“We offer unified photo storage across all your devices, for free, at 1,024-pixel quality,” founder Steve Cosman told me a few weeks ago in Toronto. “Or you can pay $5/month for unlimited resolution.”

Tomorrow MyShoeBox is launching version two of its photo backup and sharing service, with a new iPad app, updated mobile apps, and a new shared galleries feature that you use to build grouped sets of photos with people you went on vacation with or family members who shared an event such as a wedding.

The freemium model has helped the company get a quick start.

Source: MyShoeBox

Search and self-quantification

After exiting from Toronto accelerator Extreme Startups in the fall, the service saw 13.4 million photos uploaded in November, its first month. And, Cosman says, MyShoeBox users upload far more photos than Facebook or Flickr users — 3,200 each, compared to Facebook’s 220 and Flickr’s 320.

But the value proposition is much more than photo backup.

Instead, MyShoeBox is a way to enjoy all of your photos, all of the time, on any device you have. Frankly, for most people, their photos are strewn around their main computer (photos from their actual, official, camera), their phone (snapshots from their built-in camera), and their social networks (uploaded from wherever you happened to be at the time). There’s no unified view, no way to see — and search — all your photos at once.

Using MyShoeBox for the first time syncs your photos up to the cloud-based service automatically, in the background, and installing the services’ mobile apps on your Android or iOS-based phone will do the same.

That’s helpful, because we often want to see more of our photos on our mobile devices.

“Our new iPad app is an incredible way of browsing your entire photo collection,” Cosman says. “And it’s one of the only ways you can get your full photo collection on your iPad … most people don’t have enough space.”

What most interested me when I chatted to Cosman is MyShoeBox’ solution to a problem that I think I share with many other digital photographers: enjoying your own work and finding photos. A former program manager for Microsoft’s augmented reality team for Windows Phone, Cosman has placed special emphasis on automated sorting, tagging, and exploring features.

“So many people that have given up the concept of a photo collection,” he says. “Faces, places, and things are important ways to automatically categorize photos. And they keep getting smarter every day.”

So MyShoeBox highlights places you’ve been, photos you took last year at this time, events, cameras you used, and more, creating what the company calls “an interactive infographic” of your life. That includes personal quantification data like the top times you take photos, and your most photographed neighborhoods.

And if you want to search your photo collection, MyShoeBox has just rewritten its search features to be much faster and more powerful as its power users often have more than 15,000 photos each.

“iOS, Android, Windows, Mac … it works pretty much anywhere,” Cosman says. “And once together, it’s automatically organized.”

MyShoeBox is based in Toronto, Canada, and is currently raising a financing round. Its new iPad, iPhone, and Android apps will be live in Google Play and the app store tomorrow.

Image credits: MyShoeBox

NEW YORK CITY — On the same day as it announced its $1.1 billion purchase of blogging powerhouse Tumblr, Yahoo debuted a flashy new design of photo-sharing site Flickr and its Android app.

Yahoo acquired Flickr back in 2005, but the photo-sharing service suffered under persistent mismanagement and Yahoo’s inability to make Flickr better. While Flickr suffered, Facebook became the dominant photo-sharing application, and later, Instagram became the top dog for photo sharing with friends and family.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer acknowledged that the Flickr acquisition “didn’t go so well.” But now Flickr is getting better with a bold new redesign, and the new design is live now.

“We’ve made Flickr spectactular,” Mayer said. “We’ve got full high-resolution photos. You don’t lose any fidelity. No one else does that.”

First, photos will be bigger and the design emphasizes high-resolution images. Every user will get 1TB of space for their photos at no cost. Yahoo says that’s 537,731 photos of average size that you can store for free.

“I think Flickr is awesome again with these new announcements,” Mayer said. “Photos make the world go around. Flickr was awesome once. It languished. But now it’s awesome again.”

Just for reference, this is what a standard photo page on Flickr used to look like:

Now that same page looks like this:

The announcement comes at the same time as the Tumblr acquisition. After numerous reports the past few days, Yahoo finally confirmed that it had purchased Tumblr for about $1.1 billion early this morning. Mayer promised “not to screw it up.” Tumblr CEO and founder David Karp will remain CEO of the company he started, and Tumblr will stay an independent company from Yahoo.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was also on hand at the event to congratulate Yahoo and Tumblr on the deal.

“We’re proud that Tumblr is a homegrown company,” Bloomberg said. “We couldn’t be more excited for them. … Not only are David and Tumblr made in New York, they’ve helped us make a better New York.”

With the event in New York, Yahoo also appropriately announced that it will soon open a new office in New York City. Yahoo has taken out a lease for office space at 229 West 43rd Street, which is the old New York Times building. All of the 500 New York Yahoo employees will be moved there. Tumblr’s employees will remain separate in their own office.

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Windows Phone 8 users who just want to see a stream of random, but curated content need to look no further. Tumblr is finally here.

It’s all mobile for Tumblr these days. The company launched its Windows Phone 8 app today, shortly after revamping its Android version.

Where previously the Tumblr app was only available on iOS and Android, today’s news opens the “post anything” blogging site to a whole new host of phones.

The app is connected to the phone’s voice assistant. You can speak your posts and Tumblr will obediently (we hope) record the thoughts. It also shows content from the Tumblrs you follow on the live tiles, or the ever-changing home screen box graphics, as well as the lock screen. Of course, you’ll be able view gifs on the app as well as take photos from it.

It’s obvious Tumblr is focusing energy on its mobile side. The company recently released an update to its Android app that includes a playful revamp to its activities menu. Options to post videos, images, links, quotes, photos, text, as well as to chat appear to be spring-loaded, popping out of the bottom right corner of the app. This was done on purpose, since that corner is the easiest place to poke the screen with your thumb.

We don’t get that same, lively feel from the Windows Phone 8 app, however. Those working on the Android app likely have more resources than those working on Windows Phone 8. Android still holds the top spot on mobile marketshare charts, making it a much wider audience for Tumblr to target.

The app is available now from the Windows Phone App Store.

Tumblr app image via Microsoft

IsAnybodyDown published galleries of nude photos, including identifying features, names, and cities.

