Apple has allowed developers to support sharing Live Photos in their own apps since iOS 9.1, and Tumblr appears to be the first major social network to take advantage of the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus feature Tumblr 5.0 for iOS was released today and supports sharing the new animated photos, 3D Touch within the app, and a few other goodies.
Facebook has today unveiled a new app called Moments from its Creative Labs division that makes it easier to exchange pictures amongst friends who were together at an event or place, all documenting it through their own photos. Here’s how Facebook describes the problem they’re solving:
It’s hard to get the photos your friends have taken of you, and everyone always insists on taking that same group shot with multiple phones to ensure they get a copy. Even if you do end up getting some of your friends’ photos, it’s difficult to keep them all organized in one place on your phone.
Through the use of location and facial-recognition data (both areas where Facebook has invested heavily), Moments groups photos together and then asks if you’d like to share them with the people it has recognized, and vice-versa. It’s very reminiscent of the now-defunct Color, although that app was more real-time and ephemeral (Moments allows you to collect and sync photos with friends after an event is over), and wasn’t integrated closely with Facebook’s 1 billion plus user base.
https://vimeo.com/130380325
It’s available now in the iOS App Store and on Google Play, which is useful in the event that some of your friends are on Android (gasp, I know).
Flickr has made a significant update to its iOS app, revamping the look to mimic that of your iPhone’s Camera Roll and bringing the auto-upload feature added back in 2013 front-and-center. When you first run the app, it immediately asks if you want to automatically upload every photo you take. If you say yes, photos are set to private, so you won’t be sharing them with the world.
With Flickr offering 1TB of free storage, and a typical iPhone photo coming in at around 2.5Mb, that gives you capacity in the order of half a million photos …
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Facebook is rolling out an update to its Paper app for iPhone users bringing a better photo sharing experience to the alternative News Feed app.
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After updating its app for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus last month, Instagram is out with a feature update today with some welcome features.
Users will likely appreciate the ability to edit photo captions and locations attached to photos in post now. That means if you make a typo on your caption, you no longer have to choose between correcting yourself in the comments, deleting and re-posting the photo with the correction caption, or just ignoring it altogether.
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Instagram today released a major update to its popular photo sharing app for smartphones. The latest release, Instagram 6.0, packs in several new photo editing tools including light and dark adjustments, sharpening effects, color adjustments, filter strengths, and more.
When you go to select a filter, you’ll now see a new wrench icon. Tap it and you’ll find a tray of photo editing tools ready for you to explore. You can also now adjust how much of a filter you apply to a photo by double tapping the filter icon.
The update comes just a day after Apple previewed iOS 8 which includes its own photo editing advancements in the native Photos app similar to those found in apps like iPhoto.
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Facebook today updated Messenger to version 5.0 bringing a list of feature improvements to the iPhone messaging app. The new version boasts a streamlined design for accessing and sharing photos as well as a new shortcut for downloading sticker packs (tap and hold a sent sticker to download the pack), but it’s main feature addition tackles video. Users can now access and share video clips to other users within the app. Previous versions were limited to only sharing photos and voice recordings. The update also includes improvements to searching people and groups by name.
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We first showed you Photos+ by Justin Williams of Second Gear last December when the app that shows you photo EXIF info debuted. Jonathan Hayes of SilverPine Software, who worked on Sunlit with Manton Reece of Riverfold Software, has since purchased Photos+ and today version 1.1 is debuting.
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AirDrop can be a be a quick, simple way to transfer files between iOS devices. It can be especially handy because it is truly a device-to-device transfer that works even when neither device has internet access, although Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have to be turned on for it to function. In this article I will discuss how to turn on AirDrop and use it to share files between devices.
In Apple apps, any files that can be transferred using the share icon can be sent via AirDrop. This includes photos, videos, iWork documents, notes, contacts, links, directions, and location data. Some third-party apps can also share data using AirDrop. AirDrop for mobile devices is a feature of iOS 7, and can only be used to share files between mobile devices, not between computers and mobile devices.
Last October I reviewed Launch Center Pro for iOS 7 and shared a few actions and shortcuts I found useful. Today Contrast is out with Launch Center Pro for iPad, and it’s just as neat for anyone wanting to build shortcuts and more efficient workflows on the iPad.
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Twitter released a feature update to its iOS app today bringing new photo-centric features to the social client. Version 6.1 delivers a photo gallery to the tweet compose view making it quicker to sort through your images as well as improvements to photo editing.
Users should also find new content recommendations at the top of the timeline, a feature that may have been popping up for some users before.
The last major update to Twitter also focused on photo sharing as it introduced DM image support.
Twitter 6.1 is available for free on the App Store.
