It’s been about 10 days since the last tool - Ripples was released. Thanks everyone for sending in your comments and suggestions.

If you haven’t noticed already, a new toy has been up on the site for few days. It’s called Motivate Me. It can be used to create your own personalized motivational posters. Not sure what a motivational poster is? Well here’s an example:

A motivational poster (or inspirational poster) is a type of poster commonly designed for use in schools and offices. The intent of motivational posters is to make people think differently about the things that they may be learning or doing.

So you take a picture, add a witty title and description to make the viewer think twice by relaying a sarcastic or humorous message.

Our new tool makes it a breeze to create your own customized motivational posters. You get options to change the font, color and style of the text on screen. All changes are reflected in real time, which is a fancy way of saying that everything is fast!

If you’re not sure what to create, there’s a lot of inspiration on Google Images.

There are tons of motivational and de-motivational posters out there. Now you have the power to create your own! Check it out: http://clipyourphotos.com/motivate

One of the reasons I started ClipYourPhotos is because it is my mission to make it very easy for anyone to do really cool stuff with their photos with just few clicks.

That got me thinking for a while as to what works and what doesn’t in the site. And so far, simplicity has worked well on ClipYourPhotos. Framer is used by thousands everyday, and I believe that’s because it is so very simple to use. Same goes for Bulkr and other tools. So I thought of doing a small experiment and quickly putting an easy to use one-purpose tool. The experiment is to see how a single purpose tool works out on the site. And based on the result, more similar tools will be added later.

That is how Ripples Maker was born.

It’s a no frills tool that adds rippled reflections to your photos.. instantly!

It doesn’t have too many feature and using it is pretty straightforward. I’m pretty happy with the results since it was a quick project (2 days). Here’s what the tool can do:

Ripples Maker is up on the site and you can start creating stuff right away at: http://clipyourphotos.com/ripples

Your comments or suggestions to make this or any other tool better are always so very welcome!

Apparently all the links in my previous post were broken. It happened due to a small negligence on my side. I’m writing this post just to reach out the email subscribers. Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

You can click this link to check out Face Bender V2. This time the link works

-Prakaz

It’s been a while since the last blog post. I’ve been working on improving the ClipYourPhotos framework so that it’s more extensible and future tools and toys will have visual and other consistency.

Face Bender was added to the site about a month back and I’ve been getting lots of comments from users. Thank you all for sending them across. It helps me to understand what users want and how the tools can be improved.

Today, a new version of Face Bender is out on the site. This version is much simpler to use and has many more effects than before. Now you have more ways to make fun of your friends’ photos Take it for a spin and please let me know what you think so that it can be improved.

Check out the new version and have a good laugh – Face Bender V2.

Your comments/suggestions are always welcome.

It’s been a month and half since Bulkr was released and I’m delighted to say that it has been already used to download more than 1 million photos (1,004,530 as of this writing) from Flickr! Thank you everyone for using the app and for your feedback/comments. I wanna share a small story on how Bulkr came into existence and how an app I created for myself has been used by thousands to download more than a million Flickr photos in a short time.

How it all started…

Bulkr started with a problem – somewhere in mid November last year I wanted to copy all my Flickr photos to Facebook. After struggling with few apps it occurred to me that there really wasn’t a decent tool to backup Flickr photos on Mac. So, in a few days I created a small prototype app which could download everything from my Flickr account to the computer. It was called PhotoGettr then. Here are some screenshots tweeted during it’s development:

• Initial idea on paper
• The first working version (it didn’t even have a download button!)
• During development

PhotoGettr was not really on my project list for ClipYourPhotos. I created it just because I needed it then. The first version was named Bulkr and it was up on ClipYourPhotos on 6th Dec, 2009. Only after it was featured on MakeUseOf.com few days later, I realized how useful this was to others too. Bulkr was mentioned in dozens of other blogs and the snowball effect started.