Florida is one of the first states to take definitive action against revenge porn. The House subcommittee unanimously voted in favor of a bill that would make posting revenge porn a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Despite the fact that revenge porn is a pervasive and alarming problem, the practice still exists in a legal grey area. Revenge porn refers to the act of ex-lovers uploading illicit photos to the Internet. The images are often accompanied by personal identification information, and done without the subject’s consent. This is not technically illegal because the photos may be considered the photographer’s intellectual property, and the line between invasion of privacy and free speech is a thin one. Furthermore, operators of these sites claim they are not responsible for user-submitted content due to the Communications Decency Act, and content is often submitted anonymously.

House Bill 787 “prohibits knowing use of [content] that depicts nudity and contains any of depicted individual’s personal identification information or counterfeit or fictitious information purporting to be such personal identification information, without first obtaining depicted person’s written consent.”

Victims can currently make claims against their harassers through civil channels, but this bill would make revenge porn a criminal act. It recognizes “contextual consent,” which means that while a person may allow photographing or filming in one context, they would not allow it in another. For example, a girlfriend who lets her boyfriend take a nude photo in the privacy of her home is not consenting to having that photo published on the Internet a year later with links to her social media profiles. Other provisions of the proposal include enhanced penalties for violations involving victims under 16 years of age and targets perpetrators who live outside of Florida but post content involving in-state residents.

However, some say the Bill is not specific enough. In an interview with Salon, Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami, said that while the recognition of “contextual consent” is good, the law is both too broad and too narrow. On the one hand, it applies to any image that depicts nudity, which could include someone standing next to a nude statute. On the other hand, the law is too narrow because it does “not apply to depictions of graphic sexual activity unless certain parts of the body are visible.” Franks cited a case where a man posted a picture of himself ejaculating on his sleeping girlfriend’s face, which does not violate the law.

Revenge porn and its criminalization have recieved national attention over the past week as a group of lawyers, bloggers, and activists work to bring down “IsAnybodyDown,” one of the most well-known revenge porn sites, which features photos of hundreds of people. In March, CBS Denver reported that the federal government may launch a formal investigation into the site after several underage victims filed copyright registration certificates in Colorado with intent to sue. These class action suits, while they can have an impact, are slow to move and do not have the immediacy of a criminal case. The man behind IsAnybodyDown, Craig Brittain, has twice closed down his site after coming under scrutiny and transferred the content to a new site to frustrate the authorities.

Revenge porn sites have existed for a decade, and yet little progress has been made to address the problem. San Francisco attorney Erica Johnstone told VentureBeat’s Christina Farr that when she first started handling cases like these, they were individual cases of an ex seeking revenge. Now, there are more examples of hacking and extortion, such as a scheme that charges victims hundreds of dollars to remove them from the site. Additionally, the rise of camera phones and sexting mean that people can be photographed without their knowledge.

The Florida bill provides an effective date of October 1, 2013. Representative Tom Goodson authored the bill, with support from the Brevard Country Chief’s Association, State Attorney Phil Archer, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Florida Sherrif’s Association. The bill followed a report of a young woman in Brevard County who had nude photos, her name, email address, and hometown posted without her consent, and when she went to the Sheriff’s department for help, was told it was not a crime.

Photo credit: Screenshot

The main selling point of the $1,299 Pixel is its large, high-resolution, touchscreen, which is appealing to people who work a lot with photography. Thus, a complementary photo app for uploading and organizing pictures makes sense.

You plug your camera’s SD card into the laptop, and the app automatically uploads the images in full-resolution to your Google+ account. From there, touchscreen-friendly features make it easy to select photos to place in albums, and the app even suggests which pictures are the best. Once the albums are ready, they are easy to share.

The announcement of the newest laptop from Google put the tech community in a flurry this morning. Google said in a blog post that the 2,560 x 1,700 resolution and 239 pixels-per-inch mean the Pixel has the highest pixel density of any laptop screen on the market today. The display offers “sharp texts, vivid colors, and extra-wide viewing angles” and is geared towards “power users who have fully embraced the cloud.”

According to a report in Engadget, the app will at first only be available to Pixel users but will eventually roll out to all Chromebooks.

Photo Credit: Google+

Comedian John Oliver may joke that SnapChat is designed for sending penis pictures, but the company is destined for a lot more.

SnapChat, an app that lets people share fleeting images, has closed $13.5 million in its first round of funding led by Benchmark Capital.

Oliver joked about the popularity of “sexting” while hosting the Crunchies, an awards ceremony that honors achievements in the tech world. SnapChat won the award for “Fastest rising startup” and is heralded as an example of the startup Holy Grail:  viral growth. A report in the New York Times states that the app sends more than 60 million messages a day and has millions of users.

The popular mobile social photo sharing service, based out of Los Angeles,  enables people to share a photo with another person or group of people who can only be viewed for a very short time (a few seconds). The person you send that photo responds with one of their own, which is also only available for a few seconds — hence the name “SnapChat.”

Photo sharing is one of the obsessions of our generation. Whether it is baby pictures on Facebook, a hipster coffee shop on Instagram, roasted chicken with bread on Foodspotting, room decor on Pinterest, or that day’s vintage-inspired ensemble on a fashion blog, taking and posting images is almost second nature. Sometimes, it feels like if no-one documents the moment on the internet, it doesn’t exist.

However, not every photo needs to live forever, which is where SnapChat comes in.

People can send images to their friends that may not merit (or be appropriate) for public, permanent display. A majority of the users are between 13 and 25, and wary of embarrassing content coming back to haunt them later in life. The story of the job-seeker denied a dream job due to a unflattering Facebook photo is something of a modern urban legend.

Speaking of Facebook, SnapChat founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy claim that Mark Zuckerberg met with them in December, just before launching its own self-destructing messaging app Poke. The competition has not seemed to diminish SnapChat’s success. The company is now valued at $60 to $70 million.

Rumors arose in December that SnapChat was raising an $8 million round at a $50 million valuation from Benchmark’s Matt Cohler. The rumors were half true, as rumors tend to be.

In fact, it was Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky who spearheaded the financing after hearing about SnapChat from his teenage daughter. Benchmark is also an investor in Instagram, the world-famous photo sharing app that Facebook bought for $1 billion in 2012.

After returns like that, it is no surprise that the firm is going down the rose-lined photo sharing path again.

Today, you never know what can be taking a picture of you. Computer, mannequins, and security cameras all have the capability to stealthily record us. Now you can add your friend’s phone to the list. That is, if you’re trying to get into it.

