blog plz

Photo Editing

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:05:00 -0700

Today we are bringing photo editing to our picplz mobile apps using the fantastic tools and technology from Aviary. Now, in addition to the effects already in picplz, you can crop and rotate your photos, adjust the contrast or saturation, and even add text or draw annotations! We are launching with 15 photo editing tools, and all are available via the new Edit button found on the Preview screen in picplz.

Let’s see what it looks like. Tapping the new Edit button brings up the Aviary photo editor view:

In this example, I really want to focus on the flower so I tap on the crop tool and with a couple quick gestures draw out my desired rectangle:

After hitting Apply, the Aviary editing engine works its magic, and then I’m back at the editing view. Now I want to brighten things up a bit so I swipe along the bottom to reveal more tools, and find the Brightness tool.

I tap on Brightness and choose the version I like:

After I’m done editing, I’m taken back to the normal picplz Preview screen.

From here I can choose one of the standard picplz filters, hit Next, and share my photo. It’s that easy! Both picplz 2.4 for Android and picplz 1.8 for iPhone are available now. Requires Android 2.2+ or iOS 4.3+. Take it for a spin and let us know what you think. We are very excited about working with Aviary and hope that you love the new photo editing tools as much as we do!

Coming Soon: picplz with Aviary

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:28:01 -0700

Yesterday Aviary launched their mobile photo editing SDK and we are excited to be among the partners integrating their technology. Many of you have asked for some of the most basic photo editing functionality to be added to picplz, and via the Aviary SDK we can do exactly that. Leveraging Aviary’s image editing prowess lets us focus more on the photo sharing and social integration features of picplz.

We’re not quite ready to take the covers off, but rest assured we are hard at work putting the Aviary SDK into the picplz Android and iPhone mobile apps. Stay tuned for additional details in the coming weeks!

Remove Follower

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 14:35:48 -0700

Today we added the Remove Follower feature. Simply hit the “Remove” button next to a username in your followers list and confirm. A couple of caveats: you can only remove someone you are not following, and removal is permanent. We don’t expect you to need it very often, but when you do, it’s there.

NYC Photo Hack Day

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 14:06:24 -0700

Ever wanted to write a killer app using a bevy of photo related APIs? Now is your chance! The good folk over at Aviary are coordinating a NYC Photo Hack Day on August 20-21 at General Assembly and we are excited to include the picplz API as part of the event.

If you are a coder or designer and want to take part, register here. One of us will be there to see the amazing creations, meet the developer community, and answer questions. And if you need a little help getting started, photohackday.org has a bunch of ideas. See you there!

picplz for Android v2.3 and iPhone v1.7 released

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 12:27:43 -0700

As we said last week, new releases of the picplz Android and iPhone mobile apps were on their way. Today we’re pleased to announce that picplz for Android v2.3 is available in the Android Market and picplz for iPhone v1.7 is available in the App Store. These are the first new releases of the apps since picplz has been under new management. We’re very excited about where this is heading.

Both mobile apps have two new filters, C-41 and Redscale, with and without borders. Both filters are based on cross-processing techniques, with C-41 giving the photo a more green tone, while the Redscale filter suppresses the blue channel resulting in a warm, red glow.   We’ve also added a new, highly requested option to save a filtered version of the image to the phone’s photo library/gallery. This option is in the Settings screen on both apps.

Give it whirl and let us know what you think on Twitter!

Screenshots:

picplz Under New Management!

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:02:53 -0700

Over the past 18 months the team at Mixed Media Labs has built picplz from nothing to a service used by millions of people around the world. Today picplz is the best place to share your pictures across iOS, Android devices, on the web, and through applications built on top of the picplz API. The Mixed Media Labs team, however, is most passionate about building new products from scratch, so today they are announcing the launch of a new service for mobile application developers called app.net. To focus on this new project and make sure that picplz gets the most love going forward, the team has decided to pass the picplz torch on to the management team at Sporcle.

Wait! What’s a Sporcle? And what are you going to do to my picplz? At Sporcle we operate a platform for publishing trivia games through our web site and suite of mobile applications. Our platform consists of over 200k trivia games that have been played over 575 million times. Don’t worry, we’re not going to turn picplz into a trivia game and all of your pictures are safe! As new owners of picplz, we will continue to operate picplz as it is today and we are committed to building more features on top of its strong core. Support for the picplz API and the broader development community will also continue to be a high priority. We’re excited about what the future holds and have big plans for the direction of the product.

In the next few weeks, you’ll see updates to the picplz Android and iPhone mobile applications that add some features and address issues that have come from our users. Your feedback continues to be extremely important to us, so please write to us anytime.

New search features for picplz

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 10:54:00 -0700

With our release of “collections” a couple of weeks ago it became pretty clear from feedback that it was time to add a “search for pictures” feature.

As of now you can search for pictures, collections, cities, places and people on the picplz website. Creating and adding pictures to a collection should be a far more rewarding experience!

Since this is our first release of search, we have not yet turned it on in our mobile apps. Once we are confident that it is working well, we will be adding search functionality to our iPhone and Android apps.

