Tag | ThingLink Blog

ThingLink Updates Editor with Search and Preview

By: Neil

30-05-2013

Education, From the lab, Instructions, Why we do what we do

Today we are happy to share a major improvement to the image editor on our web platform at ThingLink.com.

You can now use our search functionality to find wonderful content for your images.

Your search will query content at Etsy, SoundCloud, Amazon, ThingLink pictures, YouTube and Vimeo.

Run your search, click on an item you want to feature in your image, save tag, and it’s added to your image with a preview so you can see what it looks like when hovered.

As always you can add a tag description of up to 1500 characters and change the icon to a standard one for free user accounts or a custom one for premium user accounts.

If you want your company’s products featured in ThingLink Search, please contact our business development team.

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ThingLink Mobile: Tips for Adding Live Videos to Images

By: Neil

28-05-2013

From the lab, Images we Love, Instructions, ThingLink Mobile, Why we do what we do

ThingLink Mobile is the ideal iOS App for creating interactive images with embedded video players, text links and @Twitter IDs. This post focuses on adding live videos to images.

Take a picture with your iPhone using ThingLink Mobile (or use an existing photo). I saw the band Chicago at Westbury Music Fair this weekend and used ThingLink to capture videos of my favorite songs on images shot at the show.

Here’s how you can take family and concert photos and capture moments around you daily by adding videos into your images.

1 Open ThingLink Mobile on your iPhone.

2 Take a new photo or use any image from your gallery.

3 Touch the image and two options appear:

Add Text - touch and add any text including #hashtags and @Twitter handles.

Add Video – touch and you’ll see three video options

Now lets add a video.

Take a Video – shoot your own 30 second videos.

Choose from Gallery – add videos you’ve already shot with iPhone.

Add from YouTube – touch and open up a search on YouTube – add your favorite videos from YouTube.

TIPS for Adding Live Video – to avoid seeing upside down or sideways videos inside the image:

Shooting video with the REAR camera, hold the iPhone with the HOME button to your right.

Shooting video with the FRONT camera, hold the iPhone with the HOME button to your left.

IMPORTANT: NEVER shoot videos with the camera held vertically.

If you see an iPhone image overlay while getting set to shoot a video, it means you’re holding the camera incorrectly.

The iPhone image overlay is an error message. Flip the camera until that overlay disappears. When the image disappears, you’re ready to shoot.

The image below is what you see if you shoot video and have the HOME button on the wrong side. The image overlay is an error message. Flip the camera until that overlay disappears.

Here is what you should see when you’re holding the camera properly. Now, you’re ready to shoot.

Good luck shooting ThingLink Mobile videos. Questions? Write to support@thinglink.com.

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ThingLink Adds Interactive Image Sharing to Facebook Timeline

By: Ulla

23-04-2013

From the lab, Images we Love, Partner announcements, Thinglink users

ThingLink, the most popular interactive image platform for publishers, brands, agencies and consumers, today added interactive image sharing to Facebook Timeline. Now when publishers share ThingLink interactive images to Facebook, viewers can “touch” them to experience the content inside the image — without leaving Timeline.

ThingLink’s proprietary, patent-pending web-based solution allows publishers to create, tag and share any image, in any environment, quickly and easily. ThingLink allows content producers to better understand how their images are being used by consumers on the different social media platforms, both in terms of interactions with the image as well as a wide range of social behaviors.

Publishers and individuals can now use ThingLink to transform static images on Facebook Timeline into a discovery experience — with music and video players, social links and brand content that appear inside an image when it is “touched.” Rich media tags from services like Youtube, Vimeo, Instagram, Imgur, Flickr, and Twitter are supported from the beginning, and support for custom third-party tags will be added in the coming weeks.

“Images are becoming forums for conversation and discovery that include sharing, touching, commenting, and remixing rich media content created by others,” said CEO Ulla Engeström. “ThingLink is now enabling a new kind of discovery experience on Facebook Timeline that evokes emotion and brings moments to life in ways that drive higher engagement.”

Founded in 2010, ThingLink is the leading interactive image platform with over 130,000 publishers. ThingLink’s enterprise level account for publishers, agencies and brands offers such key features as group account management and the ability to create and launch custom image apps and icons that enhance engagement. ThingLink also offers advanced metrics for measuring image performance across social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, enabling valuable, new insights into consumer engagement.

For more information visit ThingLink.com and ThingLinkPress.com.

How to share your images to Facebook Timeline?
CopyPaste a ThingLink url to your timeline. See examples from MSF, Huffington Post France, and Giorgio Armani.

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ThingLink unveils image icons for creative storytelling

By: jonas

06-09-2012

From the lab

We at ThingLink are all about fun and creative ways to tell and discover stories. As much as we love black and white dots, we decided it was time to give you something more to play with. To your delight and inspiration, we are now introducing new image icons that will make tagging so much fun! There are birds, hearts, triangles, question marks, and this is only the beginning! See the new image icons used for the history of London’s subway and in this cool family photo.

Check out the new icons and make something fun!

Suggest new tag icons!

What symbols, colors, or shapes would you like to use to tag your images? Tell us and we will listen. Send your idea to social@thinglink.com, and our designer Palash will work hard to deliver new sets for you. Tell us about the icon you want to see!

