picplz Shuts Down July 3, 2012

Fellow picplz users, the service will be shutting down a day before America's independence day. A pity as I found that it is one of the better photo sharing apps around with some photo editing features built-in, though I've not been using it lately. RIP.

Clouds above the Malaysian sky...

Was driving down South for a meeting yesterday and noticed that the clouds were rather interesting, so I took a photo with my HTC Desire mobile phone. After putting the photo through picplz's new editing features of cropping and rotating, here's the original:

If these clouds were in Russia*, they would look like this:

*assuming the Russian Toy Camera filter in picplz turns a photo Russian. ;)

The Unwelcome Guest

Ever so subtle, your host may drop a hint here and there when you have over spent your welcome...

picplz "Quickie" Smartphone Unsharp Mask Takes The Lead Over Lightbox

I've been comparing both picplz and Lightbox for quite awhile now and am still at it albeit a little slower these days as the novelty began to wear off. Make no mistake, I still love to snap a thing or two here and there but due to busy work schedule, the interest waned a little.

Today, I stumbled upon this "Enhanced Definition" filter in picplz and would like to share it with everyone here. The photo was first processed with another great app called Pixlr-o-matic from Autodesk before I put it through picplz. The one below was untouched by any picplz filter while the one at the bottom got its definition enhanced. You be the judge:

As far as I'm concerned, picplz helped sharpen my blurry photo. Have not encountered any other app with such a sharpening tool. Hence picplz 2, Lightbox 1.

Lightbox draws with picplz - In-App Cropping

As Lightbox gets updated, a few features had been added and cropping within the app is one of them. Was meaning to post this for quite some time now but when I had the time, Blogger did not. So today is the day for this. :)

There is 1:1, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9 and unrestricted cropping.

Besides that, you can also rotate and flip the photos.

Lightbox 1 picplz 1.

picplz 1 Lightbox 0 - Photo uploads from desktop

I know picplz and Lightbox are both mobile photo sharing apps where their primary task is to share photos taken by mobile phones but I like to upload photos taken with my digital camera, too. I would prefer to upload to flickr but I'm stuck with the 200 photo limit because I'm just too stingy to go for the pro account. Then there's Picasa but that one's got a 1GB limit... or something like that and yup, too stingy to pay for more space.

picplz and Lightbox are the only ones at this moment where I can upload photos and hot link to this blog (because if I upload photos to this blog directly, it also eats into the 1GB limit that it shares with Picasa) with no visible space limitation.

Oh yeah, previously I also upload to twitpic but then there was some controversial stuff there so I stopped that. Then there was yfrog but both twitpic and yfrog don't got no filters to play with. :P

Now comes to the point of this post - I can't find any options in Lightbox for me to upload photos from my desktop. I can only upload through the Android app. picplz allows me to upload through its desktop web page so it wins this round over Lightbox. picplz 1, Lightbox 0.

Here's my latest upload to picplz (enhanced with my favourite Russian Toy Camera filter), mistakenly taken with my non-mobile phone camera:

Light up my pic boxes, please

I'm in a dilemma now. I've got both Lightbox and picplz apps in my Android phone and don't know where to share my photos! At the moment, both have some unique filters that the other doesn't have. I like Lightbox's Lomo, Ansel and the new Testino filters, and picplz's Russian Toy Camera and C-41 filters. picplz also has a Enhanced Definition filter that seems to sharpen the photo to greater detail.

I'm going to use both for now and here is the same photo using Lightbox's Ansel filter and picplz's Russian Toy Camera, respectively: