Stephen Shankland

Flickr’s new limit on free photo sharing is helpful, not hurtful, CEO says (Q&A)

The criticisms started piling up as soon as Flickr said it would end its free terabyte of photo storage and delete all but a member’s 1,000 most recent photos unless the member upgraded to a $50 annual pro subscription. “Internet say goodbye” to “11,000 photos that were hosted on #flickr,” said one tweet. “I’m sad …

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How MacBook Air showcases the battle between USB

There’s a big rivalry inside the slim chassis of Apple’s newest MacBook Air. The laptop’s two ports serve double duty, working as both industry-standard USB-C inputs and Intel’s proprietary Thunderbolt alternative to connect devices like monitors, cameras and external hard drives. (Apple calls them Thunderbolt ports, adding to the confusion.) Intel is heavily pushing the higher-speed Thunderbolt, but it’s not …

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Google AI helps NYT get a handle on 5 million photo archive

Google’s computer brains are helping The New York Times turn a historic archive of more than 5 million photos into digital data that’ll appear in the newspaper’s features about history. The newspaper’s “morgue” has 5 million to 7 million photos dating back to the 1870s, including prints and contact sheets showing all the shots on photographers’ rolls of film. The …

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Flickr Commons photo archives will survive profitability push

When Flickr announced this month it will limit free accounts to 1,000 photos and delete any that cross that threshold, it wasn’t immediately clear what happens to the Flickr Commons, the tens of millions of freely shareable photos from museums, governments and other archives. Well, now we know: Flickr will keep them. “The historical photos up there are just priceless. …

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$99 USB

If you want a bunch of cables poking out of the side of your iPad just like they do with your laptop, good news: accessory maker Sanho has a dock that adds a bunch of potentially useful ports to Apple’s new USB-C-enabled iPad Pro tablets. The iPad Pro models, the first Apple mobile devices to come with industry-standard USB-C ports …

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Flickr imposes 1,000

SmugMug, trying to strengthen its Flickr site as a community for photo enthusiasts, will limit free members to 1,000 photos and scrap the old policy of a terabyte of storage in an attempt to move toward subscriptions. The move, accompanied by a 30 percent discount on the $50 annual Flickr pro membership through Nov. 30, is the first big business …

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The iPad Pro’s USB

When Apple announced Tuesday that its iPad Pro had ditched the proprietary Lightning port in favor of USB-C, my eyes lit up. Lightning has had a good run, but I’d be happy to toss my collection of Lightning cables into my junk drawer alongside the ones for Firewire hard drives, VGA video and printers that perversely used those weird squarish …

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Apple’s iPad Pro gets PC power with USB

Apple just made its iPad Pro a lot more like a personal computer by giving it a USB-C port, a connector that can be used not just to charge it fast but also to link it to monitors, cameras and other gear. Apple helped push the PC industry toward USB-C with its MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, but its iPhones …

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Mozilla’s Firefox offers VPN service to boost privacy for $10 a month

Mozilla is trying to find out if you’re willing to pay $10 a month to get better privacy — and to give the Firefox maker a little financial independence from Google. Mozilla makes money through search-ad deals, notably with Google, in which it’s paid for sending Firefox users’ search queries to Google. Google shows ads next to the search results, …

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Google’s Pixel 3 camera rewrites the photo rules with new zoom and raw images

Every digital camera is flawed. Image sensors can’t capture light perfectly, lenses distort scenery, and photos so often seem blah compared with what you remember seeing. But Google, with its Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones, has found new ways to use software and hardware to overcome those flaws and get you better pictures. Its Pixel and Pixel 2 …

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