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This has been a long time coming. Flickr now allows video uploads. They show up in your photostream alongside regular photos. They can even be played right in thumbnail mode and embedded on your own website, like this:

 Nicely done!

This week’s Photo Friday challenge is a grab bag called emotions. Emotions, especially the difficult ones, are difficult to capture on film because of their spontaneous nature. Sports photographers usually capture quite a few, but then they are trained on watching the “joy of victory… and the agony of defeat.” I sifted through some of my own photos, and most of the emotions captured came from happy or joyful moments. The few exceptions were usually contrived. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t experienced darker emotions… just that I’m less inclined to whip out my camera to preserve the moment.

So I went for the dogs… and a happy moment. This photo was snapped on our walk at Badlands Park above Laguna Beach, and the girls here (Maggie and Lucy) are two very happy bitches. We could all learn a lesson or two in contentment from our dogs.

Adobe Photoshop has long been recognized as the premier tool for image and graphics editing, but the cost was prohibitive for many people. Adobe first offered a slimmed-down version of Photoshop at a lower cost, but now you can use Photoshop for free! Zero. Zip. Nada. Nothing.

Adobe has introduced Photoshop Express, a free, web-based version of Photoshop. Photoshop Express is available now in beta form, and apart from the required Flash 9 plug-in (also free), you don’t need to install any software on your PC. This means Photoshop Express will run happily on your Mac, your Windows PC or even your Linux computer.

On top of that, Adobe is providing 2 GB of storage for your work, also free. So now you can edit images from pretty much anywhere with a PC and an Internet connection.

While graphic designers and image pros will still need the full desktop client, most people will find Photoshop Express more than meets their needs. Even pros will find it useful for those occasions when their own PC is not nearby.

And it’ll probably make law-abiding citizens out of a lot of would-be pirates.

This week’s Photo Friday theme is Found Objects.

Have a good weekend! In between family and fun, I’ll be diving into Joomla this weekend.

Animoto is a terrific service that creates video presentations combining photos and music with some great visual effects and very little effort on your part. The beauty of Animoto is that it works with the photos you probably have already uploaded. Animoto can retrieve your photos from Flickr, facebook, smugmug, Picasa or photobucket. You select the photos you want to use, including any special photos you would like to highlight in the video.

For music, you can upload your own or choose from a very nice selection in a variety of genres. For the video above, I chose one of the Indie Rock selections.

That’s about it! Animoto then creates your video automatically. When it’s done, you’ll have a code you can use to embed it on your own blog, or Animoto will automatically embed your video on facebook, myspace, blogger and several other sites. You can even automatically upload the video to YouTube, or download a Quicktime version to your computer.

All of this is free… as long as you’re happy to limit your videos to 30 seconds in length. Longer videos can be created at a cost of $3 each, or you can pay $30 for an annual subscription that let’s you create an unlimited number of “full-length” videos.

The results speak for themself. I was pleased, given the amount of effort that went into it (almost zero).  Check out Animoto.

It’s been a while since I’ve participated in a Photo Friday challenge. This week’s challenge was “The Good Life.” I was looking through some of my photos to see if I had something that captured the essence of the theme, and I’m happy to report that life is good! And while this might bend the “rules” of the challenge, I submit to you the following collage.

Here’s to the good life!

I recently ran across a couple of Flickr groups devoted to iPhone wallpapers, and decided to try my hand at it. The proper size for an iPhone wallpaper is 320×480, portrait orientation. And just for kicks, I used Flickr’s (relatively) new built-in editor to crop and resize the images. Click the images below for the full-size version, then right-click to download.

I’ve tagged my wallpapers, so to see them all, just click here.

If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you can download your fave wallpaper images to a folder, then simply sync that folder to your iPhone using iTunes. Pretty sweet, no?

I’m still trying to decide whether to jailbreak my iPhone or not. There is a very easy method if you’re running the 1.1.1 firmware, but I’ve already upgraded to 1.1.2. Should I downgrade to 1.1.1, just to jailbreak my iPhone?

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Tags: iPhone, wallpaper, photos, jailbreak

This week’s Photo Friday theme is Sunrise. This particular sunrise was captured in Laguna Niguel on my way to work during the recent brush fires in Southern California.

As you can see, I’m a sucker for sunrises.

I will admit, I like Flickr a lot. I like the convenience, the tagging and the social nature of the comments. My enthusiasm for Flickr has rubbed off on a number of you, too.

But one of the things that has always been frustrating was the inability to upload large numbers of photos in a batch. That changed a few months ago when Flickr introduced their new Flash-based upload page, but I still prefer Flickr Uploadr. This handy desktop application let’s you drag-and-drop as many photos as you like and send them all en masse. For anyone sharing large number of files, the Uploadr is invaluable.

The current version of the Flickr Uploadr 2.5 is great, but it’s not without limitations. It let’s you edit titles and descriptions, but only after uploading, which isn’t really the best situation.

Fortunately, the new Flickr Uploadr 3.0 beta fixes those limitations. Now you can upload in batches, and still edit titles, descriptions and most of the other editable fields associated with a photo — all before you upload.

The new Flickr Uploadr is available for both Windows and OSX. I downloaded the Windows version on my XP machine, and gave it a try. In my initial tests, everything worked flawlessly. It is beta software, so it’s likely to have some bugs still, but if you’re a Flickr fan, give it a try!

For a more detailed review, check out Christina Warren’s notes over at Download Squad.  

One other quick note for Flickr fans: be sure to check out BigHugeLabs Flickr DNA webapp. It’s fun!

This week’s Photo Friday challenge is busy.

And the shoe fits.