The last such milestone the foundation announced was 10 million media files, back in April of 2011.

“Credit is due to the Wikimedia Commons community, who is largely involved in a variety of projects, processes and negotiations that are intended to improve the availability of public domain and freely-licensed educational media content to the public,” says Peter Weis on the Wikimedia blog.

“The last two years have seen an increasing number of cultural institutions (GLAM) and other organisations providing content that would have otherwise not been freely accessible,” he adds. “Two Wiki Loves Monuments contests have also been responsible for more than 500,000 uploaded images. Moreover, constant technical improvements, such as the UploadWizard introduced in May 2011, and the new HTML5 video player, facilitate the contributions of current and future participants and encourage them to expand niches like audio and video.”

Wikimedia projects attract 480 million unique visitors per month, according to the foundation.

“With Yahoo! Mail receiving and sending on average up to 500 million photos a day, this new tool makes it easier to manage photos coming to (and from) your inbox,” a Yahoo representative tells WebProNews.

The video below shows the features:

Yahoo Mail Director of Product Management, Miriam Geller, writes on the Yahoo Mail blog, “f you’re like me, you send and receive a LOT of photos in Yahoo! Mail. From baby pictures, to soccer photos, to what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas shenanigans, my Yahoo! Mail contains a treasure trove of memories. The problem is, those memories are buried deep within my mailbox. Ask me to retrieve those great photos Grandma sent when the twins were 3 (or was that 4?) and I’m likely to throw my hands up in dismay.”

“No longer,” she adds. “Now, Yahoo! Mail makes it super simple to find and share those treasures with our new Photos app. The Photos app aggregates all of the photos in your inbox that you’ve ever sent or received during the entire life of your email account. You can see thumbnails of all the photos and filter by date, sender, folder and size.”

Yahoo Mail users can find the Photos app on the lower-left side of Yahoo Mail in the Applications area.

This week Yahoo also announced a new look and some new features for image search and video search.

If you’re new to Panoramio, check out the demonstration video that will give you a better idea of how the service works.

Like I said, though, if you’ve looked up any popular destination of interest lately on Google Maps or Google Earth, you’ve likely already been seeing Panoramio pictures appearing on your screen. In Street View, they appear as little window panels that you can click on to see the user images stitched together with the Google images. If you’re still in map view, sometimes you’ll see blue dots that indicate a Panoramio-uploaded picture.

Via the Lat Long Blog today, Google Maps announced that they’ve tweaked the uploading process so as to make even easier for users to share their photos on Google Maps. From the post:

You can now snap your photos to a place on the map. When searching for your photo location, you’ll see a list of suggested places where your photo may have been taken, and you can click “Snap to this place” to select the right location. We’ve also added the ability for users to indicate that a photo was taken indoors. These additional details about where a photo was taken provide all users with more useful information and context.

The Panoramio pictures you see on Google Maps and Google Earth are, to the chagrin of several users, there whether you like it or not. There is no way to disable or hide the feature. A couple of different forums in the Google Maps Product Forums have popped up in the last year bemoaning the unavoidable presence of Panoramio pictures on these two Google mapping services. So far, though, no Google employee has responded to the posts and it has not provided a way – as far as I have been able to determine – to hide the Panoramio pictures in either Google Maps or Google Earth.

Given that you can probably expect more Panoramio pictures to be popping up in Google Maps now that it’s that much easier to add them, I asked Google to confirm whether or not there is an option to disable the appearance of Panoramio thumbnails in Google Maps since this seems to be a question people have yet to have answered. I’ve yet to hear a response but we’ll keep you posted if Google gets back to us.

BandAbout is a new company in a long list that will convert your Facebook pictures into something else. The Facebook possessed have turned their pictures into artwork, posters, shower curtains, even full sleeve arm tattoos…

It isn’t limited to Facebook, however. Customers can use any picture in their photo album, or from the web.

On their Facebook profile, the company claims to have “reinvented the wrist band.” Customers can take their favorite photos, drag and drop them onto the virtual wristband, and create their own fashion statement. Their profile page contains ideas for your own wristbands, or you can come up with your own.

The company offers some suggestions on how to use you new wristband:

A BandAbout wristband is about almost anything you want it to be. A circle of friends. Your interests, beliefs, and passions.

Sports teams can assemble a band with the players’ images. People can create a band of vacation memories.

Be creative!

We turn your design into a beautiful, high-resolution wristband made of a lightweight polyester material. The wristband is non-toxic, recyclable, and proudly made in the USA.

If you love your design, post it on our Facebook wall for a chance to receive a promo code for your next order! Be sure to tell us what your BandAbout wristband is all about.

This BandAbout video shows you how to make your own wristband.

Well, guess what – that’s hardly the worst of it because apparently apps are also helping themselves to the photos stored on iPhones. Mindful not to omit anybody from this round of privacy non-protection, though, it turns out Android phones also have apps that include a similar photo-accessibility flaw.

