Various photo sites have their own uploader apps, but what if you use more than one site? Orli Yakuel at GO2WEB20 just posted about an app called PhotoScatter that can help you with that.

PhotoScatter lets you send a photo to several different sites at once, including Facebook, Flickr, ShutterFly, PhotoBucket, Picasa, and Twitpic. There’s an ad-supported free version and a $3 pro version (with the same features, but faster upload speeds).

The main feature missing from Photoscatter, from a serious photo junkie’s point of view, is the ability to add new services or custom URLs to upload to. It would be amazing to send photos to your blog or photo portfolio site and Flickr at the same time.
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Now that Photoshop is used as a verb in the English language, and probably countless other languages for that matter, it’s easy to take for granted how much it has transformed the publishing industry and how it’s editing tools allow us to view an alternative reality. It’s probably reasonable to suggest that most published images are digitally manipulated in some way – models to look thinner, colors to be more intense, composition to appear more visually appealing, etc. The question becomes what is real, and what is fake?

Photoshop has had an interesting journey from its early days as a simple display program to a sophisticated digital image editing application with over 10 million users worldwide. Using its suite of tools, you can retouch images, add textures, crop images, build layers, add text and basically do everything to create stunning results. Adobe offers several levels of Photoshop, from the free, online image editing app, Photoshop.com, to the advanced CS4 Extended, recommended for film, video and multimedia professionals.

If you want to join Photoshop’s birthday celebration, there’s a number of links for you to visit, below. If you want to comment on Twitter about the anniversary, add the tag #PS20. Additionally, Adobe TV has an excellent video, Startup Memories, to commemorate the impact Photoshop has had over the years and gets the original developers together to discuss the creation of the software.

Photoshop Facebook
Photoshop Twitter
National Association of Photoshop Professionals

Happy birthday Photoshop! Here’s to at least another 20 more years!

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Ever since Palm and Apple started their dance about the Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes, I’ve been keeping an eye out for alternative ways to move media to my Pre.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been putting three applications through their paces with my Pre to find a suitable workaround for this glaring omission on Palm’s part: MarkSpace’s GoGadget for webOS, Salling Software’s Media Sync and doubleTwist. All three applications are available for Windows and Mac OS X, however in this review were tested on Mac OS X.

Photo by whatleydude

GoGadget for webOS

MarkSpace, developers of GoGadget, are well known for their syncing application The Missing Sync, which has long allowed users to sync data such as contacts, bookmarks and music with their devices. Whilst there is a version of Missing Sync available for webOS (costing $39.95) I took a look at GoGadget which is a slimmed-down version of Missing Sync designed with your media in mind, costing $19.95.

GoGadget is well-designed, and offers the handy feature to create a ringtone for your device (whether it’s from a non-DRMed iTunes song or other audio file) as well as the ability to sync documents and other files to your Pre. It also has the nice touch of being able to eject your Pre from the computer after syncing, so you don’t have to eject it using your computer’s OS.

Whilst it’s the most comprehensive of the applications I’ve tested to get media onto the Pre, it’s also lacking one key feature for me: it doesn’t support Aperture as a source of photos, so I can’t transfer photos to my Pre. In the scheme of things, however, it’s a small inconvenience: I’d hazard a guess most people on OS X are using iPhoto – and on Windows you can sync folders of photos just fine.

Salling Media Sync

I’ve been a fan of Salling Software’s Clicker application since I bought my first Mac just under 5 years ago, and their Media Sync application provides many of the same features as GoGadget. That said, Media Sync has a few unique features that may appeal to users. Unlike GoGadget, which is specifically tailored for webOS devices, Media Sync works with a broad variety of devices including webOS (handy if you need to sync more than one device to iTunes). Media Sync also allows you to transfer photos onto your device from Aperture.

If you’re on Windows, Media Sync may well have the upper-edge over GoGadget. As well as supporting folders as the application supports photos from Adobe Photoshop Elements (v6-7) and Adobe Photoshop Album SE 3.2.

doubleTwist

doubleTwist (free) is a slightly different application from the previous two, in that it’s designed more to replace iTunes than it is complement it – however as doubleTwist remains in beta, it’s not feature-complete either.

Besides being the only free application in this test (though the UI implies that a paid-for doubleTwist account is forthcoming), doubleTwist is also a promising replacement for iTunes. Whilst I’m mostly happy with iTunes, I know a few Windows users who aren’t – and the the inclusion of the Amazon MP3 store and familiar UI certainly helps make it far more easier to use than the bloated and unreliable open-source Songbird player.

The only problem right now is that, for a Pre user, the only sync option right now is to select playlists or drag and drop songs onto the device to be transferred. Photos and other media are, for now, a notable omission. doubleTwist’s current feature set prevents it from being a genuine competitor right now in this test, however it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on in the future – particularly as the application starts to add more media syncing options.

Summary

Given the small and subtle differences between the two main contenders in this showdown (GoGadget and Salling Media Sync), it’s hard to pick a winner. Salling Media Sync has the upper hand in the number of third-party applications it supports – however if I had to choose one it would be GoGadget. With the built-in ringtone creation and document syncing, I’m willing to overlook the app’s lack of Aperture syncing.

