Flickr and Snapfish have struck a deal to make HP’s photo sharing site (and Flickr competitor) the go-to printing partner for the 40 million Flickr users in the US and international markets.

As Flickr’s “preferred printing partner,” Snapfish will let Flickr users to transfer, organize, and print photos, scrapbooks, and more. Yahoo says that this is the first time Flickr’s international users will have an option to print photos directly from their photostream thanks to Snapfish’s presence in 22 countries. And Flick users can also ship photos to anywhere in the world. But for now, you can only print photos from your account.

Flickr’s online photo organization features, such as Organizr, Sets, and Photo Page, are integrated with Snapfish as well. Members in the U.S. have the option to pick up their prints locally at any of Snapfish’s retail partners’ stores, including Walmart, Walgreens, Staples, Duane Reade, and others retail stores.

It’s unclear what the revenue share is between the two photo sharing sites. HP acquired Snapfish in 2005 days after Yahoo acquired Flickr.

Flickr also recently added people photo tagging and launched an iPhone app. But the popular photo sharing site has come under fire in the past few months for freedom of speech issues and Yahoo’s branding of Flickr. But Flickr has remained a dominant player in the photo sharing space, with more than 4 billion photos uploaded, growing at a rate of 100 million per month.

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When we intially wrote about the service (remember, very early on in the realtime search phenomenon), we noted that the presentation of results was impressive, but the results themselves were utterly dominated by Twitter. That really shouldn’t have been all that surprising considering Twitter’s popularity in the space. But the service has since added some new features to make it more robust.

You’ll notice that when you do a search, there is a clean, two-column layout. On the left, popular shared items appear. These can be links shared on Twitter, Digg items, etc. You can also filter this content by videos, links, and images. On the right, you’ll see the live-updating items from around the web. The majority are still coming in from Twitter, but there are plenty of results from places like Delicious and Digg mixed in as well. These two columns have been swapped since when we first covered the service, and the “Your Searches” column has been removed and place in the top bar.

More importantly, Scoopler has added an entirely new top area to break searches up into categories. Scoopler is calling the feature “Realtime Channels,” and co-founder AJ Asver describes it as, “like Digg’s categories but updated in realtime. They show the hottest tweets, links, videos and images in News, Business, Technology, Politics etc.  The idea is to drive more search queries by suggesting what people should search for.”

Makes sense. And the results are pretty solid. For example, I just clicked on the Entertainment channel and I see the live posts are being populated with talk about things like the new Michael Jackson movie and also the new Avatar trailer. There is also a constantly updating area along the top of the page to show you the hottest topics being talked about in realtime around the web.

But perhaps the best feature of Scoopler remains the “peek” option. This allows you to quickly see the content being linked to through tweets and Digg results in an overlay without having to leave Scoopler. The service also has little picture thumbnails that get inserted into the stream for things like Flickr pictures.

Scoopler’s seed round has attracted investors such as Ron Conway, (Bebo co-founder) Michael Birch, Avalon Ventures, and XG Ventures. Though the amount of the round wasn’t officially disclosed, we hear it’s in the $500,000 to $1 million range.

Speaking of realtime, don’t forget our second Realtime CrunchUp taking place on November 20.

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Its new “People In Photos” feature is long overdue. With it, you’ll be able to select a picture and start typing a person’s name, which will then scan your Flickr contacts to see who it should add as a tag to the picture. And like Facebook, you’ll be able to draw an outline around someone’s face to show exactly who they are in the picture.

But the reason this feature is even better than Facebook’s functionality is the opt-out and opt-in options. While most users love the people tagging for photos in Facebook, just about everyone wishes there were more options that allow you to opt-out of being tagged in certain photos. You can untag yourself, or block people from tagging you, but there isn’t a good case-by-case method of doing this.

Flickr is offering that by allowing you to opt-out of being tagged in individual photos. And once you opt-out, unlike Facebook, no one can put you back into that photo. You can also set who is able to tag you in photos. And you can set who is able to tag people in photos that you shared.

The stength Facebook has over Flickr is that you probably have many more contacts, or at the very least, actual friends on Facebook. Because Flickr relies on your Flickr contact list, it probably won’t be as useful as Facebook’s, at least at first. But this is a great incentive to get you adding more contacts on Flickr, and encouraging your friends to sign up.

Users have long been working around Flickr’s lag of people photo tagging by doing it manually in the tag section of pictures. Now it’s getting a whole lot better. Undoubtedly, some users will hate this feature, but they can opt-out entirely from being tagged.

When you’re tagged in a photo, it will show up in your recent activity stream. And Flickr has revamped users’ profiles to show pictures you’re tagged in.

[photo: flickr/spuz]

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Scott Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he was President and CTO. Dietzen went on to replace Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s former SVP of Communications & Communities, when he left the company in June 2008. He reported to Bryan Lamkin, the SVP of Applications who oversees the global strategy, development and performance for the products cited above.

Before Zimbra, the TechFellow Award winner was CTO of BEA Systems (now an Oracle company) where he was the principal architect of the technology strategy for the WebLogic product family.

