noisylime

Image optimization is an art that not many people master. There are many good image editing tools that allow us to get the best visual result for a certain file size but “under the hood” a lot more optimization can be done.

Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You’ll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.

Smush it comes in different flavours:

• You can upload a bunch of pictures in your browser
• You can provide us with a list of image urls or
• You can get a Firefox Extension to optimize the images found on any web page

Saving bytes has never been so easy - you point us in the right direction, and we’ll do the rest for you. A ZIP archive with optimized images will be generated for you.

visit Smush it

Ajaxorized proudly presents… the Image Transition Manager. The Image Transition Manager is a javascript library based on scriptaculous and prototype. It supports several image transitions, such as fading, appearing, sliding, growing and shrinking and more to come.

While working on a project for a customer, I needed to create a kind of slideshow-like effect for presenting several photos of products. When I started out making this ‘effect’, I found out that I could use this for much more other projects than just this single one. That is what triggered me to create a nice class out of it, so I could easily implement it into my other projects. After showing my first version to Willem, he did some of his magic and extended my class with some other nifty image transitions and functionalities. That is how our Image Transition Manager was born.

The advantage of our library is the way in which you can implement it in your own projects.

[from ajaxorized]

A new project from Flickr will see the photo sharing site showcasing historical imagery from public resources.

“The Commons” is a pilot project between Flickr and the Library of Congress that will tap into the Library’s rich historical footage and allow it to be viewed from Flickr. The first two sets in the pilot are American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression, color photographs of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection include scenes of rural and small-town life, migrant labor, and the effects of the Great Depression and The George Grantham Bain Collection, “Photos produced and gathered by George Grantham Bain for his news photo service, including portraits and worldwide news events, but with special emphasis on life in New York City.

Flickr said that as well as bringing these historical photographs to the masses, the project will also “facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search,” in other words, they want to tap into Flickr users to tag these images.

The Library of Congress has more here.

[via TechCrunch]

When I heard that Flickr was making announcements this evening, I assumed it was the long awaited integration of video into the service. That isn’t happening (it will soon, though), but they are making significant upgrades soon around geotagging and a new area of the site will launch called “Places Pages.”

GeoTagging Updates

a year ago - to date 29 million public photos have been geotagged, with 150,000 new ones coming in each day. They aren’t making any changes to the way photos are geotagged (using Yahoo maps), but they are updating the results pages for searches.

The existing pages don’t show large numbers of geotagged photos effectively; the new pages will do a better job by placing actual tags from photos on a world map. Users can quickly find photos based on tags and geotagged information. Enhancements to navigation are also being introduced.

Overall, the enhancements are good, but the real win here comes when devices auto tag photos via GPS devices. Until then, most users can’t be bothered with taking the time to add the appropriate meta data.

Flickr is giving a preview of the new features at Web 2.0 and will launch them in a few weeks.

Places Pages

Now this is more interesting. Flickr is announcing “Places Pages,” which are dedicated pages that provide users with specific information about places. We’ve uploaded an overview PDF to Scribd, here.

Pages will be built around the Flickr concept of “interestingness,” but based on places and tags. So China/bicycle shows popular photos of bicycles taken in China. Paris/architecture is another example. Any of 70,000 places can be viewed, optionally followed by any tag. Flickr is also adding in additional information on the place, such as weather and local time, as well as relevant Flickr groups.

The product will get better over time, too. Eventually users will be able to adjust pages by time or season, so pictures from New York in the Fall can be viewed, for example. Or pictures from a specific event that happened in a city.

Flickr now has over 1 billion photos and 37.7 million unique monthly visitors. 2.5 million news photos are uploaded daily by 15 million registered users. I wonder if founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield ever wish they hadn’t sold out to Yahoo so quickly, for just a rumored $30 million or so in 2005…

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

[via TechCrunch]

nice resource for icons…

[via del.icio.us/webdesign]

I have seen most of these in the past but there are some new image sources listed here… enjoy. 

[via del.icio.us/webdesign]

Mark Frauenfelder: DeskLickr is a neat Mac screensaver that grabs images from Flickr, "giving you all the options to grab photos from your profile, tag searches or even the DeskLickr group filled with hand selected Desktop goodness!" Link

[via Boing Boing]

A few weeks ago we published a list of 34 places to get design inspiration online and off and it proved to be one of our most popular articles to date. So today we journey back out to the world of design inspiration to bring you many, many more places to get inspiration - 60 to be precise.

I have literally been combing the web and have unearthed so many great sites and places that I’d never seen. From advertising to architecture, graphics to web, art to design, there’s a bit of everything. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed finding them and that they inspire some of the great works of tomorrow!

[via del.icio.us/webdesign]

It’s that time again folks. I have been itching to make some more Photoshop brushes, so here’s a set to digest. I took a trip to the store, got a bouquet of flowers with a nice variety (I can’t grow flowers to save my life), whipped out my Nikon D-80, and went to town + […]

[via BittBox]

Here is a great resource for icons… search and you shall find.

[via del.icio.us/webdesign]