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If a scratch on a new camera makes your eyes moisten, you won't want to take a look at what they did to a Nikon D3 at the DesignZen Web site. They cut the camera in half and posted pictures of the hemispheres at the cyberstop. The exercise, according to the text accompanying the autopsy photos, is supposed to give "technophile camera lovers" an appreciation of the "beauty of the engineering" that went into the snapper. For $5000, though, I'd rather appreciate the camera's engineering in one piece rather than two.

When the Library of Congress launched its pilot project on Flickr in January of this year, it didn't know what to expect. What it got was an overwhelming response from the members of the photo sharing Web site's community to the thousands of historic photos from the library's archives posted online.

During the first nine months of the pilot, the library's Flickr affiliate has accrued more than 10 million total views and is averaging 500,000 hits a month, according to a report released last Friday by the agency.

"We entered the pilot not entirely knowing what to expect, and we were pleasantly surprised on a number of fronts," the report said.

"The Flickr community," the report observed, "has rallied to our call of assistance with a surprising level of engagement, and the quality of 'history detective' work has been excellent."

“Increasing the ability to engage and connect with photos increases the sense of ownership and respect that people feel for these photos,” the report noted. “Lessons learned from this project provide guideposts to the type of experience that people would like to have with our collections.”

After the library established a beachhead at the photo sharing site, Flickr launched a new initiative called The Commons and invited cultural heritage organizations to participate. So far, the report said, 10 museums and libraries from six nations have joined and are sharing selections from their photo archives and inviting the public to contribute information to them.

Despite the apparent success of the The Commons project, it apparently isn't dodging the grim reaper of redundancy making the rounds of every organization these days. According to photographer Thomas Hawk the owners of Flickr, Yahoo, laid off one of the primary employees working on The Commons project, George Oates, just as news of the LOC was being made public.

David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times, aimed his considerable influence today at the confusion over sensor sizes in digital cameras. Here's the problem as Pogue sees it. "[I]t’s really hard to find out how big a camera’s sensor is," he writes. "The manufacturers diligently bury this detail. It’s not on the box, it’s not in the ads, and sometimes it’s not even on the camera’s Web site." Even if you can find the spec, he adds, it's in a form that makes it difficult to compare one sensor to another.

What's a camera shopper to do? If you're David Pogue, you call on your readers to come up with an online calculator to make all this sizing stuff comprehensible. And lo and behold, within three hours two such tools were posted to the Web. Both offerings get the job done, but Sensor Calculator Two is a little more elegant and attractively rendered than Sensor Calculator One.

Even columnist Pogue was surprised by how quickly his challenge was dispatched. "Holy cow, people… two solutions in three hours?" he scribbled. "Next week, I’ll assign you guys a program that solves the Federal deficit and Social Security!"

A picture frame, like a toaster, is a simple idea. But let the adjective “digital” elbow its way into the picture and watch out! Suddenly slideshows are appearing in picture frames; then slideshows with music; then video clips. What good is a digital device without an Internet connection? So WiFi is added to the mix. Now Microsoft wants to push d-frames further into the cloud with its Windows Live FrameIt service. Not only will FrameIt stream photos from the Internet to frames that support the service, but it will funnel traffic, news and weather reports to them, too. Actually, the service will work its magic with any device that can handle RSS feeds.

“The Microsoft Live FrameIt application is resounding proof that today’s busy consumers have embraced digital photo frames and now want to do more with these useful devices,” Dean Finnegan, CEO of frame maker Pandigital, said in a statement.

Pandigital isn’t just praising FrameIt. It’s also making products for it. The first such offering, announced today, is its Kitchen Technology Center, or KTC ($449.99). The gizmo is a combination digital picture frame with touchscreen technology, 15.6-inch HDTV, digital cookbook with recipes from Bon Appetit and WiFi Internet device. All the unit needs now is a kitchen sink to complete its functionality as a scullery appliance.

It's been said that idle hands are the devil's playground. That can be even more so if the idle hands have access to Adobe Photoshop, as an unemployed Web editor in New York City recently discovered when she pasted the noggin of vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin on the body of a gun-toting hottie in a stars-and-stripes bikini.

"I posted it on a private Facebook blog with full disclosure that it was a Photoshopped image and the result of a boring Saturday afternoon with Photoshop at my fingertips," the editor told professional photographer Jim Goldstein. Goldstein posted at his personal Web site today a lengthy interview with the imagesmith whom he identified only as "Naomi."

Those Photoshop admonitions--as is often the case with viral distributions on the Internet--got stripped from the composite shot as it rocketed through Cyberspace, gained escape velocity and made it to the "real world" of mainstream media.

Naomi admits she was surprised by the notoriety garnered by her cut-and-paste efforts.

"My brother called me at 3 AM on Wednesday morning to let me know that I had been on The Huffington Post on the front page and from there I just did a Google search and found hundreds of cases--hundred[s] of blogs and publications, many of them right wing that had posted the image," she told Goldstein.

"And," she continues, "I also found a couple of sites that really went into the whole debunking of the image, which tickled me because I had no idea that it would be taken for an authentic image."

Asked by Goldstein what kind of response she has received about her work, Naomi responded, "I have received a lot of direct responses mostly from peers who know me, and are in complete disbelief that I made this."

"Photoshop is not really part of my trade," she adds. "I used to use it for work but sparingly. [There's] a lot [of] shock and disbelief that it’s a fake photo that was done in such a short period of time and that there was really not much thought put into it."