So what’s next for him? Well for one thing he will be joining the Board of Directors of rPath, a venture-backed startup that develops solutions companies can use to automate application deployment and maintenance across physical, virtual and cloud environments. The company has posted a Q&A with Dietzen on its website which confirms the rumors of him having left Yahoo.

In the interview, Dietzen says he’s not thinking about what’s next yet, and that he considers himself to be on an open-ended sabbatical for now. He says he wants to ‘disconnect’ for a while to regain some work/life balance and spend more time with his family until he moves on to other things, which will most likely be a startup rather than a large corporation.

Another loss for Yahoo at the senior executive level, and a major one it is.

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The problem stems from the way Apple’s popular iPhoto software is integrated with Flickr. Recent versions of iPhoto allow users to sync specified albums with Flickr, which means they can automatically upload new photos as soon as they import them into iPhoto from their cameras, and change their captions for both at once. The problem is that iPhoto treats this syncing very literally: if you delete a photo from one of these albums on iPhoto, it doesn’t just remove it from the Set on Flickr — it actually deletes the photo from your Flickr account entirely.

iPhoto apparently informs users that when they stop sharing a photo album between iPhoto and Flickr, “The album no longer appears on Flickr, but the photos remain in your [iPhoto] library.” The wording is both ambiguous (Apple could just mean it’s deleting the photos from the Flickr set) and not nearly strong enough to suggest that it’s actually deleting data. And plenty of people have made that mistake.

Over the last several weeks this has led to a number of threads in Flickr’s help forum where some users are up in arms after accidentally deleting hundreds of photos at once.

Fortunately, Flickr is taking notice. A Flickr engineer has tweeted about how bad the design is, and a staff member in one of the threads wrote that Flickr was discussing the matter internally, and later followed up to say that they were discussing the issue with Apple. Hopefully this will be resolved shortly.

It’s worth pointing out that this is probably exactly how Apple designed the syncing functionality to work in the first place. After all, syncing with Apple devices and MobileMe works the same way: delete something on your computer, and it deletes it elsewhere. But there’s no way anyone should be able to delete hundreds of photos at once without knowing full well what they’re about to do. Apple (and Flickr, for that matter) have failed to to made it abundantly clear to users just what photo syncing really means, and that’s just bad design.

Photo via Flickr.

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Now the Swedish company is taking it up a notch with the release of a Facebook application that should make it easier for people to discover in which other photos on Facebook, Flickr or 23hq.com they (or any of their friends) appear, whether they’re properly tagged or not.

I installed the application, and after importing all the photos from my account – which took quite a while – Polar Rose let me tag persons in photos that hadn’t been labeled yet. It let me view and edit tags for photos from people I’ve added to my account, as well as those uploaded by persons I’m connected to and are also on Polar Rose (e.g. Mike Butcher, see screenshot below).

When you tag people, Facebook automatically posts about this to the named person’s wall (something that can’t be controlled from the outside), so take that into account before you start mass-tagging. And in case you’re wondering, the application only fetches photos with privacy set as “friends only”, “friends of friends” and “everyone”.

In the future, Polar Rose aims to support more social graphs, like the ones from your Twitter account and Google Contacts.

Face.com is another facial recognition startup, although they’re currently limited to Facebook only, while Polar Rose works across Facebook, Flickr and 23hq. Polar Rose also says it differentiates from Face.com because it isn’t exclusively focused on the tagging part but also about the ‘viewing and sharing experience’.

In case you haven’t heard, Facebook is huge in photo sharing. According to its latest statistics, it hosts about 20 billion photos, of which 5 billion were added in the last 6 months alone. The social network’s public stats claim 2 billion photos are uploaded to the site each month at present time.

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Yes, it’s yet another photo sharing service. And yes, it’s yet another stock photography marketplace. But both of the services rolled into one website results in a pretty decent combined offering, especially considering the fact that the whole thing was built by a completely bootstrapped venture based out of San Francisco.

Update: the company gave us some free coupons for TC readers! (see below where we discuss account types)

So what gives? On the photo sharing side, users get a bunch of features and storage for free. There’s no maximum file size (although the only format you can upload is JPEG for now), and you can store up to 5GB of photos without paying a dime. You get multiple upload options, geo-tagging and mapping features, easy organization and management tools and multiple ways to share images with your friends on other social networks in just a few clicks.

If you feel like you’ve seen this type of design before, it’s probably because you have. The screenshots below show that the whole look and feel of the Snapixel website was heavily inspired by Flickr, but frankly I see it as as a good thing because it works. Like Flickr, there’s a community aspect to the site, and the service lets you easily organize uploaded images into groups and sets, with the added ability of assigning the appropriate Creative Commons license to them. You can add tags, edit descriptions and titles, assign geo-information to photos and interact with other members.

But what Flickr lacks, Snapixel offers: a marketplace where users can go to buy and sell photos. Sure, Yahoo-owned Flickr once had serious plans for such an embedded service – it made, and still makes a lot of sense – and has a partnership with Getty Images in place that allows the latter company to market select images that Flickr users upload online.

Snapixel offers several account types: Free, Pro and Seller. The Pro account (currently $9.95/year) has all the features of the free offering but removes any advertising and comes with unlimited storage and bandwidth. When you sign up as a Seller, you get a Pro account with the extra ability to participate in the Snapixel Marketplace.