Lookout Mobile‘s latest Android mobile security feature takes a picture of anyone who inputs a phone’s password incorrectly three times or more. It’s intent is to help people with stolen phones grab a shot of the thief, perhaps to help police identify and locate the person (and hopefully retrieve the phone). It works silently. The app uses the front-facing camera to snap a picture of the snoop and email it to you.

“We want to help people protect the privacy of their most personal device, and we designed Lock Cam specifically to address unauthorized parties trying to access your phone,” said Lookout lead project manager Jonathan Stull in an email to VentureBeat. “Important to note: You can’t trigger Lock Cam remotely – someone has to be trying to enter your locked device to activate Lock Cam.”

Regardless, willingly installing software that silently takes a picture of anyone standing in front of the phone is concerning. If someone were to access Lookout’s systems, they could theoretically figure out a way to trigger the camera response. However, Chris Morales, a mobile security analyst with 451 Research, isn’t as worried:

“It’s only a concern if the Lookout software itself is compromised,” said Morales in an e-mail to VentureBeat. “It is at risk no more than any other security system. Malware for Android already exists that can take advantage of physical sensors on a device, like the camera.”

Of course, the less pressing issue is that people enter their passwords incorrectly all the time, especially if they’re in a hurry. While it might be uncomfortable knowing your picture is being taken every time, it’s not a huge inconvenience to get the email. If anything, you can see what you looked like that day.

With this update the company also released a new premium feature that allows you to leave a 300-character long message on your phone’s lock screen should you lose your phone. This way a do-gooder could see the message, which might include a phone number to call or an address, and return the phone to its rightful owner.

This feature is only avalable for Lookout’s Premium accounts, which you can get for $2.99 a month.

Android camera image via vegetando/Flickr

Facebook privacy settings aren’t always clear, as Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister and creator of the Bravo reality show Silicon Valley, found out Christmas day.

Zuckerberg posted a warm family photo to Facebook that was subsequently tweeted out by Vox Media director of marketing and special projects Callie Schweitzer.

She tweeted to her sizable following, “.randizuckerberg demonstrates her family’s response to Poke #GAH pic.twitter.com/EHNwJ78b”

Zuckerberg quickly responded asking Schweitzer where she got the photo and said, “I posted it to friends only on FB. You reposting it to Twitter is way uncool.”

The photo shows Mark Zuckerberg in the corner, while his family members try out the new Poke application — a mobile app that allows you to take a self-destructing photo and message it to friends. In the photo everyone stands around a kitchen island making funny faces into their cameras, expecting that the photos will soon no longer exist.

Zuckerberg believed her photo was set to friends only, but everyone should be aware that anything “friends-only” is often not actually “friends-only.” In Zuckerberg’s case, Schweitzer was a friend of another Zuckerberg sister who was tagged in the photo. You may have set your photo to be “friends-only,” but friends of those tagged in the picture can also see that tagged photo.

These types of situations often arise because of confusing Facebook privacy settings. You should also know that if you delete something from your Timeline, it isn’t actually deleted anywhere, just removed from view on your Timeline. In order to actually delete something like a status or photo, you have to go back to that original piece of content and remove it. You can find a lot of this content in your Activity Log.

Similarly, Schweitzer removed the photo from her Twitter, with apologies to Zuckerberg, but the photo isn’t actually removed. It, of course, lives now on many other websites including Buzzfeed.

hat tip Forbes; Randi Zuckerberg photo via World Economic Forum/Flickr

Everpix made waves last year with its promise to store all of your digital photos in the cloud, with no limitations. But the company’s true goal is actually far more intriguing: Everpix is aiming to make you love your digital photos again without having to worry about organizing them.

Today, Everpix is debuting a new Windows application that will let you synchronize your entire photo collection to the company’s servers. Everpix’s website has also been updated to work with iOS and Android browsers. The company already has apps available for iOS and OS X.

“We want to build the future of platforms for photos,” said Everpix co-founder and chief executive Pierre-Olivier Latour in an interview with VentureBeat. “[To accomplish that] you need to build many pieces first … we spent a year-and-a-half under the radar, the last thing we wanted was to grab too many users.”

Now, Latour says, a “solid chunk” of his vision has been executed — and he’s ready to prove it.

“People are missing out the key thing: people’s photo collections are growing very rapidly and they’re getting out of control,” Latour said.

Since cloud storage is extremely cheap these days, the company lets you upload as many photos as you like at their full resolution. Latour boasts that Everpix offers the fastest method for uploading and viewing your photos across multiple devices. Without having to worry about storage, Everpix makes dealing with your photos similar to Gmail — you never have to delete anything again.

Everpix has also developed a patent-pending image analysis technology that can identify objects, scenery, and other details.  That allows Everpix to highlight interesting photos and group together similar shots so you can appreciate them instead of wasting time with organizational details. (Or in my case, just letting your photos pile up without any organizing.)

Photos are always the focus of Everpix’s user interface — unlike Flickr or Google+, where you may get distracted by lots of menus and options. Everpix purposefully made its interface monochrome, to help the photos pop better.

The startup is aiming big, so Latour made sure to avoid offering the service for free from the beginning. You can sign up for Everpix for $5 a month, or for $40 per year. Latour says he’s open to a potential freemium model at some point but notes that that’s a complex detail to figure out. For now, the subscription fee could push away casual users (but then again, those may not be the customers Everpix wants).

It took an overnight uploading session for me to put my 40 gigabyte photo collection on Everpix, but once you get over that initial hump, it constantly keeps track of new photos in your library to upload automatically. Once your photos are processed, you can view them on the Everpix site, or via the company’s mobile apps. The “Moments” section in Everpix gives you a thorough glimpse of your photos based on their date, while the “Highlights” section pulls out the best shots throughout the year. In my testing, both the iPhone and iPad Everpix apps were zippy and rendered photos well.

“It’s a very ambitious project, and it comes with a number of challenges, from financing and technical, to building the apps, designing the user experience, and managing the load,” he said. “They’re interesting challenges because we’re not building an app like Instagram where you would use it every single day; we’re mostly looking at weekly active users.”

Looking forward, Latour says he wants to help people reengage with their photo collections in new and interesting ways. The company is currently testing out an experimental exploration feature on its website, where it will randomly show off a selection of pictures that have something in common.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based company has raised around $1.8 million in funding from Index Ventures, 500 Startups, Kii Capital, and 2020 Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Snapchat, the mobile app that lets you send photos that self-destruct, knows that photo of you duck-facing over a box of cupcakes is just not enough. Now it will let you take a short video of you stuffing your face with that cupcake, or any other weirdness you want to share temporarily with friends.

