Geekblok

Due to the Flickr API, we see new initiatives pop up everywhere. Today I’d like to show you a little game called PhotoSoup. The site itself describes the game as:

PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator that allows users to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and only the associated photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time.

The game is quite simple. Find all the words (tags) that describe the images around the puzzle and select them before you run out of time. Due to some weird tags you can never guess (like “bw”, “joe”, “henry” etc.), you might want to hit the “Show Hints” button. This way, you’ll see the tags you’re expected to find.

Let’s look at a sample game with topic: “geek”

Warning: you may find this game addictive!

Tagging your photos on Flickr can help you to describe the photo. By tagging them, you can search for that specific photo with ease. Smark helps you with this tagging process in quite an elegant way.

After selecting the set(s) you want to review (and tag), you see the photos individually and suggested as well as recently used tags are shown beneath the images. Simply add tags and navigate to the next image (note: you can use your cursor keys to navigate, woohoo!).

It’s working rather nice and the author of the website is open to suggestion. The changes requested by me were implemented within a day. If you have suggestions, dump them in the Flickr group

Last, but not least, “smark contains no additives or preservatives”.

More and more tools are ported to the web. It all got started with e-mail (think hotmail), being thrown into a web interface. After that, instant messengers were ported (think meebo“) and not much later we’ve seen entire webbased Office Suites (think: zoho).

Now we see rapid development in the graphics area. An eye-pleasing example is Splashup. This tool/website looks very much like GIMP/Photoshop and it works fairly well (even running it in Firefox on a Linux system). With splashup, you can open files from your own PC (upload), Flickr, Facebook, Picasa or any webserver. Then you can edit the pictures from within your browser and upload them back, or download them to your machine.

It’s awesome to see a tool that allows you to work with layers and let you open multiple files at once. The tool, of course, can be improved (make a selection, use the Paint Bucket on that selection and see that the entire layer is colored…), but it’s fairly impressing already.

Definitely worth keeping an eye on!

ImproveYourImages.com is a simple looking website that can improve your images (hence the domain name, I figure). The three examples tell us that you can

# Restore true original colors
# Correct color temperature

# Adjust poor lighting

Especially the last one looks interesting to a bad photographer like me, so let’s test our own images on this!

Read more »

Face recognition is a thing I always look at in awe. Usually, the demos are fairly smart and promising. But now, we can even try things ourselves!

MyHeritage offers a demo in which you can upload photos of yourself (or others). After uploading, the website will try to find a celebrity that looks like you. But, of course, the best way to test this system is to upload celebrity photos and see if they match!

I’ve uploaded a few, starting with a tricky one I thought (the website most likely belonging to a US-based company): Vladimir Putin. The result was actually right on spot!