(The startup is giving away free one-year Pro subscriptions to the first 200 TC readers to sign up here – you can also simply enter the coupon code “TechCrunch” on the registration form)

When you apply and get activated as a Seller after screening, you can earn 60% from every photo sale – an extraordinarily high commission compared to competitors – and you get a couple of extra features such as watermarking, IPTC keyword support, flexible licensing options and unlimited storage.

All in all, Snapixel offers a great user experience combined with a service that’s packed with features, and again it’s impressive to see both of the core services of the platform so well aligned with each other in just one interface. The startup’s biggest challenge is going to be marketing; spreading the word to enough photographers who’d be interested in signing up to make the service viable.

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It appears that a few days ago there was a slight change to Flickr’s logo: an addition of a small Yahoo logo to the right side so it reads “Flickr from Yahoo.” In response, many Flickr users have taken to the photo-sharing site’s forums to express their horror at Yahoo’s branding on Flickr.

The underlying fact is that Flickr users, many of whom are techy hipsters, just don’t mix well with “middle America Yahoo” as Bartz put it a few days ago at the unveiling of Yahoo’s $100 million marketing campaign about “Y!ou.” Bartz said to a roomful of journalists and bloggers:

“When you get outside New York and Silicon Valley, everyone loves Yahoo. I just want to transplant all of you guys out of your cynicism. What is wrong with you guys?. Go be cynical about frickin’ Google. You got me pissed off.”

Yahoo also got into a bit of a sticky situation with users when it removed a photoshopped image posted on Flickr of President Barack Obama that makes him look like the Heath Ledger (Joker) character from The Dark Knight. Flickr took the image down, citing a DMCA notice, adding that “We very much value freedom of speech and creativity.” Thomas Hawk had a good overview of all the gory details.

Strangely, the company not only took down the image, but also removed the Flickr page and comments, even though this isn’t required by the DMCA. And then, in what was a totally contradictory move, Yahoo shut down the forum discussions about the political controversy, cutting off further political discourse about the image.

Judging from the comments in the discussions surrounding the (re)branding of Flickr, users don’t want to be reminded that Yahoo bought Flickr. On the forum, users call Yahoo “stale” and think the logo is “horrifying” and “ugly” with many writing that they’d rather ignore the fact that Yahoo even owns Flickr. It’s kinda sad that even though Yahoo owns one of the most popular photo-sharing sites on the web, Flickr’s users would rather not be reminded of that fact. Perhaps Yahoo should start to make nice with its younger, hipster users that reside outside of middle America.

And here’s something for laughs—a funny mockup from a community member:

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Basically, Galleries allow you to curate up to 18 photos from anywhere on Flickr into your own hand-made gallery. Previously, if you wanted to make a group of pictures surround something, you could only do it with your own. With Galleries, if you wanted to make a collection of the 18 best pictures taken at TechCrunch50, for example, you can easily do that, no matter who took the picture.

The top portion of these Galleries are the thumbnails and below each of them is the large-sized versions of the pictures in a stream. Clicking on any of the thumbnails jumps you down to the portion of the page where that particular picture resides. Here’s a particularly artsy one for you.

To add a picture to a gallery, just click the “Add to gallery” link in a picture’s menu bar.

[photo: flickr/marshall astor]

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Yahoo’s Flickr app has just gone live in the App Store. After only a little bit of time using it, I can tell that I’m going to like it. The main screen is a fairly mesmerizing slideshow of photos from your contacts on Flickr. There is an upload button that is easily accessible right on the main page, and the upload process is nice and easy. You can obviously name your picture and give it a description, but you can also easily manage what set to put it in, and what tags to give it. And the privacy settings are very clearly displayed on the upload page.

There has been no shortage of third-party applications that used Flickr’s pictures, but this app matches the look and feel of Flickr proper much more closely than any of them. Individual photo pages look great and commenting is easy. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an easy way to send pictures to Twitter, except through the emailing method.

The main page search functionality works well, and thumbnails are populated quickly. If you click on a photo, you can also go to a larger version loaded in a different screen that allows you to swipe left and right to move between images. It does not look like pinch to zoom works, however.

You can find the app for free in the App Store here.

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Oh, this just gets better and better. Or perhaps sadder and sadder.

In a post earlier this morning we discussed Flickr’s questionable decision to remove a photoshopped image of President Obama that makes him look like the Heath Ledger (Joker) character from The Dark Knight. In that post we quoted Flickr’s director of community Heather Champ who said “We very much value freedom of speech and creativity” in an explanation about why the image was removed from Flickr. We called B.S.

Now Flickr has shut off further comments on that forum post, which was most definitely not headed in a pro-Flickr direction. In his message shutting off the discussion, Zack Sheppard reiterates how important political discussion is to Flickr:

Political discussions and expression are definitely allowed here on Flickr. We don’t want to squelch political discussion, but if something is in violation of the Community Guidelines or copyright law and it’s reported, it will be taken down whether it’s a kitten, a sunset, or something political.

It looks like this thread has devolved into antics and gone off the rails so I’m shutting it down. The OPs question has been answered here. This image was removed because the Yahoo! Copyright Team received a complete Notice of Infringement.