Bulkr had a great month. Many people sent in comments and suggestions. Being on Flickr App Garden also helped. But soon it became clear that some Flickr members found Bulkr upsetting. The idea that anyone could have access to their photos so easily was appalling to them. Few emailed and said that they would complain about this to Flickr. I replied assuring major changes would come in the next version of Bulkr and thanked them for their feedback.

And then the party stopped…

On 5th Jan, (while eating breakfast) I got a mail from Flickr with the subject “Flickr Appgarden Violation”. And that kind of subject is never a good sign . Apparently, Flickr had been getting complaints about Bulkr. They reviewed the app and found out that any Flickr user’s large size photo could be downloaded using the “Browse User” button. During development I thought that this would be a cool feature and ignorantly included it, forgetting Flickr’s privacy settings. It was relatively a small bug. But it proved to be fatal.

My bad. The app’s API key was disabled by Flickr immediately. Which is a fancy way of saying Bulkr was no more functional!

I stopped eating breakfast and got to work right away. And in 2 days a new version of Bulkr was ready. It had all the changes that Flickr users wanted. I discussed the changes with the nice folks at Flickr and everything was well. The API key was enabled and Bulkr was back from the dead.

The downloads resumed…

Since Flickr re-enabled the API key, the downloads have resumed and every day Bulkr is used to download literally thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of photos everyday. It has been an awesome learning experience for me. My sincere thanks to everyone who used the app and sent me feedbacks/comments – which really helped to make the app better. Also kudos to the Flickr dev team for creating a fine API framework and to Chris from Flickr, who helped me steer Bulkr in the right direction.

And thank you for reading. I did not intend this post to be so long, but since you have reached here, I guess, you don’t mind

What next?

More features will be added to Bulkr. Perhaps it should also have an uploader? Or something else…? Your suggestions are always welcome. You can keep up with developement and other bits happening at ClipYourPhotos on Twitter.

If you like Bulkr, please add it as a fav in the Flickr App Garden. It’s good karma

The first version of Bulkr was released about a month ago. Since then, it’s been installed by thousands of users around the world and has been used to download more than half a million Flickr photos already!

Thanks to everyone who sent in comments/feedback/bug reports. A new version of the app is now available. The following changes have been incorporated:

v0.16 beta:

If already installed on your computer, Bulkr will prompt you to update when it’s opened. Or you can install the update from Bulkr homepage.

Bulkr homepage also has also been revamped. You can now see exactly how many photos have been downloaded using Bullkr (634,452 as of this writing).

If you like Bulkr, please add it as a fav in the Flickr App Garden and spread the word. Thanks!

As mentioned in the last post, a new photo editing toy has been released today on ClipYourPhotos.com. It’s aptly named Face Bender and can be used to bulge, pinch, twist and turn your photos! It’s will be easier to explain with examples so below are few photos that were transformed using the app:

The first photo was edited in under a minute (sorry Britney! ) . The last two took about 5 minutes each. Bottom line: using Face Bender is a no-brainer. You don’t need to download any software and you certainly don’t have to be a Photoshop ninja! Just few button clicks, mouse moves and you’ll become a pro!

I’m delighted to mention that there is also an undo/redo button which comes in very handy.  You can also use ctrl+Z, ctrl+Y keyboard keys to perform those actions. [ and ] keys can be used to increase/decrease the bender sizer respectively. As usual, photos can be loaded from and saved back to your computer instantly.

Face Bender is still in development and other features will be gradually added. Please help me improve the app by giving your comments/ suggestions.

Wait no more, start bending faces - http://clipyourphotos.com/bender

Welcome to ClipYourPhotos Blog!

It’s been a great (and fun) year at ClipYourPhotos. 3 tools Archivr, Framer and Bulkr were released in 2009 and many more are coming soon. This blog will be used for announcements, early previews, development updates, tips & tricks and more. You can keep up with stuffs happening at ClipYourPhotos by subscribing to RSS, email updates or via Twitter.

A new photo toy will be released in a day or two… stay tuned!

Thanks for visiting and a Happy New Year!!

-Prakash