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Flickr Loses Your Photos with No Remorse

Paul Lilly — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:54:14 -0500

Maximum PC readers have long had the importance of maintaining backups beat into their heads, but apparently photo-hosting service isn't a subscriber to the magazine. How else do you explain losing thousands of user photos with no way to restore them?

Or at least that's the case if you believe a purportedly scorned user who claims to have had his Flickr account hacked and then terminated. According to Morgan Tepsic, a photographer and soon-to-be art student in Taipei, Taiwan, he woke up to discover three concerning emails in his inbox:

[redacted]@hotmail.com has been added to your account!
Your password has been changed!
Your account has been terminated!

After contacting the Yahoo-owned service about the security breach, Tepsic said he was told "it isn't possible to restore the content of the account." Flickr did offer to restore his screen name and URL, "but unfortunately the images, comments, and other content isn't recoverable."

There's a lot more to Tepsic's customer support nightmare, which you can read here, assuming you're not offended by big, bolded F-bombs.

Image Credit: Zazzle

MemoriesOnTV Pro 3.0

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 06:05:24 -0600

Garage developers have coded some of the most amazing software available today—including MemoriesOnTV Pro. Version 3.0 of Codejam’s powerful slide show maker packs in a ton of new features and improvements yet maintains the friendly design that we’ve long loved about the app.

The niftiest new feature is the ability to combine multiple images into a single frame of your slide show. But as much as we like the output, we’re not thrilled with the implementation—Codejam cheats when rendering the multi-image effect. While all the other effects in the program run in real time, the multi-slide effect comes about after first being rendered to a video file, and then inserted into the timeline. Fortunately, the render only takes 10-20 seconds, and making changes is fairly easy as well, but it feels like a hack.

The strength of MemoriesOnTV has always been its ability to emulate Ken Burns’ trademark zoom, pan, and fade style. MemoriesOnTV remains the best tool for Burns wannabes, and it’s damned easy to use.

The biggest improvement over previous versions of the software is MOTV 3.0’s stronger audio-editing chops. The program will now automatically trim out the silence at the end or beginning of your soundtrack. And long overdue is the ability to add sounds to individual slides. That’s handy for narrating your slide show. MemoriesOnTV gives you the ability to fade out the music while the narration plays, as well as the ability to set the narration volume. We appreciate the additions, but we still wish you could view and edit footage in a more traditional timeline—something you see in most video applications.

And that’s the rub. MemoriesOnTV is really nothing more than a tool to create slide shows; it’s not a replacement for a nonlinear video editor. With cheap video editors and DVD burning bundles offering similar functionality today, albeit not nearly as polished or easy to use, you have to be really serious about picture DVDs to opt for MemoriesOnTV. We obviously are, and for slide shows, MemoriesOnTV is the first icon we click.

Month Reviewed: November 2006
Verdict: 9
URL: www.codejam.com

Photo Finale

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 02:53:18 -0600

Remember when your high school counselor asked you about your life goals? Remember when you told her that you just wanted to finish high school? Remember when she sighed and told you to set your goals a little higher? The folks at Trevoli should do the same thing with Photo Finale.

Photo Finale should compete with the digital-imaging set—you know, Firegraphic and Photoshop Album—but it seems to only aspire to smoking weed, hanging with the fellas behind the 7-Eleven, and grooving to the new AC/DC album. Maybe, just maybe, it will one day be accepted alongside photo-management apps that are given away for free.

Photo Finale just feels uninspired to us—almost listless. Sure, Trevoli pushes it as an “easy” way to get photos from your camera, organize them, and even make CD or DVD slide shows from your pics. But most digicams come bundled with software that handles those simple tasks. And Photo Finale’s image-tweaking features are along the lines of cropping and red-eye removal—nothing more complex than that. The slide show titling tool is so frustrating to use that we want to expunge the software from our system permanently, and the limited clip art selection seems like it was lifted from a CD-ROM circa 1995.

To be fair to Photo Finale, plenty of other programs are technically in this slacker category, including Google’s Picasa. But Picasa is free. And Picasa is at least able to process RAW photo files, something you can’t do with Photo Finale.