The company announced that it is adding self-destructing videos to its products in a blog post today, saying its users already share 50 million “snaps” or photos every day. In order to launch videos, the company reworked its user interface, allowing people to take a “snap” or a video using the same button. If you’d like to only take a picture, you just tap the app’s “shutter button.” If you want to record a video, you hold down the button.

The app is popular with teens, who like to share photos of them doing teen-things without having those pictures ending up on Facebook. Unlike Facebook, which keeps data you’ve deleted for a certain amount of time on its servers, Snapchat snaps and videos are deleted from its servers as soon as they self-destruct on the app, a spokesperson for Snapchat confirmed with VentureBeat. To put it another way, if law enforcement wanted access to past snaps or Snapchat videos, the data would no longer exist.

That might be comforting to some teens, but it doesn’t guarantee your snaps can’t be saved. A Tumblr called “Snapchat Sluts” shows that people can take screenshots of your snaps before they self-destruct. If you couldn’t tell from the name, the Tumblr focuses on the naked side of things.

Whether or not Snapchat is working on a way to stop people from taking screenshots of your photos is unknown.

The company is otherwise rumored to be taking on a new round of funding from Benchmark Capital. Snapchat has not confirmed the funding.

Awkward teen image via Shutterstock

It’s the holiday season and VentureBeat threw a party. We love getting together with our friends and readers to have a few drinks, take some weird pictures, and celebrate a year of tech news.

VentureBeat has gone through a bunch of changes in the past twelve months, from opening up a New York office to hiring our chief revenue officer Ken Beach. It has been a great year and we are continuing to grow as we head into 2013. In fact, check out our latest call for a sales account coordinator.

We want to send out a big thank you to Orange who sponsored our party and to Redg Snodgrass who helped us coordinate the event. And the events don’t end here. We’ve got our conferences coming up including Mobile Summit, our invite-only mobile event, in April and MobileBeat in July.

One of our big changes to come in 2013 is a new take on our GamesBeat conference. We’re separating it from MobileBeat to focus on games alone at the end of October. We hope to see all your gaming faces there.

Thanks to everyone who came to the party, we’re glad to see all your tipsy faces. For all those at home who didn’t get to come to the event, we present you with a photographic account of the evening:

Holiday party images via Michael O’Donnell

SnapChat could be raising a fresh round of funding from one of the same investors that helped Instagram get started, reports Gigaom.

The popular social photo sharing service for iOS and Android enables people to share a photo with another person or group of people who can only be viewed for a very short time (a few seconds). The person you send that photo responds with one of their own, which is also only available for a few seconds — hence the name “SnapChat.”

At first glance, this seems like a relatively useless mode of communication, considering the number of mobile video calling services that are available today. However, if you think about it in terms of sharing photos that you never want archived, it seems a little more useful. Obviously, brands and celebrities could use this to bait in fans for exclusive, insidery news that has a time limit, but that’s not the only use. It has the potential to replace “Sexting” (sending sexual messages via text messages), as many have noted. But since smartphones make it easy to take a screenshot, I don’t know how secure this would actually be for keeping those images.

Still, it seems that a legitimate market exists for SnapChat, which sees 1,000 photos swapped on the service every second, according to Gigaom.

The report indicates that SnapChat is seeking $8 million, at a $50 million valuation. The money is said to be coming from Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler, who also previously backed Instagram. And since Cohler was also an early investor in both LinkedIn and Facebook, SnapChat may be a future company to watch. That is, provided that the funding rumors are true.

We’re reaching out to Benchmark and SnapChat for a comment about the funding. And as always, we’ll updated this post with any new information.

And the mobile photo wars continue.

Today Instagram completely disabled photo integration with Twitter, following a dramatic move by the photo sharing site earlier this week that made its photos appear cropped in the Twitter timeline. Now when you share an Instagram photo on Twitter, only a link to the photo on Instagram’s site will appear on your timeline.

Twitter officially acknowledged the change this afternoon, and a Facebook spokesperson confirmed it with AllThingsD.

The news doesn’t come as much of a surprise — VentureBeat’s Tom Cheredar noted earlier this week that Instagram could completely disable Twitter support at any point. Indeed, it’s clear that Instagram, and potentially its owner, Facebook, wants to separate the popular photo sharing service from Twitter.

But Twitter isn’t sitting still: Yesterday we reported that Twitter may be rushing to release its own spin on photo filters. While filters are only part of Instagram’s magic, having its own offering could help Twitter keep Instagram users who want to share media directly on their Twitter feeds.

Why bother uploading photos when Facebook can do the work for you?

The social network today added a feature called “Photo Sync” to its iPhone and Android applications that automatically syncs your phone’s camera roll to a private album for bulk sharing whenever the mood strikes — no manual uploads required.

Facebook first started testing the automatic photo uploader in August on Android, and later on iOS. Today, people with the most current version of the Facebook for iOS or Android application can participate in the frictionless upload process.

The feature, which makes a seamless connection between your mobile camera and the social network, really shouldn’t be unsettling, unless you’re the type of person that doesn’t trust Facebook with your private moments. Facebook stores your synced shots in a private album until you manually go in and pick the shots that you want to share with friends.

See. Totally not creepy. Well, save for the fact that whatever you shoot is stored on a Facebook server somewhere. I’d understand if that gave you pause. But then again if you have Photo Stream enabled on any of your iOS devices, you’re essentially trusting Apple with the same responsibility.

Skeptic that I am, I’ve chosen to enable Photo Sync for the simple reason that sometimes it would be nice to more easily share more of my photos on Facebook, especially the best ones that I forget to post while lost in a moment. I suspect that plenty of Facebook’s 1 billion users will feel the same, which means the social network will easily maintain its status as the most popular online destination for photo-sharing. Currently, Facebook members upload more than 300 million photos to the social newtork each day.

To enable Photo Sync, visit your Facebook Timeline from the Facebook for iPhone or Android app, click on photos, then select to enable Sync. The feature is gradually being rolled out to U.S. iOS app users and all Android app users who’ve previously uploaded at least one photo via web or mobile.

