The University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering has reconstructed Rome in a day.

By harvesting thousands of images from the web and then matching common points in the photos, they were able to compute 3-D visualizations.  All in the span of 24 hours.  I am vastly oversimplifying, so check out Digital Urban’s write up and visit the project page for more video and information.

(The video above is sample work utilizing 58,000 images of Dubrovnik from Flickr.)

The mighty Signal vs. Noise (blog) just posted about Multicolr Search Lab:

We extracted the colours from 10 million of the most ‘interesting’ Creative Commons images on Flickr. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.

The above chooses three colors: red, white and black.  Ten is the max number of colors allowed.  The navigator/controls are on the right.

Click any of the images on the Multicolr site to be taken to the full image’s Flickr page.

One of the most download free applications for the iPhone is a photo sharer called SmugMug.  But I guess I missed the part where it says the service is trial only and now my trial ends in seven days.  Here’s the email they sent:

Dear dippold,

Many thanks for giving SmugMug a try!

We hope you’ve fallen in love with SmugMug, because we pour our hearts into it and our biggest thrill is seeing people love it.

It’s simple to become smug about your photos and continue before your trial expires in 7 days. Just click this link:

https://secure.smugmug.com/endtrial.mg (You may have to log in.)

If SmugMug didn’t grab you, we’d love to know why so we can get it right.  Just reply to this email and tell it to us like it is.  No worries, we won’t send a pushy reply back unless you ask us to (and if you ask we promise not to annoy).  We read every email every day because they’re like gold to us.

All the best for you and your photos,
Chris & Don MacAskill
Photographers, owners, and regular guys

So how much will it set you back?  Their cheapest rate or “Standard rate” costs $39.95 a year with the first year costing $19.98.  There is no need to even mention the price of their “Power” and “Professional” rates because I’ll never use any of them.  I’m not saying this is a bad service, but I really didn’t have enough time to try it out for a proper review.

I’m not a serious taker of photos on my iPhone, so I’ll probably just stick with something like Exposure that uploads shots to your free Flikr account.