Description: Flickvision is a web site that displays pictures being uploaded to Flickr and the location they are being uploaded from on a map of the world in real time.

It’s been just over a week since I wrote about Fotoree, a recommendation engine that makes it easy to find images you like on Flickr, and I thought I would follow that posting up with this one. Flickvision is a very simple concept: a map of the world is displayed on-which tooltips appear showing images that were just uploaded to Flickr and pointing to the geographic location on the map that this event took place. Each photo is displayed for about 3 seconds before moving to the next one, and if you click on the name of the Flickr user and you will be taken to that person’s page on Flickr (where you can also see/download the image).

There are two versions of Flickrvision; a 3D rotating globe or a “classic” view that uses a 2D Google maps style representation of the world. You can view the 3D globe fullscreen as well as rotate it and or zoom in and out, which is very cool, but believe it or not I kind of prefer the 2D version.

There isn’t really any practical use to this aside from the mere voyeristic pleasure of observing the pictures that random people from all over the world are taking and uploading, but I found that interesting enough in itself to want to mention it here. Check it out for yourself.

[Via DownloadSquad].
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Description: Photoree is a web-based recommendation engine for images. It can learn what kind of images that the user likes by serving images and asking for a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down or no rating, and can use this information to point the user to images/photographs that it thinks he/she will like. It is based on a database of more than 1 million indexed images.

Do you enjoy good photography? Maybe you frequently find yourself downloading images or wallpaper backgrounds because of their artistic merit? If so then you probably visit Flickr and you probably are aware of the fantastic photography that can be found there. The only problem is that it can be quite time consuming to surf Flickr or sites like it in order to find the best stuff, and this is where Photoree, a recommendation engine for images and photographs, can be very useful. To quote the site: “Photoree is to Photos what Last.FM is to music and StumbleUpon to websites”. Here are more notes on this web service:

• The image database: the site states that Photoree has a database of more than 1 million images. All the images seem to share 2 characteristics (a) they all originate from Flickr, and (b) they are all under the Creative Commons license. Oh, and (c) they are mostly very good. All images are linked to their page on Flickr, where you can find out more information if you need to.
• Rating: Photoree will serve images to you based on what it learned from your previous ratings. Images which you “thumbs up” will be saved in your favorites. Curiously, once you rate an image up or down Photoree will let you skip rating a couple of images but will force you to make a judgment call after that, which feels weird at times but certainly makes the process more efficient.
• Your favorites: you can view these as pages of thumbnails in a grid, and can either share them with everyone, with people who have registered with Photoree only, with your contacts only, or just yourself. Note that you can add people as contacts very easily and at will.
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Description: Noiseware CE (Community Edition) is a free program that can remove or greatly reduce noise from digital images while keeping the details. It is different from most image processing software that employ simple methods such as median filters in that it employs a sophisticated yet fast algorithm that uses the “adaptive noise profile capability” and sharpening function to deliver excellent and quick results.

Image noise is a kind of grainy look/degradation that can be found on images which significantly reduces their quality, and is often the result of under-exposure (i.e. not enough light) when the image is taken. The good news is: NoisewareCE can deal with this problem extremely well.

There has been a proliferation of programs that manipulate, fix, sharpen, focus, and perform many other such optimizations and enhancements to images, so much so that when I come across image-fixing programs these days I largely gloss over them unless they have something that stands out. I am not an expert on image filters and this is somewhat unfamiliar territory, but what drew me to this program was (a) the promise of a sophisticated filtering technology that is apart from what you usually get with most programs, and (b) the image gallery of results displayed on the developer’s website (see here, and here; click on the before and after tags under each picture for a comparison). Also see a couple of before-and-afters that I made myself.

More info on this program:

• How to use: simply load your image and process. Typically the only decision you will need to make is to choose a pre-defined filter from the filters list. Once processed you can save the resulting image, by default it will save under the same name and append “_filtered” to the name.
• Filter pre-sets: include default, landscape, night scene, portrait, film grain effect, and a handful of others. If you do not feel like messing with these, go with the default filter. (Note: the paid version offers the ability to tweak and save custom filters).
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Description: “Sendto Flickr” is a free Windows explorer extension that allows you to upload images to Flickr through the right-click “send-to” menu.

If you’re a Flickr user you might already know that there are a number of desktop-based programs that can be used to upload photos to the photo sharing site; “Sendto Flickr” is another uploading option which, as the name implies, allows you to upload straight from the Windows “send-to” context menu. More notes on this one:

• Upload from anywhere: including network drives, removable drives, flash cards, memory cards, etc.
• Batch uploading: simply select multiple images and right click to upload. Files will be uploaded sequentially and previewed as they are uploaded.
• No image or metadata editing: unlike some of the other Flickr uploaders that do this, this one is just about 1-click uploading; you do not need to enter photo details.
• Authorization: will require that you authorize it to use the Flickr API to access your account. Will take you through the steps after installation. You will not need to enter account details every time you upload.

Wish list (or how this program can be even better)
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Description: ComicRack is a free comic ebook reader for CBZ, ZIP, CBR, RAR, TAR and PDF formats. It is designed as a full-feature reader with bells and whistles as well as being a manager for your library of comic ebooks and metadata. It can also convert ebooks to other ebook formats.

If you don’t know what they are, comic-book format ebooks are typically images files that are compressed into archives and displayed in a reader according to the naming sequence of the individual images (more info on comic book formats here). Comic readers are usually geared towards displaying pages/images full screen, rotating and scrolling them for the best reading experience.

