furtiv blog

Now you can tag your photos with Thinglink in our photo sharing website 7DayPic. Thinglink allows you to add interactive tags to your photos with links to sound, video, social or other pages. Hover your mouse over the picture above to check out some of the embedded tags.

Here are some ways 7DayPic users are already using Thinglink to tag their photos:

• Tagging people by adding links to Twitter, Facebook or flavors.me profiles
• Tagging and linking to concerts, parties and other events
• Adding sound to their photos using Thinglink’s SoundCloud integration
• Specifying the location where the photo was taken and linking to it on Google Maps
• Tagging food and linking to restaurants and recipes
• Running short-lived ads and promotions (advertising a party, putting a car for sale, looking for a missing pet, etc)

We’d like to thank our friends at Thinglink for making us part of their beta program. 7DayPic is the first service to use their image interaction technology with user generated photos (i.e. personal photos mostly taken with mobile phones). This feature is very much experimental, but we look forward to find out new creative ways in which our users take advantage of Thinglink in their photos.

We’ve updated the free trial version of our Orkut photo uploader for Nokia Symbian phones. We have removed the 5 photo upload limit. You can now upload as many photos as you want. The only catch in this free version is that your photos are uploaded to 7DayPic.com and a link and thumbnail are published in your Orkut updates feed. All photos in 7DayPic.com are automatically erased after one week.

If you already have the trial version of our Orkut uploader and hit the upload limit (seen as a “Payment Required” error message) you can now continue to upload normally. If you see the error again, just ignore it and it will go away after you next successful upload.

You can get this free uploader for Orkut from the Ovi Store or directly at http://furtiv.mobi.

If you want to upload your photos directly to Orkut, you can buy our PRO uploader for Orkut. It costs only $1 and you can get it from the Ovi Store.

7DayPic.com is a minimalist photo sharing website that we silently launched 5 weeks ago. The idea is to share your photos online, but with an expiration date. All photos are automatically erased 7 days after being posted. 7DayPic helps you manage your online reputation: you can share photos and be sure they won’t be around on the internet decades from today when future employers and acquaintances look you up online. You can upload to 7DayPic directly from your phone with any of the supported apps for Nokia, iPhone and Android phones.

We are also using 7DayPic to host the photos of our free versions of Fotogram, AutoFix and some of our free photo uploaders. We are very happy with the traffic and feedback that this service is getting so far. As always, we look forward to your feedback and comments.

We are running a little experiment with our free Twitter photo uploader. We are changing the photo hosting service from Plixi to our very own brand new 7DayPic (more info on this service in a future post). We want to find or if we can recover some of our operation costs by running some ads on your photos (instead of letting other companies like Plixi get this ad revenue). All this is in the spirit of keeping as many of our apps free as possible.

If, for some reason, you are very attached to Plixi, we ask you to splurge $0.99 and get our dedicated Plixi uploader from the Ovi Store. We also have uploaders available for other Twitter image sharing services including TwitPic, yfrog, img.ly and TwitVid so you can take your pick.

If you still are not using any of our photo uploaders for your Symbian phone, why not give them a try and see if you like them.

Finally, if you are having problems with the Ovi Store, all of our free uploaders are also available by pointing your mobile browser directly to http://furtiv.mobi.

Update: We are running a little experiment: we have removed all upload limits from the free version of Fotogram. Now you can upload as many photos as you want 100% free. The catch is that all photos are now uploaded to 7DayPic.com and a link is posted in your Facebook wall. You can get the free version of Fotogram by from the Ovi Store or directly at http://furtiv.mobi on your Nokia phone.

If you want to upload retro style photos directly to Facebook you can get the paid version of Fotogram version of Fotogram for Facebook at the Nokia Ovi Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/78562.

For a limited time we are making available a free demo version of Fotogram. It is limited to 20 uploads, but that should be more than enough for you to get to know the app. It no longer has an upload limit, the difference from the paid version is that it uploads your photos to 7DayPic.com and posts a link in your Facebook news feed. Get the free version from the Ovi Store or by going directly to http://furtiv.mobi on your mobile browser. It works with most Nokia Symbian phones (see full list of supported devices). Below are a couple of examples of what Fotogram for Facebook can do:

“1973″ special effect

“1985″ special effect

“Woodstock” special effect

If you like the demo free version, and you want to upload your photos directly to Facebook you can get the paid version of Fotogram for Facebook at the Nokia Ovi Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/78562.