Photo credit: maaco/Flickr

Photo sharing social network Instagram reached a new record over the Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Users uploaded over 10 million photos mentioning the holiday via photo captions in some form or fashion yesterday. Instagram also reports that during several peak times, users were sharing upwards of 200 turkey day photos per second — At the highest point (12:40 p.m. PT), users hit 226 photos per second.

“Overall, the day broke all Instagram records as we saw the number of shared photos more than double from the day before, making it our busiest day so far,” Instagram wrote in a blog post.

The new upload record is certainly interesting, and gives weight to the power photos have during big events, holidays, and breaking news cycles.

Top photo via Dave3/Geeks of Doom

When this feature was first announced on Facebook’s Android app, my first thought was that awkward, angry conversations with former friends should quickly ensue.

However, automatic photo uploading does not automatically publish photos to your public stream. Rather, as Facebook describes here, photos go to a private personal album, from which you can then select photos that you want to go public.

Interestingly, this new development comes not long after Facebook changed the EdgeRank algorithm that determines what you see on your Facebook news feed. That change has de-emphasized photo-only posts, which had been getting very high ranking, compared to text-only status updates.

Only some Facebook mobile users will see the new feature, and I’m not one of the lucky few. To check if you’re in the test group, go to the Facebook app, tap the menu icon at top left, and then tap your name or icon. Once you’re at your timeline page, tap photos.

If you see an option to turn on automatic syncing, you’re in.

Then, of course, it becomes a question: how much do you trust Facebook? Facebook has had its share of privacy gaffes and even bugs which delayed deletion of photos users supposedly deleted. Here’s what the social network says:

Who can see the photos I’ve synced from my phone?

Only you can see the photos you’ve synced from your phone. Your photos are saved privately in a section of your Facebook Photos that only you can see. When you view your synced photos, you can choose shots to share or send in a private message.

But you know that some of the photos on your phone are not likely to be appreciated by friends, employers, or relatives. And putting them in an environment in which a few taps will share them might be a little more danger than you’re willing to live with.

Although blackmail material is always a good ace in the hole.

photo credit: Sean Molin Photography via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Despite the rapid success of mobile photography, thanks to great smartphone cameras and apps like Instagram, we’re still waiting for someone to finally figure out group photo sharing. Swirl, the latest app incubated by Betaworks in New York City, aims to solve that dilemma by relying on one of the simplest tools in social networks: hashtags.

Swirl’s free iPhone app, which officially launches today, taps into your Twitter and Instagram accounts to collect photos from your friends using the same hashtag (keywords designated by the hash symbol ‘#’). For example, in my feeds there are plenty of photos tagged #Sandy after the recent super storm that ravaged NYC. The app collects those photos into a #Sandy group, or Swirl, and also lets you favorite it to keep track.

“I was watching my friends use the same [photo] tags on a bunch of different networks, and I wanted a way to pull all that content together,” said Swirl founder Summer Bedard in an interview with VentureBeat. “People aren’t just tagging conferences, they’re tagging birthdays, weddings … daily things.”

Typically, when you use a hashtag on a social network, your post gets thrown together with all the other public posts using the same tag. You can also search for photos by hashtag manually on both Twitter and Instagram. By focusing specifically on hashtags made by your friends, Bedard says, Swirl can offer personalized and ultimately more meaningful, collections of photos. And since it happens automatically, you don’t have to go through the effort of searching individual social networks.

Some group photo-sharing apps have crashed and burned, like Color’s initial attempt at tying in location. Flock, another competitor, is also trying to bring together location and photos, but its technology doesn’t always categorize photos correctly. And it’s also yet another app that you have to download and convince your friends to use — something that holds back most group photo apps.

Swirl, on the other hand, collects photos your friends are already placing on social networks. You don’t have to convince them to learn an entirely new app. And since it’s relying on pre-existing data, Swirl has plenty of useful content to explore from the start. The app also lets you avoid spammy (or simply gross) photos, since they’re coming from your trusted friends.

“I want people to be able to access this data whenever they want and not have it lost in their individual timelines,” Bedard said. “I want them to feel a sense of connectedness.”

The company is working on adding Facebook access soon, but the big problem there is that Facebook users don’t use hashtags very much, Bedard said. Eventually, she also hopes to add the ability to follow collectors, or groups of people using the same tag. Swirl also organizes publicly available photos on its website.

Swirl is following in the path of other Betaworks incubated companies like Chartbeat and Bit.ly. The NYC incubator also recently acquired the social news site Digg, and it’s aiming to revive the site after a prolonged period of neglect from its parent company.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Eye-Fi is doubling the amount of photos or video you can store on its wireless memory cards for the same price. The Eye-Fi Pro X2 photo cards can now store 16GBs of data for $99, compared to its previous 8GBs for the same price.

Eye-Fi memory cards are more than just storage devices for cameras and video cameras. They can connect seamlessly to wireless networks and upload photos to web sites such as Flickr automatically, allowing you to publish photos as quickly as you take them when you’re within range of a Wi-Fi network. You can connect a camera to a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet.

It’s natural for Mountain View, Calif.-based Eye-Fi to make progress on its technology like this. Moore’s Law allows companies to double the number of transistors they can put on a chip every couple of years. Named after Intel Chairman Emeritus Gordon Moore, the observation holds that advances in chip manufacturing technology allow for constant progress in making chips smaller, faster, denser, and cheaper. And it’s nice that the company can do this just before the holiday shopping season.

“Cameras have more megapixels, and pictures and videos are more demanding in terms of size. Moving to a 16GB, Class 10 card keeps up with these trends and delivers what our customers have been asking for,” said Yuval Koren, the CEO and cofounder of Eye-Fi. “Customers already know and love our Eye-Fi cards for instant wireless uploads, so the added space and faster speeds are a great addition, especially with the highest-volume photo days coming up.”

With the “endless memory mode,” a photo card can free up space as soon as a photo is transferred, so a photographer never has to worry about running out of data storage. Pictures are backed up and securely stored on Eye-Fi’s cloud. And the card can geotag pictures with your location and time taken. The card is available for pre-order now for $99.99 in the U.S. from Amazon. Eye-Fi says its customers have uploaded more than 500 million photos since 2005. The company’s investors include NTT Docomo, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and TransLink Capital.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Online photo-editing startup Aviary made a big move last year: Instead of pursuing a suite of online products, something it had been doing for several years without much growth, the company decided to become the photo editing backbone for mobile apps.

