Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs sounds amazing. They think so too by stating, boldly, that it "will change the way you think about digital photos forever". Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

Using this data you can walk or fly through a scene, zoom in and out, see where different photos were taken in relation to one another and find similar photos to the one you are viewing.

The photos are analysed to highlight hundreds of individual distinctive features - this could be a door frame corner or a a door handle. These features are linked and matched, with multiple images of the same item its 3D position can be calculated. The zooming feature sounds impressive too - you can, well, zoom right in!

It sounds mightily impressive and the potential they talk about - with photos having unique IDs and links to tags, urls and such like equally so.

But it is not yet available and no release date has been given. In the meantime have a look at the video and keep an eye on the teams blog.

Not sure if this has much lasting interest but Flickr Inspector supplies details of a registered flickr user. It is not an offical flickr site, not that you would know from the logo mind.

Details supplied incluide user id, how long user has been registered and displays the most 'interesting' photos from that user. There is a 'score', not sure how this is calculated but it gives website owners a code snippet to display it on a webpage. User data, a big tag cloud and other snippets are also displayed.

Flickr Inspector was designed by Nils Windisch from Germany. He describes flickr inspector as "a non-commercial website, that displays publicly available data about single flickr users. flickr itself is probably the most amazing photo sharing site. this is by no means an official tool by the makers of flickr (or yahoo), it's just what i, nils k. windisch aka netomer programmed in my free time to enhance user experience."

My flickr inspector details - including some terrible photos taken with a camera phone - can be seen here.

I must say I'm impressed. Liesel Pollvogt opened up a test version of Tabblo for us today; and what fun am I having!

Tabblo aims to be the best place online to put together photos, words, and template-driven customizable design for the purpose of telling stories that can be securely shared, collaborated on, and printed in innovative ways. that's the official version. Basically it can be used as a showcase for images with text accompaniments. Features abound - upload options linking to Flickr and Picassa, various layouts for your display page , colour themes for the same. Print options to EZPrint have been added too. Then you can add text both to individual images and as blocks of text next to images; all managed by drag and drop.

This drag and drop applies to photos too. There is a lightbox for holding images while you arrange them and then there is a marvelous resize corner drag and drop facility. While this is not fully reform, images snap to an underlying grid, it is still very cool. All worked smoothly on my IE7 Beta install. Although I ran into a niggley problem trying to arrange a new image and place it where I wanted. It seems you can only swap images not place them in a new spot. When you do swap any resizing you have imposed holds in the position it was placed in and is not attached to a specific image.

The 'event' section is interesting too. It lets you reserve an email address where anyone can email in pictures and automatically have them populate your photo library and even generate a 'tabblo'. Basically it just makes it really easy to collect pictures from multiple photographers at an event.

The illustration here is of four pictures I uploaded, lightbox to the right, with the St Paul's/Millennium Bridge image resized. The style is Polaroid on a Vendome theme.

Founded in 2005 Tabblo is based in Cambridge, Mass with a spirited team of nine. These new features should be live - as they take off the beta moniker - by the time you read this.

I asked what the future holds for Tabblo. The team tell me that the next major release will be focusing around the 'community aspects' of the site. This will enable users to both pool their content together more easily, and find relevant areas of the site where they can meet other like-minded Tabblo users. On the tool front they will be adding a number of new image effects and template elements, while a new media type is also mooted to be in operation by the end of the year. 

I was waiting to see the reaction on yesterdays Yahoo Photos Beta before posting some comments; but it seems few have been given beta access. The Unofficial Yahoo Blog is impressed though saying 

"So far, it's truely impressive. The new Y! Photos is smartly designed for the family user who wants to collect their photos, print them occasionaly at Target and on coffee mugs. They want to give their friends access and to view photos their friends want to share but they are not trying to reveal their photo collection to the world. And that is the principal difference between those who will like Flickr (global exposure/RSS feeds) and those who will like Y! Photos (sharing with friends and family)."

Techcrunch has some thoughts too. While at Techcrunch have a read of new service Umondo "allows users to share photos and video captured on mobile phones without the need to set up an account. By entering a phone number or email, anyone can subscribe to a feed in a number of online readers or in iTunes. Code is also available to display video on MySpace pages."

So what is all this about then? Apart from a slightly risque name... Rasterbator takes an image and from it 'creates huge, rasterized images'. 'The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 20 meters in size.' Which may be handy to some.

The tool is available for use on line or you can download a desktop version. After you have cropped the image and selected a desired size, the rasterbated image will be sent to you as an easily printable pdf file.

The website offers a huge gallery of rasterized images (which failed to show anything in IE7 but was OK in Firefox)  from which the image shown here was taken.

Are they boasting? Bubblesnaps dropped us an email highlighting their 'throwaway fun' in the form of Bubblesnaps. They finished the note with the claim that they do "animated speechbubbles captions really well".

So what is Bubblesnaps? You upload a photo, add speechbubbles and send these as ecards. My own reservations over ecards aside Bubblesnaps seems to accompllish their limited objective well. I can't see what the storage limitations are but the facility to retain your incredibly funny captions online is a good touch. All I would want is to display them on another website or blog...

Here is an interesting little tool. Convert an image into a polaroid-like picture.

Polaroid-o-nizer takes an image, and via a few controls, produces another image with added text. Might make an interesting addition to someones portfolio or postcard.

I tried to enter an images url from flickr, it didn't like it so I copied the image (a delightful purple tulips picture by my internet friend Lariffic) that had been added to our DPGuru photo group to my own server. And used the image from there. Leaving the defaults as set all I added was some text and the image above was produced. Simple and effective.

Just why do passport photographs always look so horrifying? And why do those funny little booths smell worse than clothes store changing rooms?

A site that at least negates the need for constant seat swivelling is http://www.epassportphoto.com. Catering for the UK and the USA (and it looks like four European countries from the flags at the bottom) the site allows the upload of an image and, well, that's about it - one passport photo. You can crop - as all that is needed are the head and shoulders and then print it out at home. Easy.

Thanks to Shelly for the link

Photo store and sharing site BubbleShare has added a zoom feature. Click on the button and a giant magnifying glass appears. Move it around and see an enlarged section of the image. The area enhanced is 3x in size; it is very well implemented but how useful?

I have been trying to access this site for several days -  www.PhotoFiddle.com (also tipped to us by Aaron) but all I manage to get are page not found errors. I have tried using firefox just in case my beta of the new IE is at fault. Anyone actually viewed the page?

From a press release the aim is to provide a platform to turn digital photos into canvas masterpieces. They claim to offer an array of 70 art styles, from watercolour and pop art to line drawings and mosaic which, in four steps will transform your image. Oh, and then charge for prints. Shame I can't get a look in. So I give you a picture of a cat... all together now... aaahhh.

About to be released on an open beta test (sign-up here) is UpShot from Bellamax.

As a counter-point to the increasingly complex software interfaces UpShot has been designed with simplicity in mind with "a one click automatic correction tool, an intuitive user interface, contextual explains and embedded tutorials to simplify editing".

The FastFix tools allow segment correction for skin tone, sky, foliage and other “memory” colors to optimally enhance the photo. Most red eye is automatically removed too. UpShot will also provide seamless integration to the most popular photo sharing websites including Webshots, Flickr, Shutterfly, HP’s Snapfish, SmugMug, Photobucket, and ImageShack.

The progam will be offered free for the first three months after release.