This is fantastically absurd. Yahoo is quite literally trumpeting that they support political discussion in the very message they are sending to close down a political discussion.

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Flickr really stepped in it this time. And they’ve sparked a free speech and copyright fascism debate that is unlikely to cool down any time soon.

Sometime last week they took down a photoshopped image of President Obama that makes him look like the Heath Ledger (Joker) character from The Dark Knight. The image was created and uploaded to Flickr by 20 year old college student Firas Alkhateeb while “bored over winter school break.” It was also later altered yet again by someone else and used to create anti-obama posters that went up in Los Angeles.

Thomas Hawk has a good overview of some of the other details, but the short version is the image was removed by Flickr sometime last week due to “due to copyright-infringement concerns.”

People are angry over the takedown. There are lots of pictures mocking President Bush on a Time Magazine cover on Flickr that haven’t been removed. And of the Heath Ledger Joker character.

The DMCA Excuse

Yesterday Yahoo fired back at everyone who complained, saying that they were required to remove the image pursuant to a DMCA takedown notice. Flickr’s director of community Heather Champ says “In this intance, the Yahoo! Copyright Team here in the US received a complete Notice of Infringement as outlined by the DMCA (Digitial Millenium Copyright Act). Under the DMCA, an individual may choose to file a counterclaim”

She added “We very much value freedom of speech and creativity.”

DMCA abuse is a growing problem on the Internet, and luckily the EFF often comes in to defend people who are unfairly being accused of copyright infringement. And I don’t think there is a lawyer in America who would argue that Alkhateeb isn’t perfectly within his rights to create and distribute this image under fair use and parody defenses.

Yahoo/Flickr should have asked its attorneys if the copyright claim had any validity at all before removing the image, particularly since in this case the image is so clearly non-infringing and also is so politically charged. Yes, Yahoo would have had theoretical liability by not complying if the image was later proven to be copyright infringing. But as I said above, any lawyer could tell you that this is clearly a fair use of the original Obama image, Time Magazine’s copyright and copyright around the movie.

In the past Flickr has deleted accounts of users who are critical of President Obama, but as far as I know nothing like this was done to users who were critical of Bush.

It’s clear that the Flickr team wanted to take this image down. Not only was the image removed, but the entire page was taken down with all the comments to the image. There’s nothing in the DMCA that says you have to do that, too.

Flickr lost my trust over this issue. They failed to stand up for a user who chose to display his work on Flickr over competitors.

They should have had the courage to do the right thing. This is exactly the type of speech that our constitution is supposed to protect. This is not a stolen image. It’s a powerful political expression.

Update: This whole story just went off the rails.

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Searching for photos on the Web takes way too much time. There are simply too many photos to sort through and not enough good ones. Image search is a major priority for all the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), and they’ve all been tweaking their image search to make it better. But for the longest time, Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo, but separate from Yahoo Image Search) has been my default image search engine because that is where I can usually find the best photos.

Flickr’s been coasting. Its image search hasn’t been updated in a while—until today. But once again it has turned up the awesome on image search.

For the longest time, image search results on Flickr would be returned as a single column of fairly large images that you’d have to scroll down and tab through to get to more pages. You could filter the images by “recent,” “relevant,” or “interesting.” Now that scroll view is still available (it is called “detail”), but the default view shows small thumbnails scattered across the page. As you resize the browser window, you get more or fewer images automatically. You can also hover over an image for more information (such as number of views, comments, and faves, as well as tags, location, and date) without clicking through. (They should add licensing and copyright information as well). These new features help save time by giving you a better preview of each photo, similar to what Yahoo is doing with its main image search.

You can also view by medium-sized thumbnails and, my favorite, in slideshow mode, which takes over your whole screen and shows each image huge on a black background with a thumbnail navigation ribbon along the bottom. The slideshow view is much more immersive and feels more like a desktop photo app.

You can still sort by “recent” or “interesting” (”relevant” is no longer an option though). There is also a new drop-down menu that lets you search everyone’s photos, or only your photostream, that of your contacts, friends and family, or special collections such as Creative Commons images or Getty photos. Some of these options were only available in advanced search before. Again, this helps remove steps in the search process. All in all, I think Flickr just kept me from jumping ship.

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Facebook has fast become one of the leading photo and video sharing sites on the web. The social network already lets you upload photos via MMS or through Facebook apps on the iPhone, Blackberry and other mobile devices. Today, Facebook is giving users another way to share photos immediately— via email.

Facebook now lets you create a unique upload email address where you can send photos and videos from anywhere you have email access on your mobile device. When you attach a photo or video to an email, you can include the comment to the photo in the subject line of the email. But if there is more than one image or video attached to the email, the caption will apply to all the attachments.

Facebook says that your email provider determines the file size of how many videos and photos you can send in one email, but the social network doesn’t have any restrictions on how many images can be uploaded via one email. Images uploaded via the email will be placed in the “Mobile Upload” photo album (where photos from MMS and apps go) and will follow the privacy settings of that album, according to Facebook.

This sounds a lot like Flickr’s option to upload via email. Similar to Facebook, Flickr gives you a unique email address that you can use to add your photos to your Flickr photostream. This move shows how important photo and video sharing is to the social network, which saw 1 billion video views last month.

