Windows only: DupliFinder, a free Windows utility, compares digital photos by their name, size, and actual image information to find duplicates you can delete without worrying about. Brought to you by the coder of Vista Battery Saver, DupliFinder has a slightly rough interface at this point—you have to drag and drop in a folder to search if it's not "My Pictures," for instance—but its comparison engine works just fine, giving percentage ratings and quick delete buttons for duplicates. Looks like a great tool for finally tackling that picture clean-up project you keep putting off. DupliFinder is a free download for Windows systems only.

The Red Ferret Journal points out a slick, Japanese upload-and-convert tool for giving photos that browned-out, decades-old look. Select a photo or paste in a URL (both words are written in English, as luck would have it), and hit the bottom blue button. The photo results aren't returned at full resolution, but, depending on lighting, quality, and, of course, modernity of subject, you can get pretty authentic-looking results without any image editor filters or plug-ins. The site is free to use, and (it appears) doesn't restrict upload file sizes.

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Sharing a Flickr photo or video has become that much easier, with a new Share this! button that provides tools to email, embed, link to, or blog any Flickr photo or video. Although sharing options aren't entirely new (you could always "Blog this", for example), the email option is the snazziest new feature. It auto-completes your Flickr contacts or accepts any full email address. If you're not crazy about just anyone emailing your photos with this tool, head to your account page to change who can use the Share this feature on your account. If you're like me and you got excited about the idea that you could sideload pics from another Flickr account to your own using your Flickr upload email address, it unfortunately doesn't seem to work.

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You can get decent photos out of a standard, consumer-grade digital camera, but a little post-processing can turn them into fantastic wide-angle landscapes. You don't need to be one of those people who can explain the concept of lateral chromatic aberration to get truly eye-catching digital pictures. With a few shutter clicks and some free, cross-platform software, you can easily mesh standard digi-cam shots into true landscapes, fix one photo's deficiencies with another, and create layered photo collages. Let's take a look at how to use the free, open source application Hugin to make two basic kinds of panoramas.

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Ever wish you didn't have to click through two or three pages to do an "Advanced search" at photo sharing site Flickr, and then click around further to find the right size and photo options? Compfight, an AJAX-powered search site utilising Flickr's API, is a super-streamlined interface for finding search terms in either tags or descriptions, choosing between Creative Commons and more traditional licenses, and popping up original sizes or choosing to head to a photo's default photo/comments page. Better still, mouse over a photo with a blue bottom border, and you'll see what size the original is available in. We've seen specialised search tools for Flickr before, but Compfight simply takes Flickr's built-in search tools and puts all the results on one super-thumbnailed page.

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Everybody loves looking back at pictures from a party, but unless you're lucky enough to have one of those friends who brings a camera to every party and does the work for you, documenting the event can be a pain in the ass. Most of us would rather be, you know, partying. Today I'll show you a few ways you can effortlessly—but extensively—document your next party, using everything from freeware software to some cheap hardware for your camera. When you're done, you'll be able to automate your party photos or make taking pictures fun, giving everyone incentive to contribute to the documentation process.

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Like a famed race horse or a classic book, you don't just throw away a laptop because it's banged up a little. Even if it seems outdated and underpowered, most any laptop is still small, quiet, and relatively low on power consumption, making it a seriously valuable spare to keep handy—even without a working screen. With some free software, a little know-how and some creative thinking about your home network, nearly any old laptop can find its second wind, and today I'll run through some of the best ways to get it there.Photo by daveynin.

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Take beautiful, detailed close-ups with your compact digital camera with DIY weblog Curbly's guide to macro photography. Macro mode is an excellent but underused (for most of as, at least) feature available to most compact digital cameras that focuses sharply on a small, close-up area, leaving the background nicely blurred. A good introduction to macro photography can open a whole new world to your point-and-click, so if you've never gone macro before, get ready to go on a snapping binge.

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Mac OS X only: Freeware iPhoto plug-in FFXporter integrates with iPhoto to seamlessly upload your pics to the popular photo sharing web site, Flickr. Exporting pictures from iPhoto to Flickr with FFXporter is simple, and the uploads preserve the transfer of all your iPhoto metadata into Flickr—including titles, keywords/tags, and ratings. FFXporter also supports importing photos into your existing photo sets and can create sets from your uploads. For a slightly more robust but currently shareware iPhoto-to-Flickr exporter, check out Flickr Export. Otherwise the freeware, Mac-only FFXporter handles exports to Flickr with ease.

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Blogger Vinayaka CA details how he uses Google's excellent photo management application Picasa to manage multiple photo libraries. His solution: Create a Picasa library under another user account (e.g., PicasaUser) on your Windows PC, then put a shortcut to Picasa on your main desktop. Whenever you want to use your alternate Picasa library, right-click the shortcut and select Run as ->PicasaUser. You'll have to provide the other username and password every time you do it, and this isn't as clean as if Picasa actually supported multiple libraries (like iPhoto and iTunes do), but it's a good workaround if you want to separate your pics into multiple libraries. I gave it a try and it seemed to work, but if you've got a better method, let's hear it in the comments.

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