Items tagged with photos
A little over a year ago, we talked about NVIDIA and its AI processing technology that was working to create realistic-looking human faces from a few source photos. The images that the AI created were so photorealistic that you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the AI generated faces and real human faces in photos. The technology has come so far in the last four years that the difference is now even more astonishing, and frankly a little creepy. The image above (b) shows the faces that a similar AI was able to generate in 2014, while the photo below this paragraph shows the faces the AI can create today. The AI-rendered faces are so good that if you weren't told...
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First Year In Google Photos Chronicles 200 Million Users, 13.7 Petabytes Of Pics, 24 Billion Selfies
One thing that hasn't changed in recent times is that life's precious memories are still preserved in photos and videos. However, it's the media that's different now—instead of actual photographs stored in physical photo albums, it's now common to archive memorable moments in digital form. The widespread adoption of Google Photos underscores that transition. It's been a year since Google introduced its Photos service, and in that short period of time it's amassed some 200 million monthly active users. Collectively all those users have uploaded a whopping 13.7 petabytes of digital data. To put that number if perspective, if you were to try and swipe through every photo, it would take you 424 years,...
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An update to OS X today brings with it Apple’s new Photos app, which is meant to give users better tools for accessing and sorting their photos. Photos is also more integrated with iCloud, which is good news if you’ve been meaning to get your photos off your vulnerable hard drive and into the cloud. If your 5GB of free iCloud space is already nearly tapped, however, you may soon be exploring Apple’s paid storage expansion options. Image credit: AppleThe Photos app is free, of course. It replaces Aperture and iPhoto and is similar in design to the Photos app for iOS. But it has many more features than you’ll find on the iPhone’s version, including better tools for color correction and a cropping...
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Just in case there's a shred of doubt, posting sexually explicit photos or videos of your ex-lover without his or her permission is not okay. The practice, known as revenge porn, is a cowardly way of seeking vengeance for whatever wrong an ex is perceived to have made. And not only is revenge porn in poor taste, it's also becoming increasingly illegal as new laws aim to crack down the behavior.One of them landed Kevin Bollaert, a former revenge porn website owner, an 18-year prison sentence. According to the Pittsburg Post Gazette, the 28-year-old allowed over 10,000 nude and sexually explicit photos to be posted to his now defunct website, UGotPosted.com. He encouraged scorned exes to post such...
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One of the best reasons to use Facebook is to keep up to date with family and friends that live in different time zones. Sure, we've all posted goofy status updates and pictures of our lunch, but at its best, Facebook is a vehicle for virtually taking part in the lives of loves ones, especially when photos are involved. Building on that theme, Facebook is rolling out a customizable scrapbook feature that will make it easier to organize and share photos. "Our team ran a small survey for parents who share pictures of their children on Facebook and found that 65 percent of them tag their partner in these photos to share them with their partner’s friends. These same parents also told us they want...
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Have you ever sat down and thought to yourself, "Self, what the Internet really needs are more animated GIFs!" Probably not, but brace yourself for a deluge of GIFs in the coming months anyway as YouTube rolls out a new feature that will make it easy to create them from videos that have been uploaded to the service.We're not being curmudgeons here, we just know what's around the bend, and that's a lot more GIFs. Hopefully this will result in some hilarious captures, and if you're planning to participate but need video fodder, be sure to check out HotHardware's YouTube channel.The feature is currently being tested on PBS Idea Channel's YouTube page, and the way it works is rather easy. If you...
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It's no guarantee that today's fads won't fizzle out tomorrow, especially in the rapidly evolving mobile space. That being the case, Snapchat took a monumental gamble by turning down two lucrative buyout offers by Facebook, one for $1 billion and a second one for $3 billion. Time will tell if those were wise decisions, but in the meantime, Snapchat's development team continues to find ways to keep its users engaged, most recently by adding geofilters. "We’ve had a lot of fun drawing up new filters for special locations in Los Angeles and New York. Swipe right on the preview screen to check them out – they’ll change depending on which neighborhoods you’re in! Although you’ll...