Photo sharing site Imgur has added its popular MemeGen tool to iOS via a new app on the App Store. The app actually launched late last year, but Imgur has only begun promoting it today. The application has three main tabs across the bottom: Browse, Create, and Recents. Browse allows fans of meme photos to browse new or popular images. Create allows you to harness the power of your iOS Device’s camera and photo library to create your own memes. The interface for doing so is simple. Recents allows you to keep all of your created memes at your fingertips. The app is free on the App Store.
Following recent API abuse that lead to phone numbers and usernames being exposed, Snapchat, the social photo sharing app, has updated its iPhone app with the option to opt out of linking your phone number with your username. The feature was intended to increase social discoverability among mutual contacts, but was recently abused leading to the following update and apology:
Find Friends Improvements
This morning we released a Snapchat update for Android and iOS that improves Find Friends functionality and allows Snapchatters to opt-out of linking their phone number with their username. This option is available in Settings > Mobile #.
This update also requires new Snapchatters to verify their phone number before using the Find Friends service.
Our team continues to make improvements to the Snapchat service to prevent future attempts to abuse our API. We are sorry for any problems this issue may have caused you and we really appreciate your patience and support.
Love,
Team Snapchat
The update is available now on for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store.
Amazon’s Cloud Drive Photos app, the company’s dedicated cloud-based photos app which debuted on the iPhone earlier this year in May, updated today with two major features.
First, the app, contrary to the its official name, supports managing videos from your device. Users can upload or download videos up to 2GB in file size or 20 minutes in duration.
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[youtube=http://youtu.be/gPzZevSbgGk]
Snapchat, the popular photo messaging app that is used to share over 350M photos every day, has added a substantial feature in the latest version of their app: Snapchat Stories.
The Verge has a great piece on the new feature:
“Stories: a rolling compilation of snaps from the last 24 hours that your friends can see. You create your Story as you go about your day by tapping “My Story” above the friends you want to send a snap to. Or, you can tap a new shortcut button in the app’s camera screen to instantly post a snap to your Story. But unlike conventional snaps, Stories don’t disappear in a puff of ephemeral smoke after you’ve watched them. You can watch a friend’s (or your own) Story over and over.”
Each Story is the sum of all the snaps you’ve added over the last 24 hours, which means its size is always fluctuating. What doesn’t change is that every piece of the Story is less than a day old, so viewing one might be the fastest way to see what a friend’s been up to. Snapchat may not look much like Facebook, but with Stories, the company is taking its first steps toward competing with Facebook’s most important product: News Feed.
Rather than falling for pressure from users to add a “send all” button or allow for groups, the company appears to be pushing for the new Stories feature as a way to share moments with all of your friends.
Lytro, the company behind the light-field camera system by the same name, has launched an iPhone and iPod touch application. The app connects to the Lytro Camera via a WiFi connection to allow Lytro camera users to easily sync photos from the camera to the iOS device.
Using the technologies in an iOS device, users, via the app, can then share their photos via social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Because iOS devices have built-in text messaging and email capabilities, Lytro photos can be shared instantly via those mediums as well.
Analog Camera for iPhone and iPod touch
As promised, Analog Camera for iPhone and iPod touch has hit the App Store to fulfill your filtered photo taking needs. I had a chance to spend some time with the app over the Memorial Day weekend and quickly decided it’s a keeper.
Analog Camera is a seriously fun and fast camera app with personality, as we would expect from the makers of Clear for iPhone and Mac (and soon iPad), that features eight different photo filters and all the social network sharing you could ever need.
Analog Camera’s easy sharing features allow you to open photos you shoot or edit within the app in other apps including Instagram. This feature is especially cool if you’re feeling spunky and want to experiment with double filters or blurring features offered with Instagram.
Capture and process an image in Analog Camera, then jump right over to Instagram or similar apps to share.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Apple is about to unveil an upgraded iCloud service at WWDC in June. Citing the usual sources “familiar with the matter,” the report also claimed the features would include new photo-sharing capabilities for sharing and commenting on sets of photos. It also mentioned the ability to sync video to iCloud, which sounds a lot like a Video Stream feature that we mentioned last year. Perhaps this is the reason Phil Schiller no longer needed Instagram?
The new features, expected to be announced at Apple’s world-wide developer conference beginning June 11, will allow iCloud users to share sets of photos with other iCloud users and to comment on them, these people said… Apple is trying to better compete in the red-hot market for photo sharing, dominated by fast-growing online services such as Facebook Inc. and mobile apps like Instagram—which Facebook has agreed to acquire for $1 billion.
We revealed last September that Apple was readying its Find My Friends network. At the time, we reported references to video streams that indicated Apple was likely considering a video syncing/stream feature similar to Photo Stream.
According to the report, Apple is “rolling out new features cautiously” as it worries about the cost of storing large amounts of data, but is also considering increasing the maximum number of photos and albums users can store:
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