blog plz

9 Notes

Photo Editing

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!

5 Notes

Coming Soon: picplz with Aviary

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!

2 Notes

Remove Follower

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. 

18 Notes

NYC Photo Hack Day

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!

15 Notes

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

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:

7 Notes

picplz Under New Management!

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.  

19 Notes

New search features for picplz

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

12 Notes

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…

Source: picplz.com

10 Notes

picplz for iPhone v1.6 released

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:

20 Notes

New picplz features - Borders & Collections

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:

Cross Process

The 70s

Russian Toy Camera

Little Plastic Lens

Instant Film

High Contrast Monochrome

We hope you enjoy Borders and Collections!

-The picplz team