Send your lover a digital Valentine with Lovestagram

Valentine’s Day is less than a week away, and if you’re looking for a cute and Earth-saving way to show your special someone how much you care, we’ve got you covered*. Kaitlyn Trigger, girlfriend of Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, created Lovestagram, a simple Valentine creator that uses your Instagram photos.

Trigger built the app as a Valentine’s present to Krieger and has opened it up for everyone to use. She taught herself how to code … Continue Reading

Facebook woos photographers with new lightbox viewer, launching end of week

Facebook is rolling out its new lightbox photo viewer feature to all 840 million users by the end of this week, a spokesperson for the company has confirmed to VentureBeat. The new display helps make photos more attractive by showing them larger, moving comments off to the side, and graying out the background to minimize distraction.

“The new photo viewer is rolling out to everyone on Facebook and should be available to people worldwide by … Continue Reading

Deleting a photo on Facebook might not be what it seems

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there seems to be one word Facebook doesn’t understand: “delete.”

When you delete a Facebook image from your profile you’re actually sending a request to Facebook to remove that photo file from its servers. You’d expect the request to be completed in a reasonable amount of time. Ars Technica is reporting, however, that “deleted” photos dating back as far as 2008 are still floating around on … Continue Reading

Cash in on your photo app with Aviary’s new photo editor

Continuing its quest for dominance in the photo arena, online editing suite Aviary announced version 2.0 of its photo editor today, bringing with it a slew of updated features and something enticing for developers: instant monetization for photo apps.

With the new Aviary editor comes a mobile software development kit that will offer virtual goods for purchase, including premium effects packs, original sticker packs (which includes things like holiday and season photo stickers) and branded … Continue Reading

iPhone mainstay Camera+ continues to be profitable, makes $5.1M

There’s no tap dancing around it, iPhone photo app Camera+ is a money-making machine.

The sophisticated photo capture and edit application, built by iOS development shop Tap Tap Tap, has been purchased more than 6 million times on the App Store. Camera+ has also made its makers $5.1 million in revenue to date, company principal John Casasanta revealed Friday.

Camera+, which currently retails for $0.99 and offers for-charge in-app upgrades, has been a consistently strong … Continue Reading

Instagram now flooding Facebook with 6 photos per second

A fun little iPhone application for sharing stylized mobile captures ballooned into a social network of significance in 2011. Today, the app’s insta-photo-sharing effects are felt with increasing force on Facebook and the rest of the web.

Instagram, the still iPhone-only application, is penetrating the world’s largest social network at a rate of roughly six photos per second, co-founder Kevin Systrom shared exclusively with VentureBeat. The figure means that the filter-ific application is now contributing … Continue Reading

Scalado’s innovative mobile photo tech powers 1 billion devices

After secretly making phone cameras better for the last decade, Swedish software company Scalado announced today that its mobile photo technology is now featured in over 1 billion devices.

Scalado provides advanced solutions for taking, viewing, and editing pictures on your phone. You probably own a Scalado-powered phone right now without knowing it (it’s found in many Android phones, though not in iPhones).

The company is likely counting old and obsolete devices in its figures, … Continue Reading

Lightbox leaps beyond Instagram with Tumblr-like photo journals

Many Android smartphone owners are eagerly awaiting the chance to use the hot photo sharing app Instagram currently only offers on Apple phones. But Instagram’s Android-only competitor Lightbox is debuting a new photo journal feature today that may make some iOS Instagram users jealous.

Lightbox’s original app let you instantly snap, enhance, and automatically upload photos to the Lightbox website and other services. The company’s new photo journal feature — accessible through the new version … Continue Reading

Jetpac takes you on a guided world tour, as seen by your Facebook friends (exclusive)

Jetpac debuts Tuesday as a Facebook friend-propelled rocket belt, taking you on a visual journey around the world for your travel inspiration.

The startup has developed a travel magazine-like iPad application, slated for release before the end of the year, that culls Facebook photos to recommend locales and attractions to visit. It also points you to the right Facebook friend for travel advice.

Intrigued? You can sign up, reserve your profile and get a sneak … Continue Reading

How iOS 5 devices can take panoramic photos

If you’ve got a jailbroken iOS 5-running iPhone or iPad, get ready to unleash some serious majesty: We’re going to show you how to enable panorama mode on your phone’s camera.