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If you have a teenage son or daughter, you've probably spotted them making weird and contorted faces at their smartphone's front-facing camera. They're using Snapchat, a wildly popular photo and video sharing application in which users can send each other snapshots or short recordings that are viewable for anywhere from 1 second to up to 10 seconds (the recipient can always save a screenshot, though the app tattles on them if they do). It's a simple, free app available on iOS and Android that's quickly approaching a $1 billion valuation. To keep things fresh, and to keep that value up there, the Snapchat team just issued an update that adds a "Stories" feature, which is sort of like having a...
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Facebook isn't about to let its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram go to waste. Continued innovation is the secret to both remaining relevant in an increasingly crowded field of apps that offer filters for photos and videos, and to seeing a return on such a hefty investment. Towards that end, the Instagram team just unveiled web embedding for photos and videos. "Now, when you visit an Instagram photo or video page on your desktop web browser, you’ll see a new share button on the right side of your photo (just under the comments button). Click the button to see the embed code. Copy the block of text it gives you and paste it into your blog, website or article. When you hit publish, the...
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Instagram addicts can now get their fix of filtered photos even when their mobile phone batteries run out of juice. How so? The Facebook-owned service announced that you can now browse your Instagram feed on the web from your desktop or laptop, just like you do on your mobile device. All you have to do is head to Instagram's website and log into your account. "We believe that you should be able to access Instagram on a variety of different devices, any of which may be convenient to you at a given moment – including your desktop computer or tablet," Instagram stated in a blog post. "We do not offer the ability to upload from the web as Instagram is about producing photos on the go, in the...
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Being an investigative journalist isn't always easy. So, when a semi-illicit snapshot of a steamy dressing room scene in a French ski shop started making its way through cyberspace, we knew he had to, uh, take a closer look. For journalism, of course. And what exactly did we find upon a closer examination? We found that this particular ski shop has a sense of humor. Not only was the dressing room scene staged, but there are several funny scenes to be found as you virtually browse the store through Google Maps. Here's a look at the pic that grabbed our attention. We have no idea how far the naughty dressing room inhabitants went to make this scene look authenticate, but we do know they weren't...
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Here’s a name that’ll bring back memories (particularly memories of waving photos ‘til your hands hurt): Polaroid. The company is fighting its way back into the market with the just-announced Polaroid Fotobar, which is a retail location that lets you print the photos stored on your phone. It sounds as though Polaroid is following in the footsteps of the Apple Store with a focus on customer experience. According to Polaroid, the world is shooting 1.5 billion pictures every day. Nope, this isn't an Apple Store. It's a Polaroid Fotobar. Image credit: Polaroid Polaroid, which will have more details on the Fotobar at CES next week, describes the experience of printing your photos...
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Hasselblad has been catering to photographers for over five decades and specializes in medium format cameras, which are priced accordingly. In case you didn't know, the typical medium format camera can cost as much as a Kia, or more, so the fact that Hasselblad is running a promotion where a number of models are discounted by up to 22.9 percent (let's just call it 23 percent, shall we?), well, that's a pretty big deal. Make no mistake, these cameras are still expensive even after the price cuts, and if you're a bargain shopper, there's nothing to see here. But for those who are interested in Hasselblad's cameras, now is the time to pounce. A sample of models that have been reduced include: Model...
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Samsung's ST80 digital camera might be just the cure for social networking nuts who get the shakes when unplugging from cyberspace for too long. That's because the ST80 is Samsung's latest in a line of Wi-Fi enabled point-and-shoots, meaning Little Miss Molly MySpace and Freddy Facebook can fling those Kodak Samsung moments online from any hotspot instead of having to rush home to fire up their PC. "We want to let people share their favorite pictures quickly while they’re on the move, and the ST80 does just that," said Sangjin Park, President of the Digital Imaging Business, Samsung Electronics. "Connectivity is everywhere, and at Samsung we are committed to bringing these wireless capabilities...