ComicRack is a worthy replacement for CDisplay, the standard bearer for comic book readers (which is also free). It goes a couple of steps further in that it is not just a display engine but includes the functionality to manage your ebook collection. Here are most notes on this program:

• Bells and whistles: there are many of these, including multiple display modes (rotate, 2-page views, etc), scroll mode, information overlays, color adjustment, automatic background matching, a magnifier tool, etc.
• The user interface: is generally nice and highly customizable, but may have just too many options and tweaks to be user friendly. Supports a tabbed, explorer-style file browser that can be placed on the left, right, or bottom of the screen (or in its own window). The type of view within the browser can be customized as well in a way reminiscent of Windows’ folder views. You can even save your workspace once you arrive at a customized layout/view combo that you like or create and save multiple workspaces. See the tips and tricks page for more info.
• PDF support: supports PDF eComics (which is to say PDFs that contain images only). However ComicRack also has the ability to read any PDF provided that you install the latest version of Ghostscript as well.
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Description: PicLens is a free browser extension for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari that interacts with a number of the most popular image sharing sites to provide a seamless, full-screen "immersive slideshow" experience. Sites supported include Google Images, Yahoo Images, Facebook, Friendster, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. It is also possible to embed PicLens immersive slideshows within your own site or blog.

This program is a little bit hard to describe: imagine that you’re browsing, say, Flickr, and that you are looking at a page full of thumbnails. Normally what you would do is click on the thumbnail and view the image, go back to the page with the thumbnail and click on the next image and so on. What PicLens offers is an alternate way of viewing the images that literally "takes over" and overlays itself on top of your browser window; your images will be displayed full screen and all thumbnails presented in a horizontal sequence that is quickly browsable on the bottom of the screen.

• How it works: whenever you are surfing on a site that supports PicLens, a little distinct arrow will appear on the image thumbnail when you mouse over it which signals that the images are browsable with PicLens. Clicking on the arrow will activate the PicLens image browser, while clicking on the thumbnail anywhere around it will open/display the image as normal. (See second screenshot).
• Browsing with PicLens: you can use the mouse or arrow keys to scroll through the images, as well as the navigation arrows to move/jump back and forth.
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Description: Thumbview is an open source program introduces thumbnail support (in Windows’ thumbnail folder view mode) to 19 image types that are not natively supported in Windows, including PNG, PSD and TIFF. It also adds informational tooltips for image file formats that are displayed when images are hovered over by the mouse.

Ever wondered why some image files display a preview thumbnail in explorer (when using ’thumbnail’ view) while others don’t? The reason quite simply is that Windows by default includes thumbnail support for only a handful of image files (e.g. JPG, GIF, BMP and a few others). What Thumbview does is add another 19 image types to this: CUT, DCX, DDS, MDL, MNG, PCD, PCX, PIC, PIX, PNG, PNM/PBM/PGM/PPM, PSD/PDD, PSP, PXR, SGI/RGB, TGA/VDA/ICB/VST, TIF/TIFF, WAL and XPM.

The screenshot above illustrates this; the folder on the left shows a folder in “thumbnail view” under Windows XP that contains 3 image files; the thumbnails for JPG images are showing while the PSD image is not. Once Thumbview is installed, however, thumbnail support is introduced for PSD (as well as numerous other image types not illustrated in the screenshot). Tooltips are now also available whenever you hover over any image with the mouse, which in itself is a very handy feature that can be very useful to have.
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Description: Group Shot is a free program that can automatically create a single ’perfect’ image from multiple image sources. It does this by merging the ’good’ parts from other images (typically shots of groups of people) into a final, perfect composite image.

Did you notice that whenever you’re taking pictures of people in a group that there’s always at least one person who’s squinting, frowning, or looking away even when you’ve finally managed to get all the other people in the picture flash perfect smiles?

Group Shot from Microsoft Research can take a number of pictures and semi-automatically merge the good parts to construct a perfect output image. If this is sounding a little bit strange, or if it sounds like it might involve a lot of work/tweaking — I have some news for you: it works like magic; a few clicks will automagically deliver perfect group shots that never existed in reality (its almost disconcerting).
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Description: "Ebook to Images" converts ebooks in most formats (.txt, .html, .htm, .lit, .pdf) to images that are custom formatted for reading on a mobile device. The idea is that while most portable devices such as MP3 players will not allow you to upload and view ebooks, many of them allow for image viewing on their screens. Hence "ebook to images" will convert the text from ebooks into images suitable for viewing on your particular portable device.

This program doesn’t print documents into images in the manner of a virtual printer (such as PDF Creator or SWF Printer Pro). Rather, it will extract the text from an ebook and reformat it as per your settings. You can tweak all aspects of the output images, including their size (resolution), the font used, font size, orientation (e.g. flip by 90°, 270°), text color, background colors, anti-aliasing and a number of other settings. You can add also a background image if you like as well as page numbering, and you can set the number of output folders to distribute the resulting images to (useful if you would like to upload separate chunks of the ebook at a time).
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Rating: 4.5

Version tested: 2.0

Description: Jpeg Express allows you to adjust the compression/quality ratio of a JPG or BMP image file while simultaneously previewing the picture quality and file size, enabling the user to achieve the best compromise between picture quality and file size.

Imagine that you’re working with large JPGs/BMPs that you want to scale down to a manageable size. The typical, quickest and easiest way to do this would be to save these images at a reduced quality setting, which will invariably make them smaller but will also adversely affect the way the images look. Most of the time little 10%-20% reductions in JPG quality will decrease the file size significantly, and although in most cases the differences in the visuals is barely noticeable to the naked eye, you mostly cannot really make these decisions to reduce the picture quality without having an idea on how the resulting image will look in comparison to the original.

Jpeg Express is a program that is designed to quickly manipulate image quality through a slider and enable the user to (a) preview the resulting/desired file size, as well as the (b) see the difference this intervention makes, if any, with both the before and after versions of the image displayed side by side. Here are some notes on this program:
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