Now it looks like that leap has paid off. Today Aviary announced that it has powered more than 1 billion photo edits and has grown from 30 partners to a whopping 2,000.

“We knew when we first launched we had a hit on our hands,” Aviary CEO Avi Muchnick told VentureBeat in an interview. “Every developer we spoke to was excited.”

He said the company crossed the 1 billion edit mark around September 13, exactly one year after it launched the new platform.

In that year, Muchnick tells me, he learned a big lesson about prioritizing feature requests: “The data is always right … we’re so much more analytical about how people are using our product now,” he said.

The company also learned the importance of having a test bed in the form of Aviary’s own mobile apps, which launched in June. Previously the company would test out features with their partners, but with its own showcase apps it can easily try out new features without worrying as much.

Aviary’s mobile apps have surpassed 3 million downloads, and Muchnick just learned last night that it’s being featured as Apple’s app of the week in China.

The company’s mobile platform now supports iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, along with tablet-specific layouts. The company is also working with “a few big names” on a Windows 8 SDK, Muchnick tells me.

Founded in 2007, Aviary started off focusing on online editing for photos and music and was even working on a video editing solution. But Muchnick eventually realized that multi-pronged approach wasn’t sustainable.

“We weren’t focusing before, we were doing too many things,” he said. “We kind of took a step back and said, hey, we have a lot of success artificially, but it’s not really amounting to much. … It’s not something you can build … to profitability and raise new rounds.”

So where to go from there? “The answer was clearly photos, and the move to mobile was too large to ignore,” Muchnick said.

The real discovery for Muchnick came when the company was trying to figure out how to jump into mobile. Aviary could have released a slew of mobile photo-editing apps, but that would have been too similar to what the company already attempted online. It also could have pursued a photo social network, but by that point last year Instagram already had that market cornered.

“Then we thought, what if we could power everyone else’s apps?” Muchnick said. “That was a wide open market, nobody was doing that, and it makes perfect sense. … Now we’re focused on getting ubiquity.”

Aviary is going to “100 percent triple-down” on its current strategy, Muchnick tells me, and it will also focus on powering bigger and bigger companies. Once its network of partners gets big enough, the next step is to focus on monetizing. The company is already running a pilot program where it sells effects and stickers within apps and shares that revenue with its partners. But Aviary eventually wants to work with partners to turn the photos into a solid revenue stream.

The company is going to continue focusing on photography, but Muchnick notes that photo editing is just one experience. Aviary is currently trying to figure out other photo-related elements. For example, the company is powering photo printing to Walgreens stores, one of its strategic partners.

“There are a whole bunch of different touch points [around mobile photos] that cold be possible,” he said. “We’re not going to make mistakes of the past.”

Aviary also announced today that it’s adding Mixi, Japan’s biggest social network, and one of Russia’s biggest networks My.mail.ru, as partners. The company also has strategic partnerships with Microsoft, Nokia, and others.

New York City-based Aviary has raised $17 million so far from Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and others.

Space fans, have we got a photo for you. NASA has released the deepest-ever view of the universe, an amazing photo that combines 10 years’ worth Hubble Space Telescope images.

The “eXtreme Deep Field,” as NASA calls it, shows just a small fraction of space in the constellation Fornax. It claims that the photo contains “about 5,500 galaxies.” That number makes my head spin, especially when thinking of how many planets within those galaxies could support life.

Here’s how NASA describes the photo in more detail:

Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind’s deepest-ever view of the universe. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full Moon.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time. The new full-color XDF image reaches much fainter galaxies and includes very deep exposures in red light from Hubble’s new infrared camera, enabling new studies of the earliest galaxies in the universe. The XDF contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.

Click here to see an extra-large version of the awesome photo.

Deep space Hubble photo via NASA

Facebook isn’t waiting for the Instagram deal to close to give its users more to do with their photos. The social network updated Facebook Camera, the social network’s homegrown version of Instagram, today with additional functionality.

Version 1.1 of the Facebook Camera for iPhone app now allows photo-takers to upload their captures to specific Facebook albums, and includes a “News” tab for notifications on photo comments, tags, and “likes.”

The release also includes bug fixes and makes the application accessible to non-English speakers. The app now supports 10 additional languages such as French, German, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, and Spanish.

The relatively minor update comes just days after Facebook released a major upgrade to its fully featured iOS application. The new version of Camera also makes its debut following the FTC’s blessing of the social network’s purchase of Instagram (the deal is still pending final close), which has more than 80 million users and is far more popular than the three-month-old Camera app.

Photo credit: fiduz/Flickr

Facebook is preparing to change its photo layout once again, and the new experience is as slick as thumbing through a glossy print magazine, one where you yourself in control of the layout.

In that sense, it’s a perfect fit for the company’s Timeline aesthetic of highly visual tiles in varying sizes that correlate to the object’s actual importance in your life.

The new pics format will let you gaze at your and your friends’ images in glorious full-screen sizes, and for photos on your own page, you can choose to highlight the ones that are most meaningful to you just by clicking the star icon — the same one you’d click to highlight activity on your timeline.

With the new design, when you click on the Photos tile at the top of your own timeline, you’ll be directed to a new kind of page. Instead of white space separating a bunch of dinky thumbnails, you’ll see a mosaic of pictures that fills up the entire page. From there, you can use the menu to find images you’re tagged in, pictures you’ve posted, and albums you’ve created.

The company first started making major changes to its photo features a while ago, but we have a sneaking suspicion the latest upgrade is a direct result of a certain acquisition/hiring deal.

Facebook snapped up photo-sharing app Lightbox back in May. The similarities between the new Facebook photos layouts and the Lightbox app layouts reach right down to the varying image sizes displayed as Metro-esque mosaics.

Here’s a look at the new Facebook photo layout, with Lightbox screengrabs for comparison:

Top image courtesy of lev dolgachov, Shutterstock

Bump‘s apps are great for tapping two phones together to share contact info and photos. Now, the Bump team is unveiling Flock, a new app for sharing group photos easily and quickly with everyone in said group.

Flock identifies the photos on your phone that were taken together with your family and friends; it then creates a single album in the cloud and shares it with everyone in that set of pics.

The best part is, all you have to do is install the app. Flock does the rest automagically in the background. For a team that emphasizes the so-simple-it’s-stupid nature of its consumer-facing applications, this kind of set-it-and-forget-it functionality is exactly what we’d expect.