Thanks, let us know what you think,

-The picplz team

best of picplz: Best of SXSW

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:44:00 -0700

best of picplz: Best of SXSW :

Great picplz collection from SXSW

bestofpicplz:

We have created an awesome collection of photos from the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX. Behind the scenes, in the crowd and at the after parties, picplzrs are everywhere in Austin sharing their experiences with the world.

If you’re not lucky enough to be there, picplz…

picplz for iPhone v1.6 released

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:21:39 -0700

As promised, the picplz for iPhone 1.6 is available in the app store. This update includes support for image borders and some speed improvements when applying filters.

Changes:

Image borders for some of your favorite effects. Optional borders are now available for Russian Toy Camera, The 70s, Little Plastic Lens, High Contrast Monochrome, Cross Process, & Instant Film.
Speed improvements (2x faster image processing speeds)

Screenshots:

New picplz features - Borders & Collections

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:02:22 -0800

Borders:

One of the top feature requests we have gotten from the picplz community is support for image borders. Image effects are one thing, but adding borders can add a whole new dimension to a photograph.

Today we have released a version of the Android app that supports borders, and our iPhone app with border support was completed days ago and will be released once Apple approves it.

Please note that we still keep your original unmodified image, and that we apply the border and filter to a high quality version of the image. We pride ourselves on helping users create big, beautiful, high-res images.

Examples of picplz photos with image borders:

Collections:

We also added a new feature called “Collections”. A collection is a collection of photos from picplz. Any user can create a new collection, give it a name (for example, “blue things”), and then browse around the site and add photos that you find to the collection.

This creates a whole new way to organize and curate all of the great pics on picplz. We also added the ability to give someone (from the list of people that follow you) “editing” ability to a collection you create. This way you can have a group of friends, co-workers etc. add pics to a common collection.

The best way to explain a new feature is to demonstrate it, so here are some examples of collections we have created during the development process.

Examples of collections:

Color Explosion

Puppyplz

Head in the Clouds

Do I make you hungry?

NBA All-Stars 2011

Examples of borders:

High Contrast Monochrome

We hope you enjoy Borders and Collections!

-The picplz team

picplz for iPhone 1.5 released

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 11:23:16 -0800

We have just pushed a new update to the picplz iPhone app.

Changes:

Speed improvements when browsing photos
“Pull to refresh” support to update photo views
Added contact search, it’s now easy to find people you already know on picplz
New setting to disable GPS Data sharing
High quality image setting now respects all image sizes
Proper rotation support even when a user has Portrait Orientation Lock turned on.
Bug fixes

Screenshots:

picplz for Android updates

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 10:31:00 -0800

Over the past couple of weeks, we have released several small Android updates.

Here is a quick summary of what has changed in the picplz Android app:

Changelog for picplz v2.1

Find other picplz users via your phone contact list
Better navigation when browsing, added Home and Refresh menu buttons
New settings to control email and push notifications separately
Better password recovery process on Android
Android auto-correction support when you are entering a caption
Speed improvements

Changelog for picplz v2.0.2

Fix for blank image or crash on Xperia X10 and HTC Desire
Fix for rare crash when applying photo effects

Changelog for picplz v2.0.1

Reduced application size
Fixed crash on Xperia X10 and HTC Desire
Fixed problems with notifications on Android 2.2 and up
Fixed CPU usage bug regarding backgrounding in some cases

Thanks, please let us know what you think on twitter.

The picplz team

picplz for Android 2.0 released

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 12:18:00 -0800

Today is a big milestone for picplz as we release version 2.0 of our Android app.

We have integrated a great deal of user feedback and created what we think is a dramatically better user experience. The best way to see the difference is to try it yourself :)

Full changelog:

New look and feel!
Native camera support. Picplz now takes advantage of all the great features that come with your phone’s camera such as zoom, flash, white balance, focus modes, and exposure. (Options differ based on phone model)
Easily follow what’s happening in your network through the new Activity feed
Quickly post photos you’ve already taken using the Gallery option
Disable location sharing option now available from your Settings menu
Bug fixes

Screenshots:

Please let us know what you think.

Thanks

-The picplz team

picplz API launch, Creative Commons support & more

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 12:39:00 -0800

We’ve got 3 exciting announcements for this week:

1) The picplz API is now public

Our API documentation is now viewable here and we’ve published a few handy pieces of code on GitHub:

A jQuery library, jquery-picplz, for quick and easy JavaScript widget implementations that consume our API.

A code samples library that contains a few sample apps:

· A slideshow app, viewable here

· An embeddable widget, viewable here

· An authenticated-feeds test app, viewable here.

We’ve also opened a picplz-api mailing list available for announcements and developer support. We’re pleased to announce that in the past 2 weeks we’ve had well over 100 developers apply to be part of our API (far exceeding our expectations)!

One thing worth pointing out in our API is image upload & filter support. This allows developers to upload any image and apply one of our image filters to it.

