Daniel Forsythe put together a walkthrough that shows you how to disassemble your iPhone (original or 3G) and adjust the lens for taking close-up photography. The image above is from his Flickr account, demonstrating the camera focused at about 4 inches - perfect for taking project photos. You can adjust the lens to focus anywhere from infinity (the default) to less than an inch, but you'll need to take apart your phone to adjust it. If you take a lot of close up photos of projects, notes, or bugs, now you can tweak your phone and find a setting that works well for your needs.

Close-focus your iPhone 3G [via Gadget Lab]

Ever want to track how many folks are viewing your photos on Flickr? Just give Statr access to pull your pageviews and it will collect and graph your Flickr statistics for you.

Statr for Flickr allows you to track and plot page views statistics for your Flickr account. Graphs are automatically updated on a daily basis and can be linked from external websites.

Statr for Flickr: tracking page views for your Flickr account - [via] Link

Flickr is a great tool for organizing a collection. You can upload your photos and apply titles, tags and descriptions, which is a sneaky way of cramming a lot of indexed data into an invisible database. (You probably do that already, so why not reap the benefits?) The great thing about it is that you can use the indexing metadata to easily search and sort your collection by a variety of criteria. Naturally, because it's flickr, you can also share information about your collection as well as visually share the collection itself.

Paul Bausch has finished rolling his own Flickr substitute and just wrapped up his first round of extra features, including support for EXIF data, syndication, and tagging.

If you're just joining us, Paul's been rewriting his personal photoblogging and software from scratch and documenting the process. Here are all the posts in his OTFG (Off the Flickr Grid) series:

• Going Off the Flickr Grid
  
• OTFG Step 1: Setting the Stage
  
• OTFG Step 2: Thinking about Photo URLs
  
• OTFG Step 3: Authenticating the Import Script
  
• OTFG Step 4: Running the Import Script
  
• OTFG Step 5: Setting Up Sets
  
• OTFG Step 6: The Trouble with Comments
• OTFG Step 7: Import Notes
• OTFG Step 8: Resizing Images
• OTFG Step 9: Authentication
• OTFG Step 10: Adding Photos
• OTFG Step 11: Displaying and Editing Photos
• OTFG: Syndication, Exif Data, and Tags

Related:

• Flickr Hacks

Everyone's favorite DIY Web 2.0 site builder, Ning, just relaunched with new features that make setting up your own social networking site easy as pie.

Thanks to Gina's handy walk-through, I was able to whip up a community site for my own hometown in just about no time at all. The initial features in my almost-instant setup include the ability to add photos (imported from your Flickr account, sent via email or phone, or uploaded from your computer desktop), share videos, start discussions, and basically just connect with your neighbors. I've been looking for something like this as a more community-driven add-on to my local placeblog, and this was just the ticket.

Plasq, the company that brought us the fun and useful Comic Life that now ships with all new Macs, recently released a new product in private beta. Skitch is:

a refreshingly simple application that lets you easily resize your photos, jot down a quick sketch, take a lightning fast screen capture and share images online...

(Via Merlin, who appears to be one of the early beta testers)

As much as Paul Bausch loves Flickr (so much so that he coauthored Flickr Hacks), his:

inner geek isn't completely thrilled with my move to Flickr. As much as I believe Flickr is a revolutionary application, a part of me is sad to see onfocus.com go without photos. And another part of me thinks that all of the awesome stuff that Flickr enables (community, conversation, collaboration, cataloging, aggregation, and so much more) should be done in a distributed way across the Web. The Web geek in me feels that photo sharing shouldn't be owned by any one company, and photos themselves should ultimately be under the control of individual photographers.

Here are his first two 12 posts in the series so far:

• Going Off the Flickr Grid
  
• OTFG Step 1: Setting the Stage
  
• OTFG Step 2: Thinking about Photo URLs
  
• OTFG Step 3: Authenticating the Import Script
  
• OTFG Step 4: Running the Import Script
  
• OTFG Step 5: Setting Up Sets
  
• OTFG Step 6: The Trouble with Comments
• OTFG Step 7: Import notes
• OTFG Step 8: Resizing Images
• OTFG Step 9: Authentication
• OTFG Step 10: Adding Photos
• OTFG Step 11: Displaying and Editing Photos

Related:

• Flickr Hacks

As a longtime Flickr user (i.e., one of the "old-skool" users who just now needs to start signing in with my Yahoo! account), I've never had more fun editing a book than I did with Flickr Hacks. Though I knew enough about Flickr when we started working on the book to know that there were a lot more possibilities I didn't know about, Paul and Jim consistently increased the value of the service to me with each new hack they submitted.