Naomi told Goldstein that she cobbled together her Palin composite after spending some time researching the candidate. "I formed a basic idea of who this woman was," she says, "[a]nd it sort of scared me that this woman is a heartbeat away from the Presidency."

However, she admits her antics may have helped, not hurt, Palin's prospects. "I feel like I’ve maybe galvanized people to defend her a little more than they would have had she not been portrayed in this light," she told Goldstein.

There are lots of photo sharing sites on the Web, but a Netstop called 2Pad offers an interesting twist to this overworked idea. It allows you to use e-mail to organize and catalog photos in your online albums.

For example, after opening an account with the service, you can send to it an e-mail message containing a photo and the photo will automatically be placed in an online album. So a message sent to 2Pad@2Pad.com will be posted to a general album. Including the name of an album in the address--friends@2Pad.com, for instance--will send the photo to that particular album. If the album doesn't exist, the service will automatically create one for you. 2Pad knows where to post your photos by comparing the e-mail address from where the photo was sent to the e-mail address you used when you opened your account.

Moreover, the service will take any text in the body of your e-mail and use it to describe the photo. That text can later be used to perform keyword searches to find the photo or a series of related photos.

The service can also be configured so that when you upload a new photo, a list of friends will be notified and be able to view the photo online.

One feature that I've found very enticing is the service's ability to extract photos from e-mail messages sitting in a Web mail service, like Googlemail, and place them in a 2Pad album.

Of course, you can also upload photos into your 2Pad albums in batches as you would with a conventional snapshot sharing site.

2Pad offers three levels of service.

The free service offers 1GB of storage and 1GB of bandwidth. Maximum file size is 20MB and maximum video length is five minutes.

For $2 a month, you get 5GB of storage and 5GB of bandwidth. Maximum file size is 100MB and maximum video length is 10 minutes.

For $5 a month, you get 10GB of storage and 10GB of bandwidth. Maximum file size is 200MB and maximum video length is 20 minutes.

I've tried more than a few photo sharing sites and found maintaining a presence at them more chore than joy. That's not the case with 2Pad. Its e-mail-centric approach takes photo organization and sharing out of its Web-based silo and seamlessly integrates it into my desktop workflow. Its a smart idea and one worth taking for a test run.

There are lots of photo-sharing sites on the Internet but how many will allow you to air your slideshows on cable television? That's one of the features that Roxio claims is built into its new online sharing site. The company, maker of such products as Creator 10 and Toast, launched its Roxio Online with PhotoShow today to try and shoehorn its way into the crowded and competitive photo and video sharing market.

Aimed at families with less exhibitionistic proclivities than the typical user of such services as YouTube, the company says that its new offering is a quick and simple way to turn personal photos and video clips into engaging multimedia slideshows that can be shared privately with close friends and relatives. At the site, the company contends, slideshows can be created complete with rich special effects and transitions, creative animations and captions, and a professional soundtrack.

"There is nothing more gratifying than being able to share the joys of our lives with the ones closest to us," Roxio General Manager Matt DiMaria said in a statement. "With busy schedules and physical distances, photos and videos play an integral part in how we communicate in today's digital world."

Roxio is offering a free trial version of the service which allows you to stash your slideshows online for 30 days. If you want to use the service permanently, you have to pay an annual fee of $39.95. With that fee you get a number of premium features including a desktop version of the company's PhotoShow software.

Both the trial and the premium versions of the service include the ability to broadcast slideshows to Time Warner Cable TV.

The magazine that brought business periodicals out of the dulldrums, Fast Company, has added a new channel to its Web TV site. Aimed at photographers, it's called PhotoCycle. Its first episode takes a trip to Yosemite Valley with Ansel Adams's son Michael, who talks about his dad's life and photography.

"A lot of people don't realize how much his [Ansel's] final result was dependent on what he did in the darkroom," Adams tells Photocycle interviewer Marc Silber. "That was in many ways the genius. A lot of us could take the picture and come up with the negative, but he could do some magic things with it in the darkroom."

"He always told people that this is not reality," he continued. "What I'm giving you in this print is not what you're seeing in the environment. You're seeing my interpretation of it. You're seeing something very dramatic in many ways."

RocketLife may not be as well-known as the likes of CVS, Kodak, Snapfish and Shutterfly, but in the minds of the consumers who participated in a recent study comparing Web-based applications to create photo bric-a-brac like picture books, coffee mugs and calendars, it definitely tops those other outfits in usability. The focus group research conducted by InfoTrends, a market research firm in Weymouth, Mass., found consumers gave RocketLife better grades than its more visible competitors in eight major measures--

• Speed and use of uploading images.
• Organization and viewing tools.
• Editing, cropping and zooming images.
• Ease of selecting images.
• Quality and variety of creative options.
• Simplicity of creative tools.
• Speed of creative tools.
• Overall ease of use.

"According to survey participants," the research report noted, "one of RocketLife's greatest advantages is in the speed and ease of getting started. RocketLife does not require users to set up an account, choose a password, or even provide an e-mail address. Furthermore, the program does not actually upload the full images until the user is ready to place an order."

"Given this design approach," the researchers continued, "most users can start a project within a few minutes of their first visit to the site, and the second visit can be even faster....To this end, RocketLife's mean score of 7.8 for ease and speed of upload is 60% higher than the second-ranked program."

We suspect, though, that this study sponsored by Visan, the company that created RocketLife, did not have a lot of Firefox users in the focus group, otherwise the satisfaction rating would have been a little different. RocketLife, you see, only supports Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher.