fhotoroom

The official blog of fhotoorom where we share our ideas.

[fhotoroom]

With the introduction of ‪#‎W10M‬, and it's explosive popularity as a very early beta. We have gotten a lot of feedback and issues. The biggest issue seems to be that Microsoft broke the way files are loaded by apps and for a photo editing app this can be a very big issue. So today our latest update of fhotoroom for ‪#‎WP8‬.1 and #W10M will introduce a new Photo File Picker, which will feature +200 sorting and ordering methods, support for loading photos from ‪#‎Instagram‬ , ‪#‎flickr‬ , ‪#‎fhotoroom‬ and your local storage. We will be adding more options like facebook, twitter and tumblr very shortly but we want your feedback to let us know how we can make it better.

Thank you so much for the support

Team Fhotoroom

[fhotoroom]

Fhotoroom, one of the most advanced non destructive photo editing apps and photo sharing community’s, is coming to the iPad. It has taken us longer than we planned or hoped it would take to get to the iPad, but to us this wasn’t going to be just a simple rescaling of our iPhone app. We wanted to develop an iPad app that was designed for the tablet experience that really utilized all the extra space you get with a tablet. We then took it one step further and made sure that fhotoroom supports every single orientation you like to hold your iPad in.

Over then next few weeks we will spend time really optimizing and refining the User Interface and User Experience based on your feedback. So expect to see a lot more changes, features and enhancements.

Thank you so much for the support and hope you can welcome our new member to the fhotoroom family as soon as it is available for the iPad.

Store Link https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fhotoroom/id811786795?mt=8

[fhotoroom]

Ephemeral

Over the past 3 years fhotoroom has grown from a simple photo editing mobile app on Windows Phone 7 too a multi-platform photo editing community that has seen over 8,000,000 downloads and over 100,000,000 photos edited with our apps. This has all been an amazing journey to watch beginner photographers take their first photo, have babies get their first photo taken of them, and photos that have sparked relationships that blossomed into marriages in parts of the world where making connections is not an easy or safe thing to do.

Looking at all of these amazing and precious moments, I have been wrestling on what fhotoroom is and where it is going, so let me share with you some of the thoughts that brought us to our final decision. The first conclusions we came too was that we are not like facebook and are far from a pure social network (we don’t ask for and mine personal data), we are not like snapchat which is a pure messaging app, and although we are similar to Instagram we have very different goals and directions. This also meant we didn’t see ourselves as shoebox or a storage apps like flickr or OneDrive. 

All these views kept pointing in the same direction, that fhotoroom is an app for the now to learn, create, inspire and share, which is exactly how users use fhotoroom. More than 90% of all the activity on fhotoroom is happening with content created in the last 2 months and things drop very quickly from there to the point that only 0.0001% of activity even looks at data older than 2 years.

Starting Sept 1 2015, fhotoroom will begin automatically deleting photos that are older than 2 years. You will not loss your likes, or comments, and your stats page will not be affected. So if you have +100,000 likes before Sept 1, you will still +100,000 likes afterwards. You will also be able to download all of your older photos via the website which has direct links to original files. The last change we are sharing publicly for now is that we will be increasing the size of photos uploaded and viewed on fhotoroom for the maximum photography experience.

We hope you like these up coming changes and look forward to any of your feedback.

[fhotoroom]

Fhotoroom's New JPG Compression

Hello Everyone, today I wanted to share with you the completion of our latest project on JPEG compression. What this refined JPG technology brings to fhotoroom is BIGGER photos with smaller file sizes at better quality.

Achieving anyone of these changes on it's own is quite simple, getting 2 happens occasionally but getting all 3 right is extremely rare. But how can we determine if what we did was actually any good or are we just blowing our own horns, so the only way to really do this is by going toe to toe with some of the biggest players in the field where storage and bandwidth is worth millions so this always a high priority.

Twitter will be our first victim. The photo above we shared shows output files from uploads to twitter and fhotoroom at a resolutions of 640x640 pixels. Why 640x640 well we will get to that later. Twitter is not much a photo sharing platform so storage and bandwidth are their priorities not quality. For fhotoroom to really prove itself in this test we wanted to cut 10% off the twitter file size while achieving a much higher level of quality. Now since we don't work at such low quality we had to make a special upload at a much lower compression level. As you can clearly see fhotoroom's photo is >10% smaller and also exhibits a lot less JPG artifacts as a result of compression. We just pointed out the obvious differences but if you look closer you can see dozens of other areas where the twitter file has even more color shifts and blockyness.

