Tag Archives: share photos

Put your iPhone photos on a T-shirt… tell everyone… make money

There are many options to have products made with your iPhone photos, a few of those options have iPhone apps to do the creative work on. A new service and free app joining the mix is Snaptee.

As the name implies, the iPhone app is a tool you can use to create T-shirts with. The T-shirts can then be purchased as well offered for sale via the Snaptee Web site. T-shirts are priced at $19.99 + shipping. If a T-shirt is sold with your design on it, Snaptee pays you 10% of the sale (to your PayPal account when the amount owed to you reaches $100). You can also create/buy T-shirts that are private so others can not see or buy. If you set a T-shirt creation to ‘private’, the service does not offer the ability to change your mind later and offer for sale. The solution is to ‘remix’ your design onto another T-shirt. Speaking of ‘remixing’, this is an option that has to be allowed near the last step of creating your T-shirt. But doing this means anyone can take your design/photo and remix onto a T-shirt they offer to sell. So, your photo and T-shirt design is protected to you by Snaptee… unless you let others remix, in which case your photo is up for grabs.

The Snaptee T-shirt design app lets you choose from a series of templates or free form your own design. You can add text, which can be colored via a picker. I noticed quite a few T-shirts on the site that where just lettering and no photos at all so there is no limitations on your creative there. Speaking of the site, if you want to make any money selling your T-shirts, you will need to do all of the promoting yourself. The Snaptee site is a single long list of T-shirts which means it is by chance that someone would happen upon your creation. Your best off creating, then promoting. Is this better than Zazzle or CafePress? Snaptee is a new addition to this group of long term professionals so while their list of offerings may be limited right now, they may be highly motivated to make this a winning solution.

Echograph – A new view of creating animated GIFs on the iPhone

Animated GIFs… I can take em or leave em. When I head the term, I think of the little cute icons on Web pages years ago that where just fluff on the page. More recently, there has been a few services that are encouraging more creative thinking around a few images put together into a story. If the images are thought through a bit, it can be a fun way of sharing a moment. There are two methods that the popular services are using, either it’s a video shot at a very slow speed or a person shoots a series of photos that the app stitches together.

Now, there is Echograph, offering a third way of showing motion in an animated GIF. The movement is set to a particular area of a photo so only the parts needing to move to tell the story are moving, the rest of the image is frozen. This removes a lot of the jerky look found on most multi image GIFs.

The Echograph app is simple to use, but actually pretty powerful. This is a Universal app, so the fun doesn’t have to be limited to the iPhone, editing on the larger iPad screen may have ultimately better results if your looking for maximum impact.

Shoot or import a video. Cut it down to a maximum of 5 seconds long via a slider along the bottom of the screen. Choose the area you want to allow movement to happen by painting over it with your finger or stylus (a person in the shot, a flowing river, etc…), then share or export in low or high resolution. Yup, it’s that easy! Admittedly, this is not the solution for all animated GIF, it is more for those images where only want a particular part to move. Some animated GIFs need the full screen to be changing for the message, but for those shots that you want a still photo and a part of it alive, Echograph has you covered.

Getting photos off film into the iPhone for sharing using the Smartphone Film Scanner

You have not heard of the SmartPhone Film Scanner? Well, that would be because it’s new item from the folks at Lomography and isn’t shipping till March. The idea is simple: make a mount for the iPhone that is pointed down a dark tunnel and allow film to be placed at the far end to take pictures of. There are some fun parts in making such a simple looking device of course. Alignment, backlighting, distance between the iPhone and film is just a few. In this case, the Lomography team had a head start since they offer a similar device for an earlier project (transferred ‘movies’ from film to the iPhone where people had recorded short movies using 35 mm film, called LomoKino).

If this looks interesting, and a bit of fun. You can jump in now and get your name on the list to receive one through their Kickstarter Project. The projects is already fully funded with two weeks to go till it wraps up. The solution might not be the best answer to that big box of 500 rolls of developed film in the corner, but for grabbing a few photos off of a roll now and then, it could be very handy. A quick method to get a film image into the iPhone that can then be edited and shared. The project is also outlined over on the Lomography site too.

Automating the sharing of iPhone photos amongst friends at the same event

There has been quite a few apps claiming they are going to make it easy to see events from many angles. Using ‘friends’, merging photos together into some sort of viewable group. Most have been strong on one or two features but not providing a complete solution. The other end of the solution is apps that track every move of you and your friends to encourage sharing… that is just plain creepy!!