Note: Salling Software and Mark|Space provided Not for Resale licenses for their respective products to be tested in this review. For further details on our review policies, please visit this page.

This is actually old news, but I only just stumbled across it a couple of days ago. You see, news of Adobe’s next Creative Suite is so hard to come by that this is still the latest Photoshop development! In fact, since October, the only news they’ve released was to announce the cancellation of their Flash CS5 public beta. But can I say, having just watched the the ’sneak peek’, I am now very, very excited about the possible applications for Adobe’s CS5. Give us more news, Adobe!

Do you see the 3D elements that have been thrown in? The wire frame, the joints (the kinematics!), the simulation of a paint brush’s tip… it’s really quite crazy. I know Adobe gets a lot of flak for the continuous milking of their cash cow, but after that video I could almost forgive them.

With no news since October, and their usual 18- to 24-month development cycle, we might actually see Photoshop CS5 and Flash within a couple of months. I’m positively eager to review both of them.

Facebook is the biggest photo sharing site in the world, so it’s pretty likely your friends have some photos posted there. The thing is, nobody’s pretending that browsing photos on Facebook is fast or user-friendly. In fact, the whole experience totally, in the parlance of our times, sucks. That’s why you should get PhotoBook, a zippy, great-looking Facebook photo browser for Mac.

PhotoBook allows browsing by friend’s name or by recently-added album, and it also has a search feature that makes finding specific photos so much easier than it is on Facebook. Not only does PhotoBook save you a lot of clicks when you’re browsing, it also eliminates all that clicking of “next” and “previous” when you’re browsing an album.

Photos pop up in a lightbox, so you don’t have to deal with reloading a thumbnail page if you want to go back and select a new one. You can use the arrow keys to navigate within an album, and there’s also a slideshow mode, in case you don’t want to click at all. If you’re a Facebook junkie, you should not be without this app.

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Something else every Facebook junkie should do: become a fan over at Download Squad’s new and improved Facebook page. Sebastian has recently done some remodeling over there, and it’s looking mighty nice, if we do say so ourselves.

The FBI says that they often use stock photos to find the features they include in such mockups, but in this case, the right features weren’t available. Llamazares’ photo was pulled from the Internet, and “the forensic artist was not aware of the identity of the individual depicted in the photograph. The similarities between the photos were unintentional and inadvertent.” That’s all well and good, but it might be smart to make sure the guy whose photograph you’re using isn’t a celebrity or, in this case, an elected official of a foreign government.

Llamazares is reportedly considering legal action. “Bin Laden’s safety is not threatened by this but mine certainly is,” he said.

[via BBC News]
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Like me, you might find that fact a bit surprising, since we don’t immediately think of Facebook as a photo sharing site — that’s just one of its features.

What’s even more interesting when thinking about Facebook as a photo sharing site is that it has a built-in permission system that says that if you are tagged in a photo, you are given permission to see that photo.

A new Mac and Windows application called PhotoGrabber uses that permission (and your credentials) to go harvest all of the photos it can find of you on the service, and download them into a local folder. It can also download all the photos you have access to of your contacts.

Interestingly, it doesn’t appear to download profile pictures, but sticks strictly to photos where the target person has been tagged.

[via Lifehacker]

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The flashiest way to share photos with Divvyshot is to put two iPhones together and shake them. This method allows you to quickly share tons of photos between two phones without having to actually transfer the files – the person you’re sharing with just gets access to the already-uploaded photos on Divvyshot, and their phone pulls files from the cloud.

The iPhone-quality versions of the photos aren’t too shabby — and anyone who has access to a particular album can manually download high-res versions via the web. The service also integrates with Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, making sharing on multiple sites a snap.

If you don’t want to have a Facebook or Flickr account just to share photos with your friends, Divvyshot is worth a look as it seems to be positioning itself as the easier-to-use alternative.

Liquid Scale is an iPhone / iPod Touch app that allows you to resize images by removing unimportant elements in the photo, leaving the important ones untouched. It’s a technique called seam carving that we’ve previously mentioned, but what’s interesting here is that it’s now available to be used on the iPhone.

For those that are unfamiliar with it, the seam carving technique analyzes images to determine the most and least important elements, and when you use it to decrease the size of an image it removes the least important parts first, in tiny 1 pixel wide slices. It can be a slow process, particularly on larger images, but the result is often much more compelling than what can be done with a simple crop. Of course, if you’re not careful to use the effect sparingly, the results can go from impressive to flat-out weird pretty quickly.

Liquid Scale is available for $2US in the App Store.

[via Daring Fireball]

The site isn’t new — it’s been around since 2001. Since it has been around for so long, quite a few images have accumulated for each time of day. A list of these images appears right under the image displayed, each tagged with its location.

The site is banner-free, and looks like one man’s crazy labor of love. It’s perfect for a desktop widget. I like the URL format, too — very geek-chic.