What used to be a passing interest has, I'll admit, become an addiction. I organize and share my own photos, consume those of others, and keep tabs on friends, family, and contacts in new ways, and there's no looking back now. Now that the book is in print, I have it open on my desk perhaps a little more often than I should, since playing with the wealth of toys inside no longer qualifies as "research."

But one thing that disappointed me and others about the publication of the book was that, due to cost restraints, it needed to be printed in black and white. To ameliorate this shortcoming, shortly after the book's release, I posted all the glorious full-color images in the book in this Flickr set.

Here are a few choice samples of the types of images you've just gotta see in color (and at their original sizes):

Owners of the book should find this a great resource and addition, for the beauty of some images and the functionality of others in color. If you don't have the book yet, I hope this is enough to whet your appetite and get you interested in digging deeper into all the goodies that go with the figures.

One of the nice things about Flickr is that because of their open API a whole host of developers have built more and more interesting things to do with the site. It's interesting to me today that so many of the ways that I use Flickr are not even through the site as designed by Yahoo, but instead through the work of outside developers who are constantly creating new and interesting ways to experience the site. Today I thought I'd share what I think are the top 10 Hacks on Flickr.

I think my favorite is Flickr Leech, super easy to manage a ton of photos at once. Not on the list, but very useful: Pool Cleaner is a quick and easy way to delete photos if you manage a photo pool.

(Via Make)

Related:

• Flickr Hacks
• HOW TO - Photocasting with Photocastr
• Use the Kodak Wi-Fi Camera with Flickr
• Flickr printable books and posters
• Doing things with Flickr
• More...

It adds name_reply and icon_reply links at each of the comments under your photo. When you click on the link, the buddy icon html code will be added into the Add your comment box, where you can show nicely who your replies are directed at.

This is just one of many Greasemonkey scripts I now use regularly with Flickr, so much so that I end up taking them for granted as features of the service, forgetting that they're add-ons. Check out the Flickr Hacks group for tons of great user scripts and other Flickr-specific hacks.

Related:

• Flickr Hacks
• Greasemonkey Hacks
• Firefox Hacks

This is kind of a meta hack, since it's one I use for every post to this blog, but it also serves as a quick and easy way to resize images for a number of other purposes.

Like many blogs, this one has a posting width of 500 pixels, which we try to fill with an image of that exact width whenever possible. But I don't want to go through the hassle of opening an image-editing program to crop every picture I post to those precise dimensions. The easiest way I've found is to use Flickr to resize my images for me.

Take, for example, the source for the image at the beginning of this post: Figure 1-22 in Flickr Hacks. Taken from Hack #4: "Resize Photos for Flickr," it shows how to reduce the size of an original image before uploading to Flickr (to keep your monthly download allotment down, something that is less necessary now that Flickr increased their upload limits for free users). Since I have a Pro account, upload limits don't really pertain to me, so this figure lives at its original dimensions in my Flickr photostream.

Once uploaded, though, Flickr offers a number of options for downloading that same image. Just click the "All Sizes" button over the picture to reveal the screen shown in the screenshot at the top of this post:

The "Medium size" width of any original (Landscape orientation) image over 500 pixels wide will be exactly 500 pixels. Just download the image, or use the handy HTML Flickr provides to embed directly in your post:

The other standard sizes Flickr makes available are also handy. "Square" is always a nice 75X75 square (useful for avatars and such), "Thumbnail" is always 100 pixels for its longest dimension (useful for, er, thumbnails), "Small" is 240 at its widest/tallest, and "Large" (when available--note that the "Original" size for the image in this post is smaller than Flickr's "Large" size) is always 1024 pixels at most.

Related:

• Flickr Hacks