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Butterfield sent out a tweet tonight announcing that the new company was hiring. The link he sent goes to a page on a site for the Tiny Speck project. Along the top of the jobs page it reads “We’re a new company, founded by four core members of the original team behind Flickr.” It’s no secret that another of those four core team members is former Flickr head of engineering, Cal Henderson, who left Yahoo in April of this year.

So what is Tiny Speck all about? That is still not entirely clear. The word on the street has been that it’s some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they’ll say on the site is “We are working on something huge and fun and we need help.”

And the main page doesn’t offer much help either. On it you’ll find the words, “O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!” For the non-English majors, that’s a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is also the passage that inspired the title of Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World.

Below that, you’ll find the logo, and below that you’ll find the link stating that Tiny Speck is hiring. And below that it reads, “Other than that, we have nothing in particular to say for ourselves right now.” Mysterious.

So, is there anything to be drawn from this position they’re hiring for? A bit, yes. The position is Creative Production Team Lead. The description says this person will be supporting staff and contractors including “illustrators, along with the occasional writer, animator or sound designer.”

So clearly this is a creative project — it almost sounds like their making an animated movie. As awesome as that would be, with people like Henderson on board, you can bet there’s impressive engineering going on to turn this all into a game of some sort (if that is in fact what this is all about).

Something else that is interesting is that this is being run out of Vancouver, according to the job posting. That is also where Flickr got its start. And guess how Flickr started? As a photo tool for a project called Game Neverending, a massively multiplayer online game.

It eventually became clear that the photo sharing aspect was the idea that would take off for Ludicorp, Butterfield and Fake’s company. So Game Neverending was tabled, and Flickr was born. Yahoo then bought Ludicorp and the rights to Flickr in March of 2005.

Looks like we may be seeing Butterfield returning to his roots.

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Earlier this month, Flickr started flirting with Twitter integration by allowing users to link their Flickr accounts to their Twitter accounts. The experiment was only for email uploads, which simultaneously created a Tweet with a short http://flic.kr link back to the photo on Flickr. Now that integration is an official feature called Flickr2Twitter.

In addition to email uploads, Flickr now lets you Tweet out any photos directly from the site. After linking your accounts, whenever you click on the “Blog this” button on any photo on Flickr, your Twitter account will be one of the distribution options. This works for both photos you’ve uploaded and other photos you find on the site. I have a feeling you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon.

Developers who want to add Flickr as a photo option to desktop and mobile clients can use Flickr’s existing APIs. (You can learn more here). Once that happens, Twitpic and yFrog will have some company on those clients as a pull-down option.

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Flickr

If you visit the site, you’ll see that it now exposes its traffic stats in the lower right-hand corner. It’s a blatant attempt to make money, at the very least from advertisers willing to throw links on the page. Or presumably to get someone to buy the domain.

Here are the stats they publish:

Flicker by the numbers:

Unique Visits:
3.6MM /yr

Source:
Direct Navigation (95.74%)

Outbound Clicks:
400K /yr

CPC Keyword Values:
(Photography equipment)
$2.50 -$3.00 /click

Daily Value to Advertisers:
$2700.00 – $3300.00

(Data is approximate, tracking by Google Analytics)

Below that is a link to contact them.

You’ll notice that over 95% of the traffic comes from direct navigation. That’s because if you Google “Flicker,” you’ll find flickr.com first, and flicker.com nowhere to be found on the first page of results. And that means that millions of people each year are typing in “flicker.com” likely expecting flickr.com. Certainly, that’s worth something, and Flicker knows it.

But the people who own flicker.com probably shouldn’t hold their breath for Yahoo to buy the domain anytime soon. After all, they’re busy selling off their own killer domain names on the cheap to make money.

And so the site is resorting to rather shady tactics. While its main page claims that it’s down for maintenance, there’s a Twitter button right next to that to tweet out that it’s down for maintenance. You might think that most sites wouldn’t want people to know that they’re site is down, but not Flicker. That’s because they clearly want people to advertise on their new “down” website.

And it’s working, look at how many people are actually tweeting this garbage out. You can be sure that a lot of them think Yahoo’s Flickr is down, and they’re just trying to let others know. Flicker has its own Twitter account that highlights all these tweets.

On the site below its maintenance message, you’ll find a bunch of links to camera equipment (the same group Flicker directly appeals to with its ‘CPC Keyword Value’ stats). And just to keep things even more shady, all of these links are bit.ly shortened links.

Update: As commenter Noah points out, some of those Bit.ly links aren’t exactly bathing in traffic. This one has only 500 clicks in the past two weeks.

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As the world watches the violence and post-election protests escalate in Iran, startling images from the streets of Tehran are disseminating through various social media. Many of them are tagged #iranelection, a hashtag which started on Twitter but is spreading to Flickr and elsewhere.

Since it is difficult to find photos in the sea of Tweets using the same #iranelection tag I’ve been using Twicsy, an image search engine for photos posted to Twitter which we wrote about yesterday. If you search “iranelection” or “tehran iran”, dozens of images from the protests will pop up.