I was disappointed with a couple options that let you share pictures if you knew in advance who was going to be there, request and they accepted your invite to a shared area, etc… Usually those people are standing right next to me at the event so what does the share do for me?!

The folks that do the Bump app, which handles transferring contacts and photos by bumping iPhones, are now taking a crack at filling the need for friend event photo sharing. The app, Flock, is an iPhone app that pulls together pictures your friends took at an event and puts them in a shared album.

The info on Flock states that you can use any app to take the pictures with, so it would appear it uses the EXIF info for time/location rather than having to do it’s own unique ID. The app does require you use your Facebook login as it’s login. Normally, this is just a way of letting Facebook handle the security of logins, but in this case it is how Flock knows who your ‘friends’ are.

When first launching Flock, your asked to allow the app to use Location Services. Like Bump, this means you have the location icon showing all of the time. With some apps, your battery goes down much quicker when something is constantly pinging the location, but Bump claims their apps are better at it and shouldn’t have a negative impact. The apps need to know your location in order to judge it against other users location. In the case of the Bump app, so you can transfer files, in the case of Flock so it knows when multiple users are at the same event.

Knowing where your at, that there are photos tagged with the time and location of the location, who your Facebook friends are, and if they were at the same location taking pictures, an album is created for you. Flock works in reverse too so if an event you took pictures at was also attended by a Facebook friend of yours, a push notification will let you know an album will be created from that event too. Of course, this does mean all of that information is sitting on a company’s servers to make the connection. How much of my every move being tracked by someone is worth the convenience of having a group photo album be created? Tough question that every individual has to answer for themselves.

It would be nice if something could be done with the collection of photos, Flock Album outside of just viewing in the app and relying on Flock to get your viewing pleasure right. A couple important positives… your photos are not shared with your friend’s Flock albums without you OKing it and they are not posted to Facebook automatically either (sharing a photo can not be undone though).

iPhone photo editor, Photo Power, updated to 3.0

Some iPhone photo editors start out looking the same, then you dive in deeper and find your first impression was right, it’s the same ol bunch of filters wrapped in a different name.

A free (doesn’t say how long it will be free) solution I was playing with this week is Photo Power. It is very much not the ‘norm’. There are very few simple filters to add, everything else is adjustable and the final result is full resolution even on the 4s!

Across the bottom of the window is Crop/Resize/Rotate, then three scrollable lists of tuning options to use with the photo. Photo Power lets you apply and undo as many as you like so you can spend a lot of time getting just the right effect or clean-up the particular photo is in need of.

In this case, there are a few ‘filter’ options given to apply. Choosing one applies the effect right away. Photo Power lets you tune the amount of the filter applied by sliding your finger left/right across the image. Note the ‘%’ for the effect being used in the upper right of the screen.

Where needed, Photo Power offers sliders to tune the enhancement application to your photo.

Yes, I am applying many different filters and adjustments to the photo without having to stop and save a copy of the image along the way.

If you know you don’t need a full size image at the end, why take the time for an app to pound through the process of working against a high resolution image. But, your output need isn’t always the same from one photo to the next. Photo Power gives you the option when starting off your editing to choose what size you will need at the end so you work with the image in that dimensions from the beginning. The small, the faster the adjustments are applied, letting you move onto the next tuning option.

The Settings is all about getting the finished product your looking for. Usually this area in other apps is filled with how to tune the camera for taking the picture. With Photo Power, the adjustments are in the area of what you expect out of the app when done. Preset your resolution as well the file type. EXIF has to be chosen if your concerned about keeping all of the meta data with the image. I used JPEG so I didn’t have to convert the image later when posting to 500px.

When the ‘save’ button is hit in Power Photo, the app sets out and applies all of the adjustments you made to create a final image. I had chosen to save the final as a JPEG using the above setting. This meant that the finished creation didn’t show up right away when I exited the app, but it did show up on full resolution after a short time.

The filters and effects from many iPhone Photo editors, all available in one… Pixlr-o-matic PLUS

There are apps that give you a variety of ‘film’ effects, like Vintage, Retro, Unicolor and Soft tones. There are other apps that provide lighting effects either through disrupting like burning and leaking light or overlaying with fireworks or Bokeh.

There is an app I just started using called Pixlr-o-matic Plus that brings the many options other iPhone photo editors have to one place. The Universal app lets you use photos on your iPhone or snap new ones. In the work area, you can swipe across the photo or use the random button in the upper right corner to have an effected added for you. Along the bottom is a ‘film roll’ of options to manually choose. As you move left/right through those filter options, the effect being viewed is applied in real time.

