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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]

Photophlow is a rich interactive communication device around Flickr, created by Neil Berkman and striatic.

Photophlow allows you to add Flickr streams to its chat rooms, so you can discuss away. It also integrates with Twitter.

A view source shows both Prototype and Dojo under the hood, and the UI itself is quite rich. Comet is used for pushing the data to the client, and although many people assume it’s Flash (Flash is used for network communication and sound if available) it is Open Web all the way.

In fact, fellow Ajaxian Michael Mahemoff actually helped build an early prototype of the app.

[via Ajaxian]

Fotoflexer may be my personal favorite among the many online photo editing tools, but Flickr has chosen Seattle-based Picnik (profile) to handle the long requested photo editing feature for Flickr users.

Currently, you can rotate photos on Flickr, but the editing stops there. When the new tools launch, users will be able to edit photos more extensively using the Picnik Flash based tools (see our review here).

The deal has been signed and implementation will occur sometime in the next few months, Flickr told me yesterday. Flickr users will have an edit button on their photo pages. Clicking on it will import the image into Picnik for editing; when finished, it can be sent back to Flickr.

Basically, the integration is not much different than most of Picnik’s competitors who use Flickr’s API. But the crucial difference is that the edit feature will be highlighted on Flickr itself, pushing Flickr’s 15 million registered users towards Picnik.

CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

[via TechCrunch]

I am pretty excited about this one. We have long been able to use a JavaScript API to do read only work on GData feeds from Google. That is all well and good, but sometimes you want to be able to access feeds that require authentication, or be able to write and update data in feeds.

Well, now you can. The GData team has released a GData JavaScript Client Library. The first service available is Google Calendar, and we can hope for more to come.

This cross-domain, secure, access seems similar to Subspace, but it is actually live right now. Having a service such as Google Calendar using this is a great step forward, as you know it has been through a thorough security review.

Authentication happens via AuthSub, and you end up using new APIs such as:

When google.accounts.user.login(..) occurs, it will send you to Google to authenticate. A best practice is to provide a login button or other user input mechanism to prompt the user to start the login process manually. If, instead, you call google.accounts.user.login() immediately after loading, without waiting for user interaction, then the first thing the user sees on arrival at your page is a Google login page. If the user decides not to log in, then Google does not direct them back to your page; so from the user's point of view, they tried to visit your page but were sent away and never sent back. This scenario may be confusing and frustrating to users. Note that the example code above does call google.accounts.user.login() immediately after loading, to keep the example simple, but we don't recommend this approach for real-world client applications.

I am excited about this, as it means that you can write a rich Ajax client that doesn't need server-side proxies to do these things, which traditional was the only solution. Now the server-less model can grow even more.

I got to sit down with Jun Yang, who worked on this code, and got his take:

[via Ajaxian]

Firefox plugin PicLens from Cooliris provides full screen immersive picture browsing of Flickr and other web sites that support Media RSS.

To use PicLens, a user clicks a small translucent icon that appears atop the image of interest once the plugin is installed. The PicLens slideshow interface appears and the user can move from one photo to the next or press play and enjoy the show. A user can intuitively browse images within search results, photo albums, and Media RSS enabled websites.

Support is currently provided for Flickr, Facebook, Friendster, Picasa Web Album and image search results from Google and Yahoo. Site owners can add support to any site with photos by including Media RSS support.

The best way to describe PicLens is that it’s a like the slideshow feature in Picasa or a similar photo viewing tool, but applied to web pages. The full screen rendering does require a decent internet speed when displaying large photographs, but visually the results are stunning. This Firefox plugin is going to find a lot of fans very, very quickly.

(thanks to Ouriel Ohayon for the tip)

[via TechCrunch]

Freerange Stock has announced a major new initiative - revenue sharing through Google Adsense for contributing photographers. Photographers can now make money giving away their photos. Freerange is a free stock photo agency that is supported through sitewide Google Adsense ads. Now, contributing photographers can keep 80% of all the ad revenue generated by their submissions.

[via The Photoshop Blog]

Photos are everywhere on the web. From sharing with friends, to editing, printing, buying, selling, searching, remixing and free hosting, we’ve lined up a plethora of resources for photo fiends.

[via del.icio.us/popular]

Many popular image-editing tools allow you to determine the average color of a small section of an image, but we couldn't find any that could calculate the average color of an entire photograph. Enter, the Average Color Tool.

[via del.icio.us/webdesign]

Fotowoosh, a new service from Maryland-based startup Freewebs, will turn any image (preferably an outdoor image) into a 3D model. They went live on Friday.

The 3D image is constructed in Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) format, meaning you currently need a VRML reader to see it (future browsers will likely build this functionality in). In a week or so, the company say, users will be able to upload a picture and have a 3D animated image returned to them in a Flash widget that can be embedded on any website.

When you upload an image to Fotowoosh, their software tears it apart and distinguishes the sky, ground and vertical elements within the photo, then cuts and folds it into a 3D model:

Our system automatically constructs simple “pop-up” 3D models, like those one would find in a children’s book, out of a single outdoor image. The system labels each region of an outdoor image as ground, vertical, or sky. Line segments fitted to the ground-vertical boundary in the image and an estime of the horizon’s position provide the necessary information to determine where to “cut” and “fold” in the image. The model is then popped up, and the image is texture mapped onto the model.

The images below were processed by FotoSwoosh. The 3D results are immediately below the 2D images.

This is the creation of Derek Hoiem, a PhD candidate in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, who’s now working with the company. Additional information on the intellectual property behind Fotowoosh is here and here (these links auto-download a pdf and a powerpoint document).

Microsoft is working on something related to this in their Live Labs group called Photosynth (more information here). The product will construct a 3D model based on lots of photos of the same thing or general area from different angles.

Freewebs raised $11 million in venture capital in August 2006 from Columbia Capital and Novak Biddle. The company’s main product is a website building tool that draws 18 million or so visitors per month. Shervin Pishevar, the company’s president, say that Fotowoosh will be a standalone service, and they’ll also integrate it with offerings from partners as well as the Freewebs service itself.

[via TechCrunch]

Jobo rolled out its photoGPS today, sitting up top your camera as if it were a flash unit, but it's oh so different: It geo-tags your location and saves that so you'll know right where you were when you snapped that pic. The cool thing about this is that it works with any camera with a hot shoe.

The location data is all added into the photo's file after upload to the computer using the included software. It also adds more than just latitude and longitude hieroglyphics to the image; it actually adds the place names.

This should help bring geotagging to the masses. Retail pricing is set at $149. – Curtis Joe Walker and Charlie White

Product Page [Jobo]

[via Gizmodo]