is open the app, tap on the photos you want to share, and then hand over the iPhone. Your intended viewer will only see the photos you chose, and won’t be able to swipe into anything super embarrassing.

Remember Picturelife? It was one of our top picks for online photo storage when Everpix bit it, and now it has been upgraded to version 3.0. The highlights are a new $15 per month unlimited plan, which is really truly unlimited and can be shared with up to three other family members, plus an all-new, redesigned iOS app.

Things in the online photo world are definitely heating up again. iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite will bring exciting new features for photographers and a recent update to Adobe Creative Cloud gives shutterbugs even more options for editing and storage.

But Picturelife has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve to make it a worthy competitor to the big guns. Here’s why it deserves a shot at becoming your new super-awesome online photo library.

How many times have you allowed a friend to use your iPhone and then experienced that sudden sinking feeling when you realize they might stumble across “personal” snaps in the Photos app? Well, with iOS 8, that’s something you won’t need to worry about quite so much.

Apple has added a new feature to the built-in Photos app that allows you to hide images you don’t want others to see — but hidden photos aren’t exactly hard to find.

Twitter will now let you attach up to four images to a Tweet, and tag the people in those photos, all without counting towards your 140-character limit. This is a pretty obvious attempt to beat Instagram and make Twitter your go-to sharing service.

One of the cool things that your iPhone can do is tag your photos with geolocations. That way, you’ll know where you took the photo in addition to having the photo.

With iOS 7, you can also see your photos on a map, which is all sorts of fun if you travel a bit and like to take vacation photos while you’re there.

It’s easy to enable and access, too, which is a good thing.

Keeping photos on Instagram, Facebook, iPhoto, Google Drive, Google+, Flickr, Lightroom, Aperture, Picasa, Dropbox or OneDrive? Then you might like StreamNation, an app and service that collects them all together in one place.

What’s more, it also gives you 20GB of free storage to get started, and the upgrade rates aren’t so bad either.

Kim Dotcom’s Mega app for iOS now lets you auto-upload your photographs from your iDevice, just like Dropbox, Jottacloud and Google Drive. Only unlike those other cloud services, Mega comes with 50GB free storage, and jumps to 500GB when you sign up for the $11-per-month paid tier.

What if you could print your iPhone photos and have them sent to your door, without paying a penny? Sound impossible, right? But that’s exactly what new Kickstarter-hopeful startup Flag is planning to do. The catch? An ad, printed on the back of each picture.

Quick: You have taken a bunch of great photos of your recent birthday weekend in [EXOTIC LOCATION], and your parents want to take a look at your vacation pictures on the big screen. But you also spent some “quality time” with your girlfriend/boyfriend/spousal unit in the hotel room, and you sure as hell don’t want your folks to see those photos. What do you do?

You use Boinx’s PhotoPresenter, an app that’s designed for impromptu slideshows.

Photoful is a great photo-browsing app that offers an alternate – and in many ways better – view of your iOS photos. You can see all your pictures on one long scrolling timeline, and when it comes to adding captions and tags, Photoful makes iOS’ Photos app look like something that crawled out from under a PC.

Sure, you can use something like iPhoto to really dig in and edit your iPhone photos, but if you just want a simple, no frills simple edit or two–plus some nifty filters if you have an iPhone 5 and up–the built-in Photos app in iOS 7 is a pretty great choice. It’s easy to use, and you already own it.

We showed you how to apply the new iOS 7 filters in yesterday’s tip post, so let’s look at the other four options available to you: rotate, auto-enhance, red eye, and cropping.

Apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic have trained us all to find photos with various filters applied attractive and cool. Apple realized this, obviously, when it updated its own built-in Camera app for iOS 7. These are only available on the iPhone 5 and up, though, so don’t worry if your iPhone 4S doesn’t show any filters here.

While filtering your photo is pretty darn easy, it might not be super intuitive for everyone. Plus, removing the filter is straight up non-intuitive. Launch your camera app and take a photo to walk through the steps involved.

Every time I walk into a bookstore, I want to buy a book. Or three. Sadly, my budget doesn’t cover that all the time, because I go into bookstores quite a bit. To scratch that itch, I’ve turned to taking a photo of the book covers with my iPhone; that way, I get the satisfaction of doing something about my book lust without having to pull out the wallet each time.

Shoots & Leaves is a new iOS app that aims to solve the same problem, but for all those things you need to be reminded of, not just books you want to buy (though you can use it for that, too, I suppose).