For example, when Bump relaunched its mobile app recently, it pared the whole thing down to just the two most popular features. Risky, yes; dead simple, absolutely.

And when the company recently launched phone-to-computer sharing, it made the feature as simple as tapping your phone on your computer’s spacebar. It’s what Bump CEO Dave Lieb called a “cognitively simple” solution in a phone chat with VentureBeat.

When it comes to sharing photos, Lieb said, “What we want to focus on is the really big pain points, and moving photos was the biggest one. People were sick of emailing photos to themselves or trying to find their syncing cable.”

Ditto for group photos. On the company blog this morning, we read:

We designed Flock so you don’t have to think about it at all. You just live your life like you already do. Spend time with your friends and family; take photos with whatever camera app you prefer. There’s no work for you at all, really. Flock uses new battery-friendly location technology and sophisticated algorithms to magically know which of your Facebook friends you are with when photos are taken. After you leave your group hike, or the night out on the town, or Thanksgiving dinner, Flock will check if anyone wants to share the photos they took and then bring those photos together into a single group album for everyone to enjoy. And because most photos taken by iOS devices are geotagged, Flock can even work backwards in time from before you installed the app! So if you and your friends and family install the app today, you’ll likely unlock lost memories that were trapped on each other’s phones for years.

Here’s a video showing off the new app, starring Lieb himself (he’s the bearded dude):

The new Flock app is in the iTunes App Store now; we suspect an Android version is on the way.

Bump was founded in Chicago in 2008 and currently calls Mountain View, Calif., home. The startup has raised $20 million in funding to date.

top image courtesy of Tyler Olson, Shutterstock

Jasbir Patel, a director at Walgreens Photo, said that almost a third of photos taken today are snapped on a smartphone, not a dedicated camera.

Already, photo apps such as GroupShot, Kicksend, and StillShot have partnered with the company and integrated printing to Walgreens into their apps. In addition, Walgreens is aiming for massive scale by partnering with Aviary, a software library or set of components that enable developers to very quickly and easily integrate photo functionality into their apps.

Aviary is currently in use by about 1,200 apps with eight million users … and as TechCrunch revealed today, Walgreens participated in the company’s recent $6 million round of investment.

This announcement helps Walgreens’ photo printing business remain relevant in an Instagram age in which no-one is taking rolls of film to their neighborhood drug store for developing.

But the real story here is that what we think of as traditional businesses are no longer traditional businesses.

Brick-and-mortar enterprises need APIs just as much as Google and Amazon need APIs. In an era when the government has APIs and your neighborhood drug store has APIs, it’s getting hard to imagine a business with any scale whatsoever that couldn’t use one or more APIs.

“An API shows a business is mature and successful … it’s become a platform,” Yossi Mlynsky, founder and chief executive of Alt Tab Mobile told VentureBeat. “Walgreens should release an API for prescription drugs next.”

It’s part of the digitization of everything. Grocery stores need APIs. Businesses of all kinds — stores such as Walgreens and other non-technology companies — that five years ago could never have imagined building and offering an API, may now see the utility in providing multiple APIs: for shopping cart integrations, for integrating project management for a large construction company, for photo printing of course.

With this announcement, Walgreens just became one of the leaders of the followers.

Image credit: Phillip Pessar/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

One of the most important factors for whether Microsoft’s next OS, Windows 8, will be a success is its app ecosystem. But if the company’s stand-alone Photos app is any indication of what’s to come, the company could see major success.

The new Win 8 Photos app greatly exceeds what Microsoft has done before with photos inside Windows. Instead of browsing the images that are locally stored on your machine, the app will let you see files from the web and your machine all in the same place, creating a giant and easy-to-access scrapbook of your memories.

“We realize the myriad places you have to go to see all of your photos, so we decided to bring them all to you in one place,” Windows Live group program manager Brad Weed wrote in a detailed blog post. “Because you can connect your Microsoft account to services like Facebook and Flickr, you can get to all of your photos and all of those memories just by signing in to Windows 8 with your Microsoft account.”

Microsoft emphasizes that the app will work best if you connect it with its cloud storage offering, SkyDrive, and its Windows Phone OS. (Although, the experience looks solid even without connecting to these.)

“Of course, the Photos app works best with our SkyDrive service, and with Windows Phone, you can automatically send all the pictures from your Phone to SkyDrive,” Weed wrote. “This makes the Photos app in Windows 8 a great way to show off your photos without having to huddle around a phone.”

From all the pictures we’ve seen of the app, it actually does look quite good. It gives you many ways to view, organize, import, and share photos, and it creates an engaging experience for looking at years of memories in a fluid manner. Fingers crossed that we’ll see more apps like this before Windows 8′s launch.

Take a look at the gallery below for more views of this awesome-looking app:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Fashion-forward types seem infatuated with photographing their outfits. You can scoff at the practice all you want, but the overwhelming number of fashion blogs tells us that sharing outfits is popular, especially in a world with Instagram. Cloth, an iOS app available since last December, goes a step further and catalogs your entire closet based on outfit pictures. Today, it adds weather-tracking features and photo filters to its app.

Cloth encourages users to snap a picture of their outfit each morning and add descriptions, such as clothing brand and style. As you snap pictures, the app gives you points and badges. Eventually, the goal is to catalog your entire closet with Cloth so you never again have to complain that you have nothing to wear.

Cloth is partnering with Weather Underground to connect your outfits with the weather outside. When you photograph an outfit, Cloth will automatically tag it with the current weather. Then you can go back later and choose a weather category to see which of your outfits will keep you comfortable based on the forecast.

Cloth is also teaming with Aviary to add fancy photo filters to the app, Instagram style. Outfit pictures are sharable on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Cloth’s free redesigned app launches today in the App Store (it used to cost 99 cents). The weather features and photo filters are available with an in-app 99 cent purchase.

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Early Instagram competitor PicPlz has notified its users that the service will be shutting down indefinitely within a month.

The site made the announcement on its blog Friday, and followed up with an email to all users today. In it, the message reads, “It has been a pleasure bringing picplz to our users, but we have decided to move on to other projects and have made the tough decision to shut it down.” The service itself will be officially shut down as of July 3. It’s users have been instructed to log in and begin downloading whatever photos they’ve uploaded via a button next to each picture.