Fair warning: these images are raw and unfiltered, and some of them are quite gruesome, showing people getting shot and lying in pools of blood. The most tragic one shows what is described as a woman protester bleeding to death after being shot today. This same incident was caught on someone’s video or cell phone video camera and uploaded to YouTube. (I hesitate to link to this because it is so hard to watch, but you can find it by searching for “An innocent girl was shot by Iran riot police” on YouTube).

Update: The woman is being called “Neda” and her image is becoming a symbol of Iran’s brutality against its own people. Her name is already a trending topic on Twitter. There are now at least two separate videos of her death on YouTube. Since they are spreading around on their own accord and other news organizations are linking to them, I will add them here. Again, these are highly graphic and disturbing, so consider that before you click (video uploaded June 20, video uploaded June 21).

There’s been plenty of debate about how big a role Twitter is playing in events in Iran. At the very least, it is being used as a channel to distribute information and images to the rest of the world. It is not always clear where these images come from or who took them. Some of the images are credited to professional news agencies such as the AP, Getty, Reuters, and Arabic news organizations and are being spread around by bloggers both inside and outside Iran. Others look like they were taken in haste or on a cell phone. (For other images from Iran taken by citizen photojournalists, check out Demotix/iranelection).

Below are a few images circulating on Twitter. The first one was uploaded on June 14, 2009 and has no attribution (if anyone knows the photographer, please tell me in comments). Update: The photo is by Olivier Laban-Mattei/Agence France Press/Getty Images:

This one was also uploaded on June 14, and is also uncredited. Update, this one is also Olivier Laban-Mattei from AFP:

This one was taken by Farhad Rajabali of news.gooya.com:

So was this one (Farhad Rajabali/news.gooya.com):

Beyond Twitter, you can find a slide show of Iran protest images on the New York Times. And on Flickr, Faramarz Hashemi has collected the set of #iranelection photos embedded below (some of them overlap with the ones on Twitter).

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Shutterfly, an online photo sharing and printing site, is adding video capability to its photo sharing sites. Shutterfly is using video hosting site Motionbox to power its video sharing service. So when you upload a video to your Shutterfly Share site, it will also be stored in your Motionbox account. If you upload to Motionbox directly, you will be given the option to post your video to your Shutterfly Share site.

Users can also share videos to social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Blogger can upgrade for unlimited video storage and HD-quality playback. The free account is a little limiting for storage—you can only upload ten video clips. For $30 per year, you can have a premium subscription which allows higher file size limits, unlimited video downloads and HD-quality playback.

I’m assuming that Shutterfly will monetize the addition of videos by offering customized DVDs of clips. Currently, the company offers users a variety or printing services where users can not only print their photos, but also create cards, mugs, invitations, apparel and more with photos emblazoned on each item. But I’m not sure how else Shutterfly can make money off of the video component.

Shutterfly, which IPO’d in 2006, is playing catch up to other more popular photo sharing sites, like Flickr and Photobucket, which both host video as well as photos. Even Facebook is becoming the go-to destination to share photos and videos. But Shutterfly, a vestige of the dot-com boom and bust, has managed to survive, despite being in an ultra competitive space that’s chock full of similar offerings and products.

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Watch out TwitPic, Flickr is finally waking up to the power of letting users share links to their photos over Twitter. Flickr members can now sign up for the Flickr Twitter Beta, which allows them to link their Flickr and Twitter accounts (using Oauth) to their send out a Tweet whenever they upload a new photo via email. Here is an example from a Twitter employee (see screenshot), which then links to this photo on Flickr.

This only works for email uploads right now. Flickr gives you a special @photos.flickr.com email address which allows you to email photos directly into your Flickr stream from your mobile phone or desktop email. If you want to Tweet out a photo, you simply add “2twitter” at the end of your special email address before the @ sign. It is a bit kludgy. (Why not just add it as a feature to a mobile Flickr app instead?) But once you set it up, it is pretty easy. I just tried it myself. There is nothing like Tweeting out a photo to get an instant response.

This is just a taste of where Flickr might be going. Right now, you can’t choose to Tweet out photos you upload directly to the Website (yet). But the beta test points in that direction. Flickr is using its own shortened URL (http://flic.kr). And it is letting users choose which photos to share via Twitter instead of automatically sharing all uploaded photos, which is the right way to do it.

(Hat tip to Ouriel, who has a more complicated way to do the same thing via Twitterfeed).

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Photo-sharing on the Web keeps getting more popular as people transfer more of their digital photos from their the black holes of their computer hard drives to social networks where their friends and family can actually see them. Although Facebook Photos has emerged as the largest photo-sharing service in terms of users and is one of the fastest-growing of any size, it is still not the largest by the sheer number of images that it stores.

That honor, for the moment, goes to ImageShack, which currently hosts 20 billion images, I’ve confirmed with the company (for more background on ImageShack, read this post). Facebook holds 15 billion photos, according to a spokesperson there. But it should catch up by the end of the year. Facebook users are adding photos at a rate of 850 million photos a month, compared to 100 million photos a month by ImageShack users. Good thing Facebook just fixed its storage architecture to be able to handle the bigger load. Clarification: The numbers used in this post are for unique images. Facebook actually has 60 billion image files because it stores each image in four different sizes. But it stores 15 billion unique photos. The 20 billion Imageshack figure is also for unique images but ImageShack founder Jack Levin says that it is an estimate and there could be 10 percent duplication. The Flickr and Multiply numbers below I’ve also confirmed are unique numbers.