Photos+ is a new iPhone app from Justin Williams aka Second Gear software aka the developer of iOS text editor Elements. Photos+ is in the “one thing well” school of apps: it lets you look at the photos you have on your iPhone, and it does a better job that the built in app. In most ways at least.

There are tons of solutions to get iOS photos from your device to some sort of backup system, from Dropbox to iPhoto. Backing up your photos is imperative, especially on iOS, as the iCloud backup system doesn’t back up photos, and PhotoStream only keeps the last 1,000 photos on your phone synced to all your enabled devices.

Backing up to cloud services is extremely convenient, but what happens when you no longer want to pay for the storage, or would rather hang on to your digital memories on your own computer? Sure, you can connect to your Mac with a cable, but then you’ve got to do the hard work of figuring out which photos you’ve already backed up.

Sync Photos To Storage, a new app from developer Simplex Solutions, aims to make this process much, much easier.

Meteor is a $1 app with a brilliant, simple solution to a common problem no one seems to have addressed until now — and it’ll almost certainly unclutter your phone.

IFTTT has gotten a big update today in the form of proper Reminders and Photos integration for iOS. Before, you could have it do some clever automatic thing when you added a new photo or reminder to the respective iPhone apps, but now IFTTT can create reminders and add pictures to any album. It’s pretty sweet, and would be awesome but for one big gotcha.

Timshel (“Time Shell”) is a pretty great looking new service that sends you prints of your own photos once a month. You know those cool apps which mail you your old photos every once in a while? It’s like that, only with real photos.

One of the much touted features of iOS 7 is the new organization feature of the Photos app. When I opened it for the first time, back in the beta, I was dismayed to see the Year view.

The photos? They’re tiny! How the heck am I supposed to find the photo I want? I’m old and need glasses. Sheesh.

Ahem.

It turns out to be much simpler than you’d think to scan through the photos in this view.

If you want to get all Ansel Adams and start exploring black and white photography, you could go out and buy a fancy photo editing program like Adobe Photoshop, you could go see if anyone still makes film cameras with black and white film, or you could go the super easy and cheap route and just use Preview, an app that’s already on your Mac.

Your call, of course, but here’s how to get Preview to make your photos all arty and stuff.

There’s a lot to be said for organizing your photos into folders in the Finder. In fact, if you’re using an app like Lightroom to organize your photos, then you’re already doing this, albeit with a super-helpful cataloging and editing application laid on top.

But you need some sort of organization, right? And that’s where the amazing Dr. Drang comes in, with a couple of shell scripts do the work for you.

Back in the iOS 7 beta, we noticed a feature that would focus your iPhone camera when you held down the volume button in landscape mode.

When I went to do the same thing yesterday while taking pictures of my Macbook Air’s trackpad (don’t ask), and instead of a nicely auto-focused picture, I got a bunch of pictures of my (not-moving) trackpad, inadvertently activating what Apple calls “burst mode.”

Here’s how to use it to get action shots on your own iPhone or iPad running iOS 7.

Did you know Sir Jony Ive is a huge Burberry fan? True story. He went to London this past summer to see the runway fashion show put on by Burberry, as you can see in the photo to the right.

Interestingly, Apple on Thursday announced a surprise collaboration with Burberry, a London fashion brand sometimes unfortunately associated with lowlifes, known in Britain as “chavs.”

Ive will certainly be happy today* to hear that Burberry is teaming up with Apple to use the not-yet-released iPhone 5s to capture and share images and video from the upcoming runway show in London, taking place this coming Monday, September 16.

This new collaboration is inteded to showcase the new clothing line, of course, but also to show how great the iPhone 5s iSight camera is, with it’s new, larger pixels, exposure area, and lens. It will allow photographers at Burberry to take high quality photos and high resolution video of the runway models, product details, and moments backstage.

Just imagine all the slo-mo.

If you take a lot of pictures on your iPhone, I can highly recommend the Canon Selphy CP900, a dye-sub photo printer which spits out 6×4 prints, and connects wirelessly to iPhones, iPads and Macs.

I’ve had one for a couple months, and the result is that I have a bunch of iPhonographs littering the apartment. It’s addictive, but now I don’t know what to do with all these prints. This graffiti-ready picture frame, though, might provide an answer.

Unless you’re young enough to think that the seemingly never-ending 80s fashion revival is actually cool, then it’s likely that you have a stack of real, printed photos in a box somewhere. And as we all know, printed photos are photos that you can’t post to Instagram, or backup on Dropbox.

What you need is to dig out that shoebox of pictures and send it off to somebody to scan.