Much like Instagram, PicPlz’s service provided users with a way to take picture on their mobile phone using various photo filters. It was also widely preferred by Android users, which — until recently — didn’t have the option of using Instagram on the platform. Beyond PicPlz’s photo filters, its Android and iOS app allowed users to add text overlays to photos, image correction/editing via Aviary, and upload photos directly to DropBox.

PicPlz’s shutdown isn’t a huge surprise. The service likely saw a large down in usage due to Instagram’s new Android app as well as the attention the competitor received from its multimillion dollar sale to Facebook.

PicPlz board member Dalton Caldwell said he supported the startup’s decisions, adding that the company was bootstrapping (meaning, funded only by its founders), according to a TechCrunch report. He also said the PicPlz team is funneling its efforts into a recently launched paid iOS app for Pinterest users called PinFlip. Presumably, this is what the team will be focusing on going forward.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bump has done it again. The simple app that lets you “bump” phones together to swap data and files is now letting you do the same thing with your phone and a computer.

Starting today, you can bump photos from your phone to your computer. Just navigate to the Bump URL, gently tap the phone to the computer’s spacebar, and the photos will magically appear on the computer.

“Photo sharing is really popular,” said Bump co-founder and CEO Dave Lieb in a phone call with VentureBeat. “We’ve had, like, 600 million photos shared by our users in the past two years alone.”

And when features are that popular, the Bup team’s goal becomes making the feature as simple as possible. “You don’t want to deal with email or putting them online; you just want to bump them over,” Lieb said.

Would-be Bumpers don’t have to install any new software on the computer. Once the initial “bump” happens, you’ll be able to save the photos to your computer’s hard drive with one click. Or you can get a shortlink to share the pics anywhere you want. Bump will host the images free for an indefinite period of time.

“It’s a really simple product, but from what we’ve heard from our users, it’s something they’re going to really love,” Lieb said.

“When I tell tech people about this feature, they say, ‘Why don’t I just use iCloud or Dropbox?’” he said. “But I’m a technologist, and I don’t even know how to figure iCloud out. People don’t take the time to set up even these automated things… This is a little bit more effort, but it’s just more cognitively simple.”

That kind of simplicity has become a core value for the startup. When Bump relaunched its mobile app back in February, it had pared the whole thing down to just the most two popular features. That bare-bones approach made it easy for the team to focus on making those two features better, prettier, and easier for people to use. The phone-to-desktop bump is an extension of that.

Lieb said that in the future, the Bump team might consider the phone-to-desktop bump for other types of files, such as videos or MP3s. “Certainly, it’s technically possible,” he said. “What we want to focus on is the really big pain points, and moving photos was the biggest one. People were sick of emailing photos to themselves or trying to find their syncing cable.”

And Bump has a lot more waiting in the wings. “A couple things we’re working on now are really cool,” said Lieb, “cooler than some of the things we’ve launched so far.” We can’t wait to find out (and tell you) more soon.

Image courtesy of DaBoost, Shutterstock

Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing community has been in makeover mode of late and is getting incrementally better with subtle upgrades. Tuesday, Flickr released a reworked photo page layout with a new look that’s nearly impossible to miss — especially on large displays.

Flickr’s “liquid” layout, as it’s called, is a dynamic format for each photo page that now features newly supported hi-res images on the main photo page. The layout also automatically adjusts the photo page and image size based on the user’s browser window size to feature the biggest photo size appropriate for each photo viewer.

“Flickr is known for its outstanding image quality that enables people to showcase the amazing details of their photographs,” Flickr’s head of product Markus Spiering told VentureBeat. “With our new, larger hi-resolution images and liquid design each photo page on Flickr comes alive.”

The new liquid layout is powered by an algorithm that accounts for browser width and height size, and displays content at a width that will best showcase the most common 4:3 photo ratio while also ensuring the photo title and sidebar are visible on the page, engineer Ross Harmes explained in a blog post on the technology behind the update. The algorithm also favors native photo sizes, never upscales images, and should allow for faster page load times.

The layout ultimately makes for an enriched new way to browse photos on Flickr, especially on large displays, and represents Yahoo’s renewed commitment to the photo property it let languish for far too long (we’ll have to wait and see how Flickr fits into interim CEO Ross Levinsohn’s plan for beleaguered Yahoo). But it might be too little, too late to win back or attract photo-sharers who’ve migrated to Facebook and mobile apps such as Instagram. For consideration: Flickr members upload 3.5 million photos per day; Facebook members upload 300 million photos per day.

The liquid layout featuring hi-res images has been pushed live for all Flickr users. The new photo sizes have also been added to Flickr’s API and now appear in the “All Sizes” menu.

“Oversharing can happen way too easily,” said my friend, a new parent. “I’m guessing when [my daughter] is 16, she won’t want whatever person is trying to date her to be able to stalk her through time. ‘Hey girl, I liked that swimsuit you wore to the beach when you were 10 months old.’”

This guy and the millions like him are directly in the crosshairs of Kicksend, an app for sharing large batches of photos and videos with small, specific groups of people. For all the reasons you’d want to share your most precious memories with just a few rather than the unwashed many, the Kicksend premise works and is welcome in a world that’s just about shared-out.

Today, the company is relaunching its web app and is making all its applications — including mobile, web, and desktop — free of charge.

“Over the past few years, it’s gotten easier to take large numbers of high quality photos and videos and blast them out to everyone you know,” said Pradeep Elankumaran, CEO of Kicksend, in a release this morning.

“However, sharing those photos with a subset of your contacts or sending full quality personal images to just your family members is still remarkably difficult. That’s where we come in.”

The company got its start at Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most hallowed incubator program. With the relaunched app, the team is now giving its users a new user interface and a new set of features.

Here’s a sneak peek at the new look:

You can send photos and videos to friends and family privately, and sort contacts into lists for faster, easier sharing. The app also brings baked-in commenting, and it lets you send any type of file to any email address.

And now it’s all free. Previously, the startup had tested out a freemium model; users got to send up to one gigabyte each month free of charge. Now, you can send as much as you like, also free of charge.

The Mountain View-based startup was founded in 2011. In addition to a small amount of YC money, the team has also received seed funding led by True Ventures with participation from Digital Garage, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Start Fund, and Milo.com CEO Jack Abraham.

Image courtesy of Hasloo Group Production Studio & Rido, Shutterstock