Simply put if Twitter used Fhotoroom tomorrow, Twitter would be faster at loading and look better. Basically WIN WIN!

Our next victim will be Flickr, a professional level photo sharing platform so we should see them prioritize quality over storage and bandwidth, well sadly they don't. JPG files can grow in size very quickly but flickr are still choosing a rather small size for the output but at least they were twice the size of twitter. At flickr's level of compression what you see is micro jpg artifacts all over that even give a false sense of detail. This is the reason for sharing the original photo as well as the fhotoroom output. So not only does the fhotoroom output still achieving a smaller size it is also preserving the original photo overall sharpness, contrast and color.

In this context if Flickr used Fhotoroom tomorrow, Flickr would be just as fast but quality would be much better. (technically they would also save approx. 4% in bandwidth and storage).

Our last victim is none other than Instragram. We have to first say that we give credit to instagram for being one of the few photo sharing sites that appear to give quality a higher priority than most others. That being said they have many of the same issues that other sites have but much less. The blocky issues are minimal, the gradients don't have as many bands as the other sites but with that all said it appears that fhotoroom in this situation is smaller in file size by 30% and quality output might be to fair a 50/50 split for many. So if fhotoroom quality has pros and cons vs instagram we are still 30% smaller. With these outputs it is pretty clear that fhotoroom can easily find a quality/compression size that beats instagram in both categories.

We hope you enjoyed this rather technical review of how fhotoroom now stores photos on our servers. But what does all this mean to fhotoroom users. It means that our apps will now download photos faster, save you data, save us storage and bandwidth while your photos look better on fhotoroom than on other sites.

Please share your thought this is something we are constantly refining.

[fhotoroom]

Fhotoroom for iOS8 has been completely redesigned from the ground up to be a profesionnal level non-destructive image editor with a clean and beautiful design that everyone can use. Fhotoroom has everything you will need to edit, enhance and share your photos quickly and easily. By embracing Apple's new Photo Extension, users have access to fhotoroom from within the iPhone Photo App.

Here is just the small list of what is in this latest update.

- iPhone Retina display support.... - iPhone 6/6plus support. - All New App Navigation for a better UX. - Full Gesture Support - Pull to Refresh - Swipe back to navigate back - Double Tap to Like Photo in Feed, Photo and Profile pages - Pinch to Zoom and Pan to Move - Major UI overhaul with new fonts, updates profile, feed, messages, photos, likes, comments, followers and following. - User Feed now does fading of all photos except one in focus. - New Photo Extension with support for both Portrait and Landscape views. - Interactive Editing - All New Non-Destructive Editing - Unlimited Undo/Redo History - New History Manager - Full Exif/GPS and IPTC metadata support. - More than 5x faster. - Better iPad support with official new version coming in 2 weeks. - More efficient network data usage with better caching. 

Download for FREE TODAY

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fhotoroom/id811786795?mt=8

[fhotoroom]

Recently we updated #fhotoroom touch for #windows8.1 and in the last 2 days we have gotten 2 new updates approved that bring back Vignettes and VigPro filters as well as adds new functionality to the History Tool.

We really hope you enjoy the new features and functionality as we continue to try to bring all of our apps to the same level.

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-US/app/fhotoroom/4d91298a-07cb-40fb-aecc-4cb5615d53c1

[fhotoroom]

#FhotoroomX for Mac OSX v2

Hello Everyone

Yesterday we finished our newest version of fhotoroom for the mac. This latest version brings together much of our recent work into a single powerful app. 

To begin we gave fhotoroom a new fresh Yosemite look which is not just cosmetic but actually increases the vertical space available for editing, simply put smaller window bigger picture.

The next big task we undertook was too completely rewrite fhotoroom from being a photo app with cool filters to one of the fastest and easiest to use non-destructive image editors. What this means is that your original photo is never touched and every edit you make can be undone or changed at anytime in your edit without having to undo 20 steps and loss all of your other edits. This is all made possible with our new Filter Engine and our new History Tool which will show you all of your changes in order.

The reason so many apps still do it the old way is speed, their filters are just not fast enough to do all of the edits on the fly. Even with this barrier many apps try using the older filter engines to make non-destructive editors but at a big price, image resolution! In fhotoroomX our new filter engine allowed us to make it non-destructive at full resolution regardless if you are editing a 5MP or 100MP photo. This is the future of image editing and we are just getting started on rolling out features.