Our new app Fotogram is now available in the Ovi Store. Fotogram applies a number of retro special effects to your Facebook photo uploads to give them a vintage look. It makes your photos look like they were taken with an old camera from the 60′s, 70′s or 80′s. The results are really impressive and it makes even very ordinary photos look much more interesting and worth sharing on Facebook. Below are some examples of the retro special effects in Fotogram next to the original pictures (click on the photos to see larger versions).

“1973″ special effect

“Rusty” special effect

“Groovy” special effect

“1985″ special effect

“Woodstock” special effect

You can get Fotogram at the Nokia Ovi Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/78562 (mobile link http://store.ovi.mobi/content/78562) or simply search for “Fotogram” in the Ovi Store. It works with most recent Nokia Symbian phones. Support for Nokia N8 and other Symbian^3 phones is coming soon.

Thanks to publicdomainpictures.net for the original photos for this blog post.

We’ve just published a brand new app in the Ovi Store. AutoFix for Facebook automatically improves the photos taken with your Nokia Symbian phone when you upload them to Facebook. It corrects dark photos and wrong colors that are common in photos taken with a mobile phone. AutoFix for Facebook is particularly effective with photos taken in low light situations. Check out the examples below (click on the photos to see the full-size version).

Here is one example of your typical bar or party photo where your phone’s flash misfired or otherwise was simply insufficient. Autofix does a pretty good job at salvaging a very dark photo.

Here is another example where AutoFix comes handy. The original photo was taken with a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and shows a very typical unnatural green/yellow tint. As it is common with a lot of camera phones, the colors look washed out. The automatically corrected photo has more natural colors and looks much better.

Another example where the colors are washed out. AutoFix corrects this as well as the slight overexposure. It’s a much nicer photo to share in Facebook.

In this example, the original photo is underexposed and there is an overall lack of colors. The automatically corrected photo has a much better white balance as well as a blue sky.

You can get AutoFix for Facebook from the Nokia Ovi Store http://store.ovi.com/content/73159. Mobile link: http://store.ovi.mobi/content/73159. The price is £1.50 / €1.99 / $1.99 or its equivalent in your local currency. As always, we look forward to your comments and feedback in this blog or in our support forum.

We actually think we are closer to 1,100,000 downloads of our free apps. We hit a snag with the Ovi Store publishing system: When we edited some of our apps we lost their download count. Nevertheless, the official count is now 1 million. That’s a good enough reason to celebrate.

Here are some interest facts. The top countries for our free downloads are India, Indonesia, UK, Turkey, Italy, Mexico, Thailand, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. Ovi Store says that we get downloads from 209 different countries and territories (we didn’t even know there were some many of them). The countries were our apps are least popular are Guinea-Bissau, Monserrat, Zimbabwe, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Palau, each of them with only 1 download.

The devices used to downloads our free apps the most are 5800 XpressMusic, E71, 5530 XpressMusic, E72 and E63. The least popular devices are E73 and E55, each of them accounting for only 0.1% of our downloads.

Thanks to all of you for your support.

While teaching ourselves some Android programming we decided to quickly hack together a photo sharing plug-in for Ovi Share. Have we gone mad? Does this make any sense? We simply thought it may come handy to those hardcore Nokia fans who have recently taken the plunge and gone Android. We know that there are quite a few of them.

You can get the plug-in at http://furtiv.mobi/android. You will be able to share your photos directly from the Camera and Gallery just like you do with our plug-ins for Symbian.

Some words of caution: This plug-in is just an educational exercise for us. We cannot make any guarantees on its reliability. We also cannot guarantee how long Ovi Share will be around before Nokia finally pulls the plug as it seems to have been running on fumes for over a year. In summary, please use this sharing plug-in at your own risk and peril.

Please let us know if you run into any problems by commenting on this blog post or over in our support forum.

That said, have fun and expect more Android magic from your friends at furtiv very soon.

Here is some advice to our users that do not have a flat rate (unlimited) cellular data plan. You can set your phone to never use a cellular connection when uploading photos and videos. This way your phone will only use WiFi (WLAN) when you upload using the furtiv plug-ins. If you upload while you are on the road, your uploads will wait in the Outbox until you are in reach of a WiFi connection. This is very convenient if you don’t have a flat rate cellular data plan.

Here is how to do it: Open the Share Online app and select to Options -> Settings -> Advanced -> Use cellular -> Disabled. This will ensure your uploads only go over WiFi and never through your cellular data connection.

On some ‘older’ phones (N95, N82, E71, E63, E66) the setting works a bit different and you have to select a default access point. In this case just make sure you select a WiFi access point and uploads will only work when you are within reach of that WiFi network.