Choosing the light bulb provides another group of filters, to the right of the light is frames and finally the ‘save/share’ button. At first glance, the available filter options are small in each group. Not to worry, Pixlr-o-matic Plus has many more in their online library.

Scrolling all the way to the right of the filters is a ‘more’ button (or you can use the film canister upper right corner button), tap to go to a long list of grouped effects. Notice at the top is a film and light icon, both contain their group of effects. Scroll up/down to view the groups, right/left to see the filters in each group. Each of the Pixlr-o-matic ‘packages’ has a download button to pull that group into your iPhone to use on photos.

As you add the different groups of film and lighting effects, they are included in the film roll on the editing screen. Also, Pixlr-o-matic has a ‘My Effects’ folder for a quick overview of what you have installed.

The finished image can be saved to the iPhone photo library, attach to an email, push to iTunes, store in Dropbox or post to Facebook and Flickr. After choosing a method, Pixlr-o-matic Plus gives you the option to choose what size the photo will be exported in size text, including the original full size 3264 x 2448… just right to share onto my 500px account.

Using Twitter like Instagram for photo sharing with the iPhone – TwitPic has an app for that

A bunch of us was wondering why Twitter didn’t do more for photo sharing on the mobile years ago. There was a couple outside apps produced but the twitter apps never did more than let you add a photo or access photos in tweets via three taps. When Instagram hit the market, we felt it was a sign we were right and Twitter lost that game.

Now, a free solution from TwitPic has showed up to help you take photos, do a bit of editing, then post to your twitter stream.

After you snap a photo, or import from your iPhone photo library, TwitPic provides a few filters and image editing tools. These are from the Aviary free tools collection that developers can embed in their apps. Not sure why the app doesn’t use the full offering from Aviary. When the image is as you like, ‘Done’ takes you to a screen to add your 140 characters then post for all to see on Twitter.

Photos that are posted to Twitter can be seen in a scrollable, arranged by either Timeline (folks your following) and Popular. TwitPic does crop the images in this view so you see just part of the whole. Thus, you have a limited view and still have a extra tap to see the full image. The ‘profile’ icon in the upper right corner takes you to view your profile, images you have posted and comments on those images.

Select a photo in the stream to see it full size. If you do nothing for a bit or tap the screen, the upper/lower info bars disappear for a unrestricted view of the image.

When viewing an image, you can see in the lower right corner how many people have commented on it. Tap that area to open up the comments to add your thoughts and read text from others. There is another oval in the upper right corner of the screen, selecting it does nothing. TwitPic is a bit of a head scratcher where so much is possible but looks rushed to get out the door. Some people will post it’s a clean interface, I’m sticking with my feeling that it’s half done.

I bought Cartoon Camera FX for the iPhone… so you don’t have to

If you have not figured it out yet, I pay my hard earned cash for every app you see covered on this site. The liberty of paying for apps is that there is never any pressure to review an app in a positive light if I don’t feel it is worthy.

In the case of Cartoon Camera FX, the description about the app in iTunes is light and there is a reason. The feature set of the app is light as well. The app is for creating cartoon like effects with photos taken with the iPhone. Those photos can either be taken through the app or imported from your iPhone’s photo library. If using the app to take the picture, what you see is what you get, the effect is applied on the screen. Press the center bottom button to snap the photo.

Rather than taking a picture, you can select the button on the lower left corner to choose an image to use from your iPhone’s photo library.

You can apply the effects to the images via the little face button in the lower right corner of the screen. Just select one of the effects and Cartoon Camera FX returns you to the photo with the effect applied.

When you select the center checkmark button, the image is saved to your iPhone photo library. Cartoon Camera FX mentions you can share the resulting images on Facebook or as an email attachment, that doesn’t seem to be via the app rather out of your built-in photo library. The resulting image is 3264 x 2448.

Paper photos to an online family tree using your iPhone

A family tree site is offering a free app to get your images from paper to digital. The idea is that you take a picture of the printed picture using your iPhone. The 1000memories app then lets you align the image on the iPhone so it is straight and clean. You can add text to the image as well as keywords, then upload to the online family album. So far, I have yet to see where they are charging for the iPhone app or the online service. Maybe bigger accounts of shared accounts carry an upgrade charge. I have yet to see that though.