It so happens that when iPhone’d people were granting permission for apps to use their current location, some apps conveniently inferred those location details to also include photos. The New York Times ran their own test of the privacy issue by enlisting a developer to create an app that requests permission to use the phone’s current location and thereby also gain access to the phone’s pictures.

When the test app, PhotoSpy, was opened, it asked for access to location data. Once this was granted, it began siphoning photos and their location data to a remote server. (The app was not submitted to the App Store.)

“It’s very strange, because Apple is asking for location permission, but really what it is doing is accessing your entire photo library,” said John Casasanta, owner of the successful iPhone app development studio Tap Tap Tap, which created the Camera+ app. “The message the user is being presented with is very, very unclear.”

Apple didn’t respond to a comment request from the Times, but David Jacobs, a fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, chastised Apple for its failure to yet again ensure iPhone users’ privacy. “Apple has a tremendous responsibility as the gatekeeper to the App Store and the apps people put on their phone to police the apps,” he said.

Jacobs added, “It is pretty obvious that they aren’t doing a good enough job of that.”

Once the Times discovered that Android was also guilty of the photo privacy flaw, they conducted a similar test with an Android developer to see if an app could swipe photos from a phone without the awareness of users. Surprise, surprise – the Times‘ test worked and the decoy app gained access to the phone’s pictures. However, this security breach was more devious because, unlike Apple apps, the Android app didn’t require permission to use the geo-location service in order to access the photos. Instead, as long as the app “has the right to go to the Internet, it can copy those photos to a remote server without any notice.”

A Google spokesperson responded to a request from the Times‘ to explain the security deficiency. Google, as is their wont, responded in typical cagey fashion.

In response to questions, Google acknowledged this and said it would consider changing its approach.

A Google spokesman said that the lack of restrictions on photo access was a design choice related to the way early Android phones stored data. The first Android smartphones could put photos on a removable memory card, which complicated the issue of photo access, he said. For example, a user might grant an app permission to retrieve photos from one card but not want the app to use photos on a card that was in place on another day.

“We originally designed the Android photos file system similar to those of other computing platforms like Windows and Mac OS,” the spokesman said in an e-mail message. “At the time, images were stored on a SD card, making it easy for someone to remove the SD card from a phone and put it in a computer to view or transfer those images. As phones and tablets have evolved to rely more on built-in, nonremovable memory, we’re taking another look at this and considering adding a permission for apps to access images. We’ve always had policies in place to remove any apps on Android Market that improperly access your data.”

Google is “considering adding a permission for apps to access images”? Wow, Google, don’t go breaking your back over making sure that users of your smartphones stay informed over how their information is accessed by the apps they use.

But thanks for keeping us in mind. Really, you’re too generous.

Leading up to the reading, you could see that Knox was anxiously awaiting the official word from the jury. You saw her breathing quite heavily and bring her hands up to her face several times. At one point her lawyer leaned in and was talking with Knox, it looked as though she could be sick at any moment.

Below are some powerful images from the verdict reading:

"Face movies create a movie based around one person both figuratively and literally," explains Google’s Jonathan Sposato. "Instead of the usual transition from one photo to the next, the images align themselves to the face in the photo. This creates an extremely smooth viewing experience which allows the person in the photos to remain the focus rather than the transition effects themselves.

See below:

There is no word on when this feature will make its way to Picasa Web Albums, but hopefully it will at some point.

Other features of Picasa 3.8 include Picnik integration (which was released for Picasa Web Albums recently), batch upload from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums, and some metadata updates.

Kevin Ryan Interviews Lee Siegal, SES Keynote

Siegal proposes that the internet culture is perhaps damaging our attention span and he points out the benefits of having intentionality about what we do. Interesting!

Lee Siegal, author of “Against the Machine”

Comments

I’ve posted a few photos from the event to my Flickr account. Here are a sample:

I’ll have more photos from Day 2, later today.

If you’re looking for a re-cap of day one’s panels, then I suggest you take a look here and here.

Comments

A quirky LatLong Blog entry (“Posted by The Google Maps Search Box”) states, “I can now search for geotagged photos from Panoramio, such as Big Ben in London and Pyramids in Egypt, as well as videos from YouTube (our own Google Geyser and Base jumping in Rio).  I can even look up books from Google Book Search! (Try Christmas books in Jerusalem).  Those results will appear as blue markers on the map.”

The interface isn’t exactly stunning – what happened to the clean and simple Google way? – but it does work.  However – and I’m not sure that this is such a bad thing – the feature update isn’t guaranteed to turn up something for every object you can imagine.

On a related note, Greg Sterling adds, “This is all content that can be found in Google Earth, which shares the same platform as Maps.  Increasingly the two products are less distinct and more of Earth’s content and functionality are making their way into Maps (terrain is another good example).  Another way to look at this is as the introduction of multiple forms of content (a la Universal Search) into Maps.”

Oh, and by the way – The Google Maps Search Box apparently doesn’t enjoy being pestered with questions about local pizza joints.