photos

Shutterfly announced today that it has acquired cloud-based image-storing service ThisLife.

ThisLife is a lesser-known service for users who want to store photos and videos on the Web. Upon uploading videos or images to ThisLife, users can organize them into events or categories and share them with others. Shutterfly didn't say how much it acquired ThisLife for, but the company noted that the deal will enhance its own services.

According to Shutterfly, in the coming months, it will incorporate ThisLife's storage and sharing features into its own platform. Users will be able to add photos from a host … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions about managing DVD collections in a central networked library, a missing or malfunctioning "purge" command in OS X, and options for archiving photos from an iPhoto library. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Managing DVD collections in a central networked library MacFixIt reader "brunnerr" asks:

It this era of immediacy, it can be hard to remember the days when people would shoot a roll of film on a camera and then wait to get it developed before they even saw the photos. In a sense, before digital photography, the only instant pictures that existed were Polaroids.

Now, Polaroid is looking to change up the game again. It's opening several retail shops called Fotobars where people can bring in digital photos they have stored on their mobile devices -- including those in apps like Facebook, Picasa and Instagram -- and get them printed.

"There … Read more

Millions of Instagram users are documenting their night as confetti is thrown, party horns are blown, and revelers count down to 2013. The photo-sharing social network has decided to put all of these photos in one place -- a desktop-optimized New Year's Eve photo stream.

"We love seeing photos shared from all different parts of the world," Instagram wrote in a blog post today. "At instagram.com/nye, you can see photos from every part of the world as the clock strikes midnight in a given time zone."

This is how you sell tech gear:

Yesterday I walked into B&H Photo in New York, which claims to be the country's largest non-chain camera store, and asked one of the many sales representatives if he was an expert on tripods. He smiled and responded: "It's a ball and three legs so you really don't need to be an expert."

I told him I needed to upgrade my tripod and he showed me how to get more life out of my old one. A few weeks ago, a B&H sales person … Read more

Snapchat and Poke videos shared with other people are supposed to go poof after a few seconds, but their vanishing act isn't working exactly as advertised.

Snapchat and Facebook's Poke apps are designed for folks who want to share photos and videos with their socially networked friends -- though only briefly. The appeal of both apps is that the photos and videos vanish after up to 10 seconds. That's supposed to mean you can send someone a potentially embarrassing or "sexty" clip of yourself, firm in the belief that it won't stick around for … Read more

If there was one thing you could say about Twitter's 2012, it was that it wasn't boring. Over the course of the year, the service became bigger than ever, hosted major events like a Q&A with President Obama and another with Pope Benedict XVI, and became an essential tool for those looking for information about everything from Hurricane Sandy to the civil war in Syria.

But 2012 was also contentious for Twitter. The microblogging service put new restrictions on what it would allow third-party developers to do, and then had to deal with a rebellion by … Read more

A few weeks ago, Facebook introduced the ability to sync photos taken on your iPhones, iPads, and Android phones to your Facebook account automatically. Jason Cipriani describes how to enable the feature in "Getting started with Facebook photo sync on Android, iPhone."

Your smartphone or tablet might prompt you to activate the service, which uploads via Wi-Fi or the cell network the most recent 20 photos taken with the device and all subsequent photos it takes. As Jason explains, the photos are stored in a private folder and aren't posted to your Facebook Timeline until you post … Read more

If you snap tons of photos on your smartphone, you need a full-strength photo editor. With a price tag of $1.79, you would think Photoshop Effects-Photo Editor would do all the editing you need and more. Instead, this app offers some of the most common filters and limited cropping features instead of real Photoshop effects.

By cashing in on the name of the popular desktop photo editor, Photoshop Effects-Photo Editor makes you think you're paying for quality. Instead, you're getting a simple filtering app that adds effects that would have been cool 15 years ago. Now, they … Read more