While Apple has made jailbreaking difficult with iOS 5, but it can be done.

In addition to a jailbroken iOS 5 device with a built-in gyroscope, you’ll need iFile, a file manager and viewer app.

The device’s camera has a hidden panorama mode that … Continue Reading

PicPlz adds editing to its photo sharing apps, powered by Aviary

Snap. Edit. Share.

Now you’ll be able to edit pictures on PicPlz’s popular photo sharing apps, thanks to mobile photo editing technology from Aviary.

“It was a logical fit” to include Aviary’s editing tools, PicPlz CTO Jeff Argast told VentureBeat in an interview earlier today. PicPlz previously considered implementing some editing tools of its own, but Argast says it wouldn’t have been as fully featured as Aviary’s offering. “Aviary provided the full package,” he said.… Continue Reading

Lytro unveils its revolutionary light field camera

With Lytro’s new light field camera, you’ll never have to worry about your photos being out of focus — because it’s the first camera ever to let you focus your pictures after taking them.

The company debuted its new cameras at a press event today, which will start at $399 for the 8-gigabyte version, and $499 for the 16GB version.

Lytro made some bold promises when it debuted in June, saying that it would start … Continue Reading

Aviary brings photo editing to any mobile app

Online media editing suite Aviary is taking its first step onto mobile devices today with the launch of its mobile SDK, which lets developers embed photo editing capabilities into any iPhone or Android app.

The move is a smart one for Aviary. Instead of competing directly with other mobile photo editing apps, like Adobe’s Photoshop Express, the company will be able to take advantage of the increasing popularity of mobile photos by letting third-party developers … Continue Reading

Google Maps update for Android shows one reason Google acquired Zagat

Google quietly updated its Google Maps app for Android this week, a move that helps shed more light on the company’s local search strategy and its decision to purchase reviews service Zagat yesterday.

Specifically, Google Maps version 5.10.0 now lets users add specific photos to Places and automatically shows places they’ve rated 4 or 5 stars on the map, which gives them a better look at places they’ve enjoyed in the past. To illustrate, you … Continue Reading

Facebook to add its own photo filters instead of buying Instagram

There’s just no escape from mobile photo filters. After being made popular by apps like Instagram and PicPlz, now Facebook is looking to add filters to its mobile apps, reports the New York Times.

The move isn’t entirely surprising, since filters aren’t very difficult to implement and Facebook has been the leading online photo sharing site for years. And this point, even Apple is looking to add photo filters as a core feature of its … Continue Reading

Instagram snaps 150M photos, 7M users — still only 4 employees

The growth of popular photo-sharing app Instagram hasn’t slowed down over the past few months. The company announced today that it has reached a milestone of 150 million shared photos, and it now boasts over 7 million users.

That’s shockingly great growth for a company that just launched last October. As we’ve mentioned before, neither Twitter nor Foursquare had even reached 1 million users at this point in their lifetimes. And yes, the company still … Continue Reading

Pool Party photo sharing app: Google’s other service you didn’t get an invite for

Google has spent most of the week talking up its new social service Google+, which aims to revolutionize the way people communicate online, including how they share photos. However, that isn’t stopping the company from launching other photo-related projects at the same time.

Last week, the company quietly launched Pool Party, a photo-sharing service with an emphasis on creating and sharing group photo albums in real time.

The new service has applications in both Apple’s … Continue Reading

Next up for Twitter: photo sharing? (updated)

Twitter is apparently working on a photo sharing feature that would directly compete with established photo-sharing services like Twitpic, according to a report by TechCrunch.

The service, which would provide a built-in method for Twitter users to post and share photos, is set to launch soon — “like tomorrow” — several sources told TechCrunch. Of course, now that this information has been leaked, that may change.

Given Twitter’s current focus on developing features that steal … Continue Reading

ImagePulse "sees" how you feel about brands

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? ImagePulse measures how consumers feel about brands based on photos in which the brand is included. It uses a mixture of text, sentiment and image analysis to measure if the image is positive or negative and the emotions involved. What does it mean to the brand when people take pictures of themselves at a Nike store or having coffee in Starbucks?

The more photos people take, the … Continue Reading