In the latest version of OS X, Yosemite did not only allow for a new app look, Apple also added a new feature apps can add called, Action Extensions. This allows for mini versions (plugins) of apps to run in other apps that support this technology. For this we really wanted to go all out, so we made almost all of our editing features and presets available in our first fhotoroom Action Extension. Give it a try with a photo in TextEdit or Mail which were the first apps that support this on all Yosemite installs.

Lastly, we wrapped this all up with new Saving and Sharing support. Fhotoroom will now support JPG compression options, TIFF exporting as well as universal Mac Sharing to social networks like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, SMS and more.

We are still awaiting approval and will make sure to update you once v2.0 has been approved. Thank you everyone for the feedback and we hope you enjoy our newest version of #fhotoroomX

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fhotoroom-x/id909212772?ls=1&mt=12

[fhotoroom]

Tiny Planets

Get Tiny Planets on the Mac App Store. See screenshots and ratings, and read customer reviews.

We saw such a great response for our #fhotoroomX App for the Mac, so today we are super happy to announce our #TinyPlanets App for Mac OS X. Tiny Planets is a professional level version of the mobile app. Tiny Planets can create the most beautiful Tiny Planets or Rabbit Holes photos from your 42MP iPhone 6 Panoramic shots.  KEY FEATURES: - Support for +100MP Panorama Photos - Seam blending for smooth results. - Inner, Outer and Rotate pano controls. - Interactive Editing for <60MP photos. - Output Tiny Planets and Rabbit Hole Photos - Output Size of 640x640, 1024x1024 and 2048x2048 (let us know if you want more we will gladly add any additional sizes) - Final output always uses bicubic converting for smoother results.  

Since we never really stop, we already have an update in the approval process that will bring A LOT more functionality to desktop Tiny Planets creation. Here are some of the additions.

v1.1  - Added 4096x4096 (Ultra HQ) output - Added Seam Radius option so you decide how much is blended. - Interactive Render now works on all Size Images - Added Transition slider between Tiny Planet and Rabbit Hole for a whole new range of results. (look at first screenshot) - Bug Fixes and other Minor Improvements.

[terripeterk]

Thank you all for 50k likes on my fhotoroom! I really appreciate it.

[fhotoroom]

Here is our newest app called #MASKS. Masks lets you have fun with photos by applying different effects to different areas of the image that you will definitely want to share and show off to your friends.

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-ca/store/app/masks/8c9c5421-31e0-4370-a145-4f337c5de085

[fhotoroom]

#Fhotoroom v2.1 for #iOS has just been approved, bringing A LOT of new amazing features. Here is just a small list of what you now have available to if you are using an iPod, iPhone4-5s, or iPad2-4 including Air. RESOLUTION - Full Rez Photo Support for +iPhone4s and +iPad2 - Upto 4096x4096 photo editing on iPad Air NEW AND FASTER EDITING TOOLS - New HDR Filter - New Perspective Filter - New PanoRotate Filter - New Sharpen Filter - 10 New Frames - New Tiny Planets Filter - New Denoise Filter - New Chromatic and Lens Correction Filters - 14 New Presets NEW STORE FOR EVEN MORE GOODIES - New Store MAKING IT BETTER!! - iPad Bug Fixes - iPhone Bug Fixes - Fixed Photo Orientation Misalignment - General Bug Fixes and Improvements DOWNLOAD TODAY https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fhotoroom/id811786795?ls=1&mt=8

[fhotoroom]

Fhotoroom HDR v4.0.0 for Win7/8 Now Available

Fhotoroom HDR v4.0.0 for Win7/8 is now officially available. This update brings many of the popular features found in our mobile apps to the desktop. This update was extremely large with over +100 new features and functions.

v3.0.12 which was just released only 10 days ago will still be available for registered users only, as it will be the last version of Fhotoroom HDR that has the free 8bit editor. The reason from this departer from the free 8bit editor is that we are committed to giving the best user photo editing capabilities in Fhotoroom HDR, not only HDR but also with Film photography and to do that we want to make sure we offer the best from your phone to your desktop.

 One more thing, our new features also share a lot of secrets on how to achieve many of the results we get after extensive research into specific film photography styles.

Feature List  

- +100 New Functions  

- Minor UI Updates  

- Completely rewrote Color Correction Filter  

- Completely rewrote Exposure Filter  

- Updated TiltShift Filter  

- New Border Filter  

- New Square Filter  

- Updated Classic Vogue Filter  

- Updated Vignette Filter  

- Added New Presets to Exposure and Correction Filters (Musk, Vibe, LowDef, Tinge, etc...)  

- Updated HDR Tone Mapping Operator for better quality and more reliable final output.  