We think that allowing developers access to our upload and filter pipeline brings something different to the table than “just another photo-sharing API”. We are looking forward getting feedback and seeing what kind of new apps our developers build with it!

2) picplz now supports Creative Commons licensing for pics

We’ve been consistently impressed with the quality of photography on picplz, and one of the things that our users have consistently asked for is support for different Creative Commons licenses.

Creative Commons licensing is a powerful and flexible tool for photographers. Users may opt-in and license some or all of their photos.

3) picplz now has an analytics dashboard for brands

It’s been exciting to see sports teams, DJs, artists, venues and other brands use picplz to engage with fans and followers through pictures. As part of our mission to be the best photo broadcasting tool available we have added an analytics dashboard to help users with larger audiences track activity around the content they post to picplz.

Analytics is a core component of any successful social media program, and our dashboard is just one aspect of a platform that is ideal for creative, ongoing communication with fans. By charting the number of views, likes and comments for each picture, current users such as the San Diego Chargers, Madison Square Garden, artist Trey Songz, DJ Neil Armstrong and the L.A. Lakers can get instantaneous feedback on posts and use that information to better serve their audience.

This is our first implementation of analytics and we’re looking forward to feedback. Based on the reception we’ll be building upon this beta functionality and over time possibly opening up the feature to the entire picplz community.

To further this effort we have created a contact form for brands to message us directly about integrating the dashboard and any other specific needs they may have.

Dropbox + picplz!

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:47:00 -0800

We have added support for Dropbox, a free service that securely backs up your files online and lets you access them from any computer or mobile device. Dropbox+picplz integration is now immediately available for all iPhone, Android and web users. No app update is necessary.

One interesting aspect of this integration is that when you connect picplz with your Dropbox account, your Dropbox will get both the filtered version of your pic and the raw, original version of the pic. The raw image contains all of the metadata, including EXIF tags, intact.

This way, you can use picplz to post images with filter effects and not worry about

Permanently and irreversibly altering your valuable pictures
Leaving the unfiltered version of the picture trapped on your phone

Dropbox happens to be one of our favorite services, and we happen to think this is a great integration between the two services.

Let us know what you think!

The picplz team

p.s.

We won Robert Scoble over last week with a combination of our philosophy around your pictures and our commitment to serving Android as well as iPhone from the beginning. Check out the interview here.

New picplz for Android release

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:47:06 -0800

Our new Android version includes the new “live thumbnail preview” feature that was included in last week’s iPhone release. The feedback we have heard so far about this feature has been 100% positive, so we think you will be excited to try this out.

Full changelog:

Live thumbnail preview of your picture with different filters applied. (See screenshots below)
Fixed rare crash on sign up
Fixed issue with notifications not clearing from status bar
Camera view no longer turns screen brightness to 100%
Fixed issue with camera not properly detecting the flash state on start-up
Other misc bug fixes

We also would like to let you know that we have a few more things in store for our Android users. The release after this will contain a number of speed+browsing improvements we are working on at the moment.

Android Screenshots

Thanks!

-The picplz team

p.s.

Are you a software developer? You can apply for access to the picplz API beta here.

picplz API - beta signup form

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:03:54 -0800

picplz API - beta signup form:

Are you a software developer?

Please follow the link above to apply for picplz API beta.

New picplz for iPhone version

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:00:23 -0800

We are excited to announce that a new version of picplz for iPhone is now available in the App Store.

Over the past few months, we have done our best to listen to and address the user feedback we have gotten about picplz.

The 2 major themes of feedback we have gotten are:
1) Speed and responsiveness
2) Usability

We made a number of major changes to make the picture posting flow easier to use, navigating around the app easier, as well as making the entire experience snappy.

Changelog:

New navigation structure to allow fast switching between browsing and photo posting screens
Simplified photo posting flow
Live thumbnail preview. Quickly see what you’re photo looks like with
different filters.
Camera now supports “tap to focus”
New users can test out the app without creating an account or logging in

Screenshots:

Thanks, more to come soon, including some new things for picplz for Android users

-The picplz team

Available now: Foursquare photo check-in support

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 06:31:00 -0800

Our friends at Foursquare have just launched a new feature to support check-in with a photo.

Oh, and picplz for iPhone and picplz for Android now have support for this exciting new feature. Right now.

We made this really easy on you… no picplz app upgrade required.

Simply post a picplz photo to Foursquare just like you always have, and this new feature will Just work. For both iPhone and Android picplz users. Seriously, that’s it.

Have fun!

-Team picplz

New picplz versions for iPhone & Android

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:41:00 -0800

We have simultaneously released new versions of the picplz for iPhone and picplz for Android. The purpose of this release was to share a few new filters with the picplz community.

We have added 3 new image filters: “Little Plastic Lens”, “Trip to the Optometrist”, and “Kaleidoscope Eyes.”

“Little Plastic Lens” example:

“Trip to the Optometrist” example:

“Kaleidoscope Eyes” example:

Thanks, please let us know if you have any feedback. Many more exciting things to come!