There are really only two blogs targeted at iPhone photography that I follow on a regular basis (several times a day). The first one is iPhoneography and the second one is Life in LoFi: iPhoneography. They review all the latest apps and they also let you know when a certain app is free on the App Store. I rely on them quite a bit and heed all the warnings when an app is sub-par. Also, it’s nice to be a part of the iPhone photography community. So, if you’re into this sort of thing — go check ‘em out. Pronto.

Links:
iPhoneography
Life in LoFi: iPhoneography

Piwigo is a photo gallery software for the web that comes with powerful features to publish and manage your collection of pictures. Started in 2002, the project is now supported by an active community of users and developers. It supports numerous galleries of all sizes all over the world, from an individual ten-photos party to the images stock of an agency. This scalability is supported by smart browsing capabilities based on categories, tags and chronological search. Various extensions make Piwigo even more scalable and customizable to suit your own needs and desires. Piwigo is both web and photo standard compliant. And, icing on the cake, it is free and opensource.

I went ahead and downloaded the archive and installed the Piwigo software on my server — it went pretty smooth, just follow the instructions. Then I downloaded the iPhone app and got them to play nice together (just sign in). Oh, and the app and the gallery are both free. Here’s a screenshot of the iPhone interface:

And here’s a screenshot of the actual gallery online:

Setting up the self hosted gallery is not super simple, mind you — but if you are used to operate your own self hosted WordPress blog and you have web space to spare I’d say go ahead and try it out. It’s a simple way of getting to your own pics in a clean, fast way.

UPDATE: Pierrick Le Gall (the founder of Piwigo) contacted me to let us know that there are two WordPress plugins for Piwigo; PiwigoMedia — allows media from a Piwigo gallery to be inserted into WordPress posts. PiwigoPress — a sidebar widget that displays thumbnails from a Piwigo gallery. Pierrick also pointed out that my comment function here @ Fredstuff was broken. It should be up and running now. Let the commenting commence!

Links:
Piwigo.org | Piwigo for iPhone @ The App Store

I uploaded the same photos I just uploaded to Flickr so you can see what it looks like when you have a gallery up at imgur. There’s plenty to chose from when it comes to linking to a particular picture:

You get six different link options, from direct link to pre-formatted links for message boards and HTML links. I use it a lot, especially in conjunction with Reddit and Facebook. It’s free, easy to sign up and it has very (extremely) little down time. It’s great!

Links: imgur.com

I needed a quick and easy fix. I found one, it’s called Shades. It’s free. From the delevopers site;

Shades is a FREE utility for controlling the brightness of your screen. It runs in the background providing always-available fine-grained control over the brightness of your display via a slick Mac-like interface.

Shades installs into the System Preferences window and it’s very easy to use. If you run into any trouble/questions there’s a useful FAQ.

The other app is Menu Eclipse (no direct link, find it under ‘Software’), it goes nicely together with Shades. From the developers site;

Save your constant menu pixels from getting burned into your screen!
Gain better focus on your work & play, and away from the menu bar!

Its single purpose is to dim the top menu bar in Leopard. The effect is pleasant when watching a movie but I’ve found I use it all the time at about 40% ‘strength’. When you hover over the menu bar the effect goes away. Nice. Oh, and did I mention it’s free? It is.

This pic (and about a million others) is part of a license known as Creative Commons. That means I can use it without feeling bad compared to all those times I’ve ‘stolen’ a picture from a Google Images search. Sorry about that. There’s all kinds of media published under Creative Commons; video, audio, photos, music and so on. If you need media that’s free to use I’m going to point you in the direction of this list made by Mashable.

26 places filled with free media – imagine that.