After Facebook and ImageShack, the third largest image warehouse on the Web appears to be News Corp’s PhotoBucket, with 7.2 billion photos. And then Yahoo’s Flickr comes in at 3.4 billion, which also includes some videos. Interestingly, coming in right behind Flickr in the photo count is social network Multiply, with 3 billion images. Multiply’s photo=sharing options are one of its main strengths, which make sit attractive to its core demographic of families and moms (an area where Facebook is still struggling). Picasa is probably up there somewhere, but Google won’t get any more specific than “billions” of photos have been uploaded “and millions of photos are uploaded every day.”

In fact, with the exception of Photobucket, none of these services publicly discloses its latest image count. I had to ask each company individually. Some companies like Shutterfly refuse to disclose their numbers, and they are a publicly traded company. I am still waiting to hear back from Kodak about KodakGallery..com, but the trend lines of these older photo storage services are not encouraging (see second chart at the bottom of the post). Below are the figures I was able to collect directly from each company:

Image Warehouses On The Web (numbers are total images stored)

ImageShack: 20 billion
Facebook: 15 billion
PhotoBucket: 7.2 billion
Flickr 3.4 billion
Multiply: 3 billion
Picasa “billions” (?)

While Google chose to be vague, Yahoo was completely transparent. It provided the following additional stats on Flickr:

Photos/videos uploaded daily: 3 million (implies 90 million a month)
Photos that are public: 50%
Photos that are tagged: 30%
Geo-tagged photos: 110 million
Number of unique tags: 38 million
Amount of traffic that comes from search engines: 75%

And Multiply shared with me the fact that its 12.5 million registered users are uploading an impressive 75 million photos a month. That comes to six photos per day per registered user, which is actually more than Facebook. Since Multiply encourages high-resolution uploads, it is handling 2.5 terabytes per day in image uploads. A little under one percent of its users, or 10,000 of them pay $20 a year for premium services such as unlimited storage and photo album backups. The one percent of premium users accounts for between 5 and 7 percent of all uploads.

If you look at comScore numbers, however, it is clear that Facebook is gaining the most usage overall, with 161 million unique visitors worldwide in February. Flickr is a distant but strong second with 76.5 million visitors. Photobucket is at 58.6 million uniques, Picasa is at 39.9 million, and ImageShack is at 33.2 million.

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Heres an idea: If you’re looking to build up your social site’s user base, add support for a popular, similarly focused (but not directly competitive) social site to your network’s iPhone application. It may sound crazy (who wants to promote someone else’s brand?), but that’s exactly what Radar, a social network for sharing cameraphone images and videos, is doing. This morning, Radar has released an update to their iPhone application which adds Flickr support to the mix.

Though Radar and Flickr are quite similar in that they’re both intended as repositories for your photographs, their finer focus differs just enough for this idea to work. Flickr is generally used for collections of high resolution images, with the comments area serving as a grounds for conversations that stretch on indefinitely. Radar, on the other hand, is more for spur-of-the-moment, heres-what-I’m-doing-right-now type stuff.

It also helps that free Flickr support on the iPhone is currently mostly unclaimed; searching for “Flickr” on the iPhone returns a handful of Flickr-friendly uploaders, less than half of which are free. Of these free applications, very few have more than 50 reviews. While the number of reviews isn’t an absolute indication of the number of downloads, it’s generally relative. In other words, it doesn’t seem like any of these applications have really taken off. Radar only added Flickr support this morning, yet already shows up in the first page of results for the term (albeit at the very bottom.) Flickr has a rather substantial user base; if Radar manages to become the go-to application for Flickr, they might just pull enough eyes toward their own service to make the endeavor worth while. That said, if Flickr ever gets around to releasing their own official iPhone offering (beyond the m.flickr.com Web App), it would likely take the throne pretty quickly.

Therein lies the flaw of Radar; while the concept is grand, it seems.. replaceable. It’s an entire social service built up around a single idea, and it’s an idea that other social sites can get (and pretty much have already got) up and running quite easily. Facebook’s iPhone app, for example, allows the user to upload mobile photos straight their profiles for sharing and commenting. The same can be said about Twitter, of course – it’s an entire social service build up around a single idea (a similar idea, really – just text, rather than images). But Twitter succeeds in that the format promotes efficient (or at least brief) conversation and open dialog that tends to branch out into many more conversations. Would the conversation flourish as well if pictures were required at the beginning of each?

As a piggyback application for services like Flickr and Twitter, I see it working; as a standalone service, I’m not sure I see the point.

Ah, well – Radar is free and does as advertised. If you’re looking for a solid Flickr uploader, it’s worth checking out. Here’s the iTunes link.

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If Facebook has one standout application it has to be Photos. Measured on its own, it is the largest photo site on the Web. A full 69 percent of Facebook’s monthly visitors worldwide either look at or upload photos, based on comScore data. And more than 10 billion photos have been uploaded to the site.

