After months and months of promises and hard work, we’ve finally rolled out the new site. The decision really came after the last few days of problems, so we had no choice but to release it to reduce some of the problems that user’s have been experiencing.

Hopefully you should like the slightly new look and the loads of new features.

Some of the most notable are:

1. An easier and more user friendly UI weather editing pictures, creating collages or animations.
2. The new effects and adjustments. (Twist, Fish Eye, Border Shapes, etc.)
3. Several new collages.
4. The addition of Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums and Box.NET to our list of “Connect” services.
5. Our “Upload By Email” service which is another tool that users can use to upload pictures when “on the go” directly from mobile phones (including the iPhone), iPod Touch or even from your favorite E-Mail client on your desktop computer.

The list of new features is really long, so we’ll post more about all of them in the coming days so stay tuned!

After months of hard work, we finally released the first version of our web application for Apple’s two coolest devices, the iPhone & iPod Touch!

Now you can edit or collage your pictures right from the palm of your hand!

It should run smoothly on the latest versions of the Safari Browser running on your device, but if you come across any problems, please let us know, we’ll try to have them fixed as soon as possible.

Here are the most notable features packed into this little application:

Upload - Easily upload your pictures using our brand new "Upload By Email" service or use one of the many upload tools available on our website.
Edit - Edit your pictures using 24 of our most popular effects. (Black & White, Sketch, Painting, Contrast, Hue, Sepia, and much more)
Collage - Choose from (and fully customize) over 200 different collage styles and layouts!
Explore - Browse other people’s profiles and their galleries to see what they did, post comments, ask questions, and more.

We still have Animations to come, so you can stay tuned for that!

To take it for a spin, just go to http://www.picture2life.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch device.

Or, you can check out our Application page on Apple’s website:
http://www.apple.com/webapps/utilities/picture2life.html

Let us know what you think!

This is another mashup showing how to edit 15 pictures from Flickr “on-the-fly” and make them display one after the other on an Image Fader. You can check the full mashup application here.

Popfly is the fun and easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, and Web pages. It’s made up of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups and a social network where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

This is such a great platform and we thought it would be a great idea to create a “block” on Popfly, to give other users the ability to edit pictures “on-the-fly” via our API (Application Programmable Interface). This kind of functionality really shows the power of our service as well as how we are different from all the other online photo editors out there. Its simply amazing the kinds of mashups that can be created!

Below is a screenshot of the settings for our Block which is found under the heading “Images and Video”:

As you can see, our edit operation takes two inputs, namely url (which is the internet URL of the image that you would like to edit) and filters (which are the transformations you would like to make to the picture. By default we make the picture black & white and add a little contrast).

Below is an explanation of some of the other filters that you can use to transform your pictures on Popfly.

Black & White
This is the filter used in the example I provided and it would make the picture as you can imagine black & white.

grayscale:;

Sepia Tone
Applies a sepia tone to the picture, this filter takes no parameters.

sepia:;

Invert Colors
Inverts the colors in the picture, this filter takes no parameters.

invert:;

Adjust Contrast
Adjusts the contrast level of the picture, the max level is 100, the min level is -100

contrast:level(15);

Adjust Brightness
Adjusts the brightness level of the picture, the max level is 255, the min level is -255

brightness:level(50);

Emboss
Embosses the picture, grayscale parameter is boolean

emboss:grayscale(true);

Adjust Hue
Adjusts the hue degree of the picture, the min degree is 0, the max is 180

hue:degree(20);

Color Picture
Adjusts the colors in the picture, max values for each parameter is 255, min values are -255

color:red(90) blue(20) green(10);

Rotate Picture
Rotates the picture between 0-360 degrees, keepsize parameter is boolean and determines whether to keep the original picture size during the rotate or not. The backbrush parameter allows you to set the background color (currently white)

rotate:angle(45) keepsize(false) backbrush(solid(#ffffff));

Resize Picture
Resize the picture to a specific width and height

resize:width(300px) height(400px);

Resize the longest side of the picture to a particular length

resize:longestside(400px);

Resize the shortest side of the picture to a particular length

resize:shortestside(400px);

Resizes the width (only) of the picture to a particular length

resize:width(200px);

Resizes the height (only) of the picture to a particular length

resize:height(200px);

Drop Shadow
Add a SOFT drop shadow to the bottom RIGHT of the picture

shadow:color(#000000[75%]) backbrush(solid(#ffffff)) softness(4) distance(0px) imagex(0%) imagey(0%) ;

Add a SOFT drop shadow to the bottom LEFT of the picture

shadow:color(#000000[75%]) backbrush(solid(#ffffff)) softness(4) distance(0px) imagex(100%) imagey(0%) ;

Add a HARD drop shadow to the bottom RIGHT of the picture

shadow:color(#000000[75%]) backbrush(solid(#ffffff)) softness(0) distance(4px) imagex(0%) imagey(0%) ;

Add a HARD drop shadow to the bottom LEFT of the picture

shadow:color(#000000[75%]) backbrush(solid(#ffffff)) softness(0) distance(4px) imagex(100%) imagey(0%) ;

Opacity
Makes the picture opaque or semi-transparent based upon the level (max 100%) and the background (currently white)

opacity:level(75%) backbrush(solid(#ffffff));

Sobel (Sketch)
Applies a sobel sketch of the picture, grayscale parameter is boolean

sobel:grayscale(true);

Kuwahara (Painting)
Makes the picture look like a kuwahara painting, min block value is 1, max block value is 10

kuwahara:block(3);

How to use the filters on the Block?

You can combine any of the filters listed above to perform a transformation to the picture that you specified in the “url” field of the block. For example, if you wanted to apply a sepia tone and then a 60 degree rotation to the picture, the “filters” value on the block would be:

sepia:; rotate:angle(60) keepsize(false) backbrush(solid(#ff0000));

That’s about all the basic information you need to get started using our block, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to let us know via our contact page here.

In the last update, we’ve made some major changes to our previous selection tool. The next time you either go to perform a crop, add text or a caption, blur or pixelate the picture, you will notice the new selection tool (UI). We used the Javascript Image Cropper UI, using Prototype & script.aculo.us over at www.defusion.org.uk. Many thanks to the folks over there for providing such a fantastic tool! It just works perfect and exactly how we wanted it to.

Below is a screen shot of our implementation during an image crop:

To try it for yourself, next time you go to edit a picture, try using the Crop, Caption, Gaussian Blur or Pixelate tools.

Enjoy!

We are currently looking for people to help us translate our site into your language, and what better place to start looking than here - our members!

Here are  the languages that we are really interested in so far are:

1. Deutsch
2. Español
3. Français
4. Italiano
5. Português
6. Chinese
7. Japanese

If you speak a language that’s not on the list above and would like it made available, just let us know, all languages are welcome since we really want this to be a service that the entire world can use

If you are interested in helping us, or know someone that can help us, click here to let us know. (be sure to leave your email address and state the language(s) you know)

We’ve successfully moved over to our new server which is 100x times faster than before (really, its 100x faster).

Within the following weeks, we’ll also be rolling out some brand new features that will make using the site a whole lot easier as well as more one click samples, collages and for the first time, animation templates.

It’s really amazing to see how much the site has grown these last few months. Keep it coming!

Here is a cool video I found with some tips & tricks on how to get around some of the frequently asked questions about digital cameras.

Check it out below!

VideoJug: Digital Camera Tips And Tricks

Now you can browse and see some of the other people who use this site. Remember to set your privacy settings if you want to keep your account private. This feature allows share some of the cool stuff you’ve done to your pictures with other users.

Get started now!

Note: People can only see you or your pictures if you have them set to public.