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You can add another product to this growing list of media devices that play content on your TV: the Asus O!Play HDP-R1 digital media player. The O!Play is a relatively small (1.9x7.1x4.9-inches), unassuming black box with rounded corners. It doesn’t have any onboard storage, but is designed to connect with media stored on attached drives or over a 100Mbps Ethernet connection. The left side of the unit has a USB 2.0 port, a combo eSATA/USB 2.0 port, and a reset button. The back of the unit houses the device’s output ports, which include analog stereo audio, composite video, digital audio (optical S/PDIF), HDMI, and a 100Mbps Ethernet port--the HDMI port supports up to 1080p 60Hz. Click the link...
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Perhaps one the more significant defining digital attributes of the first decade of the the 21st Century could be the size of the ginormous digital media collections so many of us have amassed--media collections made of up a disparate assortment of video, photos, and audio files from a wide variety of sources. The advent of digital cameras and digital camcorders has converted many people into virtual shutterbugs and documentarians--collecting events from our lives, ranging from the mundane to the life altering. No longer encumbered by the time and cost of having to send film off to be developed and processed, the only seeming limitation is having enough storage space to hold all...
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Shutterfly announced a new service called Wink that combines real-time sharing with photo printing. Designed for the social networking generation, Wink lets you create and share printed photostrips (2x6-inch prints) using photos from your iPhone and social network sites such as Flickr and Facebook. As part of the service, your photostrips can be delivered anywhere in the world for $2.50 including tax and shipping. According to Shutterfly, it takes only seconds to create and send a photostrip in Wink. All you have to do is choose a template, add and adjust a few photos, and send it off. You can also share completed photostrips on Facebook and Twitter. “Traditional print formats often don’t make...
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Hewlett-Packard's ready to release its latest MediaSmart servers, and, for a change, they don't hate the Mac.The EX485/EX487 are designed for home or home office use, in large part to enable you -- or your friends and family -- to access any media (music, photos, videos, etc.) via the Internet. You can network all your media files from all the computers in your home and create an online server that you can, in turn, make available to grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, godparents, best friends from high school, you know, anyone. It also enables an automatic backup of all these digital memories.It is based on Microsoft’s Windows Home Server operating system, but according to a pdf on HP's website,...
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Either these hospital workers have a strange fetish or ... well, we actually can't think of an alternative. Two University of New Mexico Hospital employees were fired after it was discovered that they have been posting photos of patients' injuries to MySpace. The workers were using their cell phone cameras. A hospital supervisor received an anonymous tip about them on Tuesday and launched an inquiry. The MySpace page could only be accessed by the employee's MySpace friends, as the profile was set to private, a small measure of comfort. Additionally, the identifying features of the patients were omitted, so no one could be identified --- but neither could the hospital inform any of the victims...
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Security researchers presenting information at next week's Black Hat convention are expected to demonstrate a particularly nasty method for stealing online credentials from users on any number of websites that allow users to upload their own pictures. The exploit will work by displaying what looks like a .gif picture, but contains a Java applet that can be triggered to run after the fact in the victim's browser. They call the file a GIFAR. The bad guys would create a profile on one of these popular Web sites -- Facebook for example -- and upload their GIFAR as an image on the site. Then they'd trick the victim into visiting a malicious Web site, which would tell the victim's browser to go open...
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There is a significant amount of untapped power to be found in even low-end discreet video cards when they’re simply drawing 2D user interfaces, and Adobe plans to put that power to work in their next version of Photoshop, which is internally being referred to by the code-name "Stonehenge". Digital media enthusiasts are more likely to know it by the title Photoshop Next when it eventually ships, hopefully before the end of the year. There are numerous theoretical advantages to using the GPU to handle some of the heavy lifting, but theory and practice have a very long history of clashing. So what kind of real world results can we expect? The primary result after this addition...
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Yet another reason to keep your teen from talking you into a cell phone?Forget about passing notes in study hall; some teens are now using their cell phones to flirt and send nude pictures of themselves.The instant text, picture and video messages have become part of some teens' courtship behavior, police and school officials said.The messages often spread quickly and sometimes find their way to public Web sites.Yes, yes, we know a lot of parents cite safety reasons for giving teens and younger cell phones, but it seems like they're getting access to things they shouldn't have without the responsibility or thinking that would prevent them from abusing it. Readers?...
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