And it’s been pulling away from its competitors. As can be seen in the comScore chart above, as recently as last September the top three photo sites in the U.S. were running neck-and-neck, with Facebook Photos at 23.9 million unique visitors, followed by Photobucket at 21.3 million uniques, and Flickr at 19.5 million uniques. But by January, the number of monthly U.S. visitors going to Facebook Photos shot up 41 percent to 33.6 million. Meanwhile, Photobucket is up only 7 percent to 22.8 million, while Flickr is up 12 percent to 21.9 million. (Picasa is a distant fourth in the U.S. with 8.1 million).

In other words, Facebook increased the gap between its closest competitor (Photobucket in the U.S.) from 2.6 million monthly unique visitors to 10.8 million. On a worldwide basis, the gap between Facebook Photos and Flickr (which is the No. 2 site globally, and looks like it is about to pass Photobucket in the U.S.) went from 41.2 million unique monthly visitors in September to 87 million in December (the most recent data available, see chart below).

What accounts for Facebook’s advantage in the photo department? The biggest factor is simply that it is the default photo feature of the largest social network in the world. And of all the viral loops that Facebook benefits from, its Photos app might have the largest viral loop of all built into it. Whenever one of your friends tags a photo with your name, you get an email. This single feature turns a solitary chore—tagging and organizing photos—into a powerful form of communication that connects people through activities they’ve done in the past in an immediate, visual way. I would not be surprised if people click back through to Facebook from those photo notifications at a higher rate than from any other notification, including private messages.

But the tagging feature has been part of Facebook Photos for a long time. What happened in September to accelerate growth? That is when a Facebook redesign went into effect which added a Photos tab on everyone’s personal homepage.

(The chart above shows U.S. visitors through January. The chart below shows international visitors through December, with 153.3 million unique visitors for Facebook Photos, 66.7 million for Flickr, 45.5 million for Picasa and 42.7 million for Photobucket).

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Adography is a relatively new service that offers a way to monetize your own amateur photos if you think there are some who might make for great advertisement material.

Adography is essentially a marketplace where people can put their amateur photos up for sale, while businesses can put out requests for photos by creating so-called ‘want-ads’. You can find an example of a listing here, which includes the image specifications, asking price, and more. The service is free for people who upload their photos, but we should note the FAQ mentions that Adography is automatically granted an exclusive worldwide license for twelve months for every uploaded picture.

It’s obviously not a novel idea, as there are plenty of web services out there with a similar proposition. Even Yahoo’s Flickr was once considering launching its own marketplace dubbed Flickr Stock. The problem with most of these is, evidently, marketing the service and getting the scale needed to attract enough advertisers and photographers to make it compelling enough for both target groups to come back for more.

Adography faces the same problems, and personally I think the user experience is a bit below par for the moment. That said, the name has a nice ring to it and no clear leader has emerged yet in this space (meaning non stock photography marketplaces) so who knows if this one will fly. Then again, I’m not so sure the advertisers Adography cites as examples (e.g. Coca-Cola) will be interested in low-resolution amateur images for their official branding campaigns. Seems to me small businesses would be more interested in the service, but how do you reach them?

Update: as a commentor notes, iStockPhoto is probably the most familiar name in this space, but it’s not really the best place for true amateur photos.

On a sidenote: I love this type of story. Someone has an idea, which lingers in his or her mind until one day this person wakes up and decides to incorporate and try to turn the idea into a business, not even considering anything but bootstrapping to get it started. In this particular case, the founder is documenting this road less traveled by blogging about it, which is a welcome aside for aspiring entrepreneurs who haven’t made the jump yet and want to read someone else’s experiences first.

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The World Economic Forum in Davos is finally trying to make its mark in social media at this year’s conference. The organization is unveiling the beta version of its exclusive Facebook-style social networking site, called WELCOM, reserved for high-profile attendees of the World Economic Forum like Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Putin and Kofi Annan.

The site, which was designed in partnership with Adobe Systems, BT Innovate and Microsoft, will actually be a pretty nifty way to share ideas between the world’s best and brightest. That is, if world leaders will bother to take the time to contribute to the site and establish profiles. (Don’t count on it).

It seems like the forum is reinventing the wheel since it uses LinkedIn and Facebook style features, yet doesn’t appear to link to either of those networks. Other conferences such as now-defunct tech conference PCForum have used existing networking sites, such as LinkedIn, to their advantage by creating groups and discussion boards for attendees. Rather than reinvent the wheel, they tapped into sites where most people already have profiles.

WELCOM will allow world leaders to sign into virtual meetings with video technology, share documents, and discuss topics live. Members can also set up private rooms and invite guest experts to participate when needed. WELCOM can also publish works and news via a public page, to share results.

Although the World Economic Forum is encouraging members to use the site to share personal news as they would a Facebook account, it’s doubtful whether world leaders would poke each other and reveal personal details, and other more “complicated” matters.

This application comes as no surprise since the World Economic Forum has made several strides into the social web this year. The forum has active MySpace and Facebook pages and a Twitter feed. The forum also uses Flickr to post current photos and features two YouTube channels, the more tame forum channel, and the Davos Debates channel.

Here are screenshots of Welcom. It’s probably as close as you are going to get to the site, so enjoy.

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