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OnceUpon. Easier & faster photobook creation. Swedish photo book company and past Visual 1st presenter, Once Upon has added an AutoFill feature to its photobook-making app to enable users to upload nearly 600 images at once to their photobook. Of note: Once Upon’s app has been downloaded more than 4M times since 2017.
Dscoop & The Dead Pixels Society. Photo imaging track. At Dscoop Edge next week industry friend Gary Pageau is hosting a Photo Imaging CONNECT mini-conference track, featuring four 45-minute sessions, two on Monday, May 8, and two on Tuesday, May 9, specific for the photo imaging segment. Check out the program, speakers, and Dscoop discount.
Poparazzi. That elusive what’s next in social photosharing conundrum. Poparazzi, the once-hot photo-sharing app is shutting down. Only last year the app had grown to 5+M installs and said to have raised $15M in Series A funding. The concept behind Poparazzi was a photosharing-focused social network that essentially took Instagram’s tagging feature and turned it into the entire experience. On Poparazzi, users could tag their friends but couldn’t post photos of their own. I.e. you’d share the photos of your friends instead of self-promoting your own. Clever idea – but the concept of sharing photos this way apparently ran out of steam. Who’s next to reinvent authentic photosharing and leave Instagram in the dust?
BeReal. More than a 1-trick pony, after all. In our last issue, I mentioned that another app focused on authentic sharing of photos, BeReal, appeared to have sizzled, presumably as a result of not expanding fast enough beyond a single use case. Well, whether it has been in time or not remains to be seen, but the company has now announced 2 new features being tested in the UK: it offers users the option to share their photos more than once a day; it is also rolling out RealPeople, a feed of authentic & unfiltered photo moments shared by "the world’s most interesting people." The feed includes updates from athletes, artists, activists and other notable users.
Instagram. Adding music. In the meantime, the no longer so authentic photosharing app Instagram is still very much alive. It just announced it is testing a new feature that will let you add songs to the photo carousels you post to the platform. A TikTok-for-photos kind of idea?
Mediaclip & Tracer Imaging. New wall décor products. Mediaclip announces the addition of both in store retail and fulfillment wall décor product lines from Tracer Imaging. This product line includes the new TilePix Frames and TilePix Corning Gorilla Glass panels which use an innovative self-adhesive “Stick&Slide” magnetic wall hanging system that enable consumers to easily display their wall art without the need for nails or screws.
Microsoft. Public preview Microsoft Designer. Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s previously announced AI-powered design tool, launched in public preview with an expanded set of features. Designer is a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI model to ideate designs, which you can then further enhance through Designer’s layout and design features.
Stability AI. Upscaler. Stability.AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, has announced a new AI-powered upscaler API that, according to the company, can increase the size of any image up to 4x its original resolution without compromising sharpness.
Stability AI. Boosting AI text-to-image creation. Stability AI announces DeepFloyd IF, a next generation text-to-image cascaded pixel diffusion model designed to generate high-quality images from text inputs. DeepFloyd IF has a many new features, which are summarized here. One of the standout features of the DeepFloyd IF model is its ability to accurately apply text descriptions to generate images with various objects appearing in different spatial relations, which previously has been a challenge with other text-to-image models. I look forward to hearing our May 17 Visual 1st Spotlight panelists’ perspectives on the potential of the various DeepFloyd IF innovations for our photo industry!
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