- HDR Tone Mapping is now upto 75% faster.   -

Dozens of Minor Bug Fixes  

- Explore and find the many other great features we have added.

Download Link

http://dwn01.cloudapp.net/FhotoroomHDRInstall.msi

[fhotoroom]

#Fhotoroom v1.6 for #iPhone is now available for download. These last 2 updates were very large and bring the iPhone version more inline with WP7/8. Still a lot more coming over the next few weeks. Here is a just a small list of all the upda...tes. - Major UI/UX updates - Upto 2x faster - Export via AirDrop - Export to Instagram - New Editing Menu Icons - Filter Presets now sorted into categories - Crop now supports 10 ratios - New Highlights and Shadows Filter - New Tint Filter - 4 New Frames - Black and White Frame Options - Increased Size of Borders - Flip Light Leaks Horizontally and Vertically - Undo/Redo Support - URL scheme protocols - Style Presets now show preview of image. - Image Preview better quality. - Optimized Editing for both iPhone 4 and 5. - Fixed Crop Bugs - Bug Fixes and Minor Tweaks. See More

[fhotoroom]

Fhotoroom Metrics

Over the last +2 years fhotoroom has grown and changed a lot since our early start on Windows Phone 7. From getting kicked off our last hosting company before Microsoft Azure and BizSpark came to the rescue to now expanding our apps and services to WP8, Win8/RT, iPhone and soon Android.

So a question that we always get asked is how many users do you have, how many MAU, what are your metrics and how are you consistently growing. Everybody wants to try and find some sort of secret, and there is one but it is plain sight which is why it is so hard for so many ppl to figure out. Now mastering this secret and leveraging it is how some companies are able to have massive growth. But that is for another time to discuss, today I want to share with you how fhotoroom is doing.

So to the heart of the most common question ppl ask, what is our Monthly Active Users or MAU. Across all of our Apps, fhotolens, fhotostorage, fhotoroom (on WP7, WP8, iPhone and Win8), and Website:

As of July 2013 it was:

1,200,000 MAU

As of April 2014 it is:

+3,000,000 MAU

Although MAU only grew +150% user engagement metric which is likes, follows, comments etc. grew by more than 1600%.

Photos Processed with Fhotoroom as of April 2014:

Daily PP 150,000 - 200,000

Monthly 4,250,000 - 4,750,000

App Downloads of April:

WP +4,000,000

Win8/RT +1,000,000

So that is it, over the next 6-12 months a lot of attention will be given to iOS and Android considering that more than +90% of these metrics come from WP and Win8/RT, we hope to see these numbers grow significantly.

Thank you everyone for the time and support, we would not have seen this level of growth or even existed without the support of a lot amazing people at Azure, BizSpark, Nokia and many others.

Thomas Lock

[fhotoroom]

Fhotoroom v11 for Windows Phone 8 has just been approved. Over the last +2 months we have worked with professional photographers collecting feedback on workflows and areas of fhotoroom that could use improving. Today is the day we bring all of this feedback to life.

Here is the short list of changes in v11

- Major UX/UI Changes - +40 New Icons throughout the app. - Live Preview of filters in presets. - Filters are now grouped into categories. - New fhotoroom store with new free/paid filters. - Light Leaks supports flip horizontally or vertically. - Textures supports flip horizontally or vertically. - Updated Color Corrections, replaced Clarity with Tint fine tuned balance. - Updated Sharpen for Blur and Clarity Sharpening. - New Highlights and Shadows Filter. - New HQ Grundge Frames. - Updated TiltShift filter for better quality results. - Camera Tap to Focus in landscape fixed. - New Undo/Redo support. - New Splash screen. - Dozens of minor bug fixes and tweaks.      

[fhotoroom]

Fhotostorage is a Windows Phone Pictures Hub discovery tool that helps finding specific photos a little easier. The photography app is available for Windows Phone 8 and should help make finding that one photo a little easier. The photography app is the latest from the developer of Fhotoroom and Fhotolens and sifts through your entire Pictures Hub by pre-set filters or a simple keyword...

Our newest app fhotostorage is now available for download. Make discovering photos easier than ever as our photo libraries get larger and larger.

[fhotoroom]

Fhotostorage our new WP8 App

Fhotostorage is a photo library discovery tool that makes finding specific photos very easy. As our photo libraries grow larger, we need better ways to find our photos. The fhotoroom team are working to solve this by making short lists of photos that can easily be scanned to find photos.

Fhotostorage is an exclusive app for users registered to Fhotoroom.