Posted 10/21/08 at 06:29:44 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Flickr's rolled out a new home page design that's intended to make it easier to see what's happening with your Flickr account and on Flickr in general.

Here's what's new:

1. The Your Photostream section now shows your five most recent uploads 
2. Your Photostream also has a toggle to show recent activity (such as comments from friends, your replies, and pictures selected as favorites). Don't want any more comments on a particular item? Click its Mute button.
3. Click More Recent Activity to see other activity and change activity settings.
4. The Your Contacts section now shows more photos.
5. The Your Groups section now shows the most recent photos from your groups.
6. Want to reduce page clutter? Click the double arrow icon next to a section title to close it, or click it again to open it.
7. There's now a new Explore module on the home page that displays the latest activities.
8. The latest entry at the Flickr Blog and the latest Flickr Tip occupy the right margin of the page, along with more ways to use your photos.

Haven't logged in for awhile? I think you'll like the changes. Join us after the jump and let us know if you agree - or not.

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flickr, Yahoo, digital photography, digital imaging, web 2.0, website, photo sharing

Posted 10/16/08 at 05:24:13 PM by Andy Salisbury

10 billion, that’s a pretty sizeable number. For the sake of this story, let’s see that number in its natural state: 10,000,000,000.

That’s the number of images that Facebook is now hosting, according to a post by engineer Doug Beaver on Facebook’s official blog. While this number might sound like it’s lost in the crowd of other photo-sharing sites, bear in mind that Flickr only hit 2 billion photos a little less than a year ago and Photobucket’s active ticker puts them at 6.2 billion at time of press.

Beaver’s post also listed some impressive stats on the amount of photos that Facebook is now handling. “To celebrate, we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups,” he said, “One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon.” They’re also receiving a staggering two to three terabytes of photos per day, and their photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 images served per second.

As monumental as this is, the hardware isn’t free. Facebook reportedly borrowed $100 million in May to help cover the colossal costs of hosting all those photos, and it’s not evident that revenues will be level with server demands anytime soon.

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photos, facebook, hardware, photo sharing, Servers

Posted 09/24/08 at 10:03:25 PM by Mark Edward Soper

At Photokina this week, Eye-Fi, makers of the first Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards, announced two improvements to its product family effective October 5th:

• First, a firmware update will double the photo transfer speed from Eye-Fi cards from the current 350KBps to 700KBps.
• Second, users of Eye-Fi cards will be able to add the photo transfer features of their choice to cards that were not bundled with these features.

Here are the new options:

• Users of the entry-level Eye-Fi Home card can add web sharing for $9.99/year, making the card equivalent in features to the Eye-Fi Share card.
• Users of the Eye-Fi Home or Share card can add geotagging for $14.99/year.
• And, users of the Eye-Fi Share card can add automatic uploading at open hotspots or at Wayport hotspots (there are over 10,000 of those) for $14.99/year.

By adding geotagging and hotspot support, users of Eye-Fi Share cards make these cards equivalent to Eye-Fi Explore cards.

The already long list of online photo sharing services Eye-Fi supports now includes Apple's MobileMe and AdoramaPix, effective immediately. Eye-Fi cards are now being bundled with digital cameras at Wal-Mart.com, and will be available at Best Buy stores starting October 5.

What do you think about the ability to add the features you want to Eye-Fi cards? Hit the jump for your chance to sound off.

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wi-fi, digital photography, digital imaging, web 2.0, consumer electronics, photo sharing, Eye-Fi, wireless Ethernet

Posted 06/25/08 at 03:55:46 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Dig the past? Wondering what your grandparents' generation was up to? Like free photos? Flickr's The Commons is the place for you! Now, the Smithsonian is getting into the act by joining The Commons, an online collection of copyright-free photos from a variety of institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress, and the Powerhouse Museum. Learn how you can explore the past - and share what you know about it.

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flickr, photo sharing, The Commons, history, Smithsonian Instution