Not everything about the app is negative. We actually like Photo Finale’s ability to sort photos by the camera’s exposure setting—if nothing you’ve shot looks sharp, it probably means your technique is weak.

But this does little to chip away at Photo Finale’s flaws—the biggest of which is its lackluster performance. On a dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60 with 2GB of RAM and a 400GB hard drive, the app just chugs. The program takes roughly two seconds to move from image to image. XP does the same thing in half a second. Indeed, there are just too many negatives in Photo Finale’s column to recommend it.

Month Reviewed: November 2006
Verdict: 3
URL: www.trevoli.com

Adobe Photoshop Elements with Premiere Elements

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 14:45:53 -0600

The newest update to Photoshop Elements 4.0 is just a bunny hop forward from the previous iteration. Adobe really sweetens the deal, however, by bundling the home-user edition of Photoshop with the home-user version of Premiere—Premiere Elements 2.0.

Don’t take that to mean that Photoshop Elements doesn’t get any worthwhile new features; there are quite a few, including some that had even our designers’ mouths watering. But the more noteworthy update is to Premiere Elements. While Premiere Elements 1.0 was a decent 1.0 version, it was a rough product.

The most noticeable change to version 2.0 of Premiere Elements is the removal of the surfeit of palettes that Adobe normally buries you under. With Premiere Elements 2.0, as you grow or shrink particular palettes, the other palettes adjust accordingly. It’s a nice touch that we’d like to see in other Adobe products.

Premiere Elements 2.0 also now lets you create your own DVD menu templates. You can set your background video or image and customize text but, sadly, button editing is verboten, as are edits to the graphical overlays used for the templates. The templates themselves, however, are quite polished and exhibit none of the general cheesiness you find in competing products. The titling capability of the program is also enhanced and the stock of included Adobe fonts is pretty spectacular.

The real gem of Premiere Elements 2.0 is its performance. Because it’s based on Adobe’s pro-level Premiere Pro 1.5 engine, Premiere Elements sings—just sings—with today’s hardware. If you’re running a dual-processor or dual-core machine, Premiere Elements’ multithreaded engine chews through video in a way that will make any hardware-head giggle with joy. Several of the video transactions are rendered on the GPU as well, for additional speed.

Rev 2 also allows you to import video using High Speed USB with cameras that support the interface (FireWire is also supported), and the app can encode audio to the space-saving Dolby Digital 2.0 codec instead of using uncompressed PCM audio. Adobe also catches up to the competition by letting you import VOB files for editing. The VOBs must be unencrypted, though—so you won’t be able to edit Sophia Copola out of The Godfather III, but you can re-import your movies once you’ve burned them to DVD.

With Photoshop Elements, Adobe mostly polishes the award-winning image-editing app. You still get a good taste of Photoshop without any of the pro-oriented pre-press stuff. The most notable changes are the skin-tone tool that lets you easily tweak skin tone in images, and the Magic Extractor. Every old Photoshop-hand knows what a daunting task it can be to clip images from photos; with the Magic Extractor, you easily separate your cat, kid, or car from the background. A similar tool called Magic Selection Brush lets you easily select objects. Both tools are far from perfect, but even if you think the Magic Lasso should be used exclusively by Wonder Woman, you’ll be able to clip and edit like a Photoshop pro.

Where Photoshop Elements 4.0 is lacking is in performance. Next to its multithreaded sibling, we found ourselves waiting an inordinate amount of time for Magic Extractor to complete. Admittedly our test clip is complex, but we were testing on a machine with four CPU cores and 4GB of RAM. Uninspiring performance doesn’t outweigh the positives of the program, but after coming off a hardware high from Premiere Elements 2.0, the lack of any real multithreading was a bummer.

Purchased separately, the apps would total $200, but as a bundle you get both for $150. That might still seem like a lot, but between the pair, you’ll be able to handle 95 percent of the image and movie chores you’ll ever be tasked with.

Month Reviewed: March 2006

+ 8MM: Dual-core and GPU support in Premiere Elements.

- VHS: Adobe Photo Downloader can be quite annoying.

VERDICT: 9
kickass=yes

URL: www.adobe.com