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Featuring hidden clips and tracks in your ThingLink images

By: jonas

28-08-2012

From the lab, Instructions

Many ThingLink users have asked us about how to feature hidden tracks from YouTube and Soundcloud in ThingLink images. We’ve tweaked things a bit and made it really simple to tag image using clips and tracks that have been marked secret on YouTube and SoundCloud. Here’s how:

YOUTUBE

In this post by Google, they describe in detail how to unlist your clips on YouTube. Here’s the short version:

1. Sign into your YouTube Account

2. Click on your account name located in the top right of any page. Click on Video Manager from the expanded menu.

3. Choose the video you want to edit and click the Edit button below the video thumbnail.

4. Scroll down to the Basic Info tab and find the Privacy section.

5. You’ll see the option to make the video Public, Unlisted, or Private.

6. Select Unlisted. Make sure to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

7. Copy the URL of your video

8. Paste the URL into ThingLink’s tag editor and you’re set to go.

After this, only the viewers seeing the interactive image will be able to see the unlisted video.

SOUNDCLOUD

Soundcloud has full instruction on how to make your tracks secret, but here’s the short story:

1. Create or select a track on SoundCloud.com.

2. Click the pen to edit the track’s preferences.

3. Scroll down to Settings and select Private. The default is Public. Now the track is hidden.

4. Click Save and go back to your track.

5. Click Share on your track and a dropdown menu will appear.

6. Copy the Secret link.

7. Paste it into ThingLink’s tag editor and you’re done.

Only the viewers seeing the interactive image will be able to listen to the hidden track.

Visit ThingLink to make your own.

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ThingLink Rich Media Tags: An overview

By: jonas

04-06-2012

From the lab, Instructions, Why we do what we do

We’ve strived to make all content online embeddable on ThingLink images, ranging from streaming media to social profiles to any site enabled with Open Graph. We wish you to be positively surprised every time you drop a link into the image editor and discover that we support virtually all rich content from around the web. In the slide set below you’ll see many of our most popular Rich Media Tags. Head over to ThingLink and try it out for yourself.

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Thrillcall and ThingLink Launch Ticket Sales Inside Photos

By: jonas

11-05-2012

From the lab, Partner announcements

Enabling Artists and Promoters to Share Content and Drive Sales Through Interactive Images

Thrillcall, a live event discovery service with exclusive daily offers, and ThingLink, the interactive image leader in music and entertainment, today launched the Thrillcall rich media tag that lets concert ticket buyers locate and purchase tickets through interactive images. When a user hovers on a picture of an artist or upcoming show, they can easily click through to purchase tickets or share with their friends, eliminating friction between brand experience and purchase.

“It’s now a lot easier to find out about shows, but getting people in the door is still a challenge,” said Matthew Tomaszewicz, Thrillcall co-founder. “We are trying to solve this by using our technology to create new ways for venues, artists and event promoters to get more people to the show and build a closer connection to music fans.”

Event promoters can now drive ticket sales by adding the Thrillcall rich media tag to images on Facebook and across the Web. This also extends the connection with fans by enabling anyone to share or embed the interactive images on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, via email and anywhere online.

ThingLink CMO Neil Vineberg added, “Images remain the most effective way for event promoters, record labels and music artists to attract audiences to events. By adding a Thrillcall tag inside images, ticket sales can now occur where audio, video players and social links already engage consumers in the artist experience.”

The Thrillcall/ThingLink tag features the latest three upcoming shows for any artist with a link back to that artist’s page on Thrillcall, where they can purchase tickets.

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Brand new features: Import your images from Facebook and tag them with Instagram photos

By: jonas

23-04-2012

From the lab, Instructions

The big news about Facebook buying Instagram for a cool billion dollars got us quickly working on two new updates: Importing images from Facebook and then tagging them with Instagram images. We’re happy to announce that both are now live. Check out the image below for a few shots of people hard at work at our office.

Importing images from Facebook

So how do you get started? If you’re a new user, you’ll need to sign up. You will be prompted to upload or import images from Facebook or Flickr. Choose Facebook and sign into your account.

First you’ll see all your albums listed so click on the one you want to select images from. In the album, select one or several images and click “Import selected images”. All images will be imported to ThingLink and you’ll be able to tag them. If you only selected one image, the tag editor will automatically open.

Tagging with Instagram

Yes, you’re now able to tag images with your and other people’s Instagram photos. Since Instagram offers limited image browsing on their web version of the service it’s better that you use Gramfeed, Statigram or Webstagram to find interesting photos in their network. Just log in and grab the URL of any Instagram image. The URL needs to look like this - http://instagr.am/p/JwvlfkFtOV/, starting with http://instagr.am and followed by a unique number-letter series. Paste the URL into the tag editor’s link field and you’re set!

Wait, there’s more!

We have also released support for ThingLink image tagging, which means that you can tag ThingLink images with other ThingLink images. This makes it possible to create chains of tagged images for other users to explore. You’re able to create ThingLink image tags from any other ThingLink user’s tagged images.

Additionally, we’ve updated our tagging editor so that you can now easily share the image straight to Facebook’s Timeline once you’ve tagged it. Enable Facebook sharing from the editor by clicking “Activate sharing” and logging in. Check or uncheck the sharing option and click save. It couldn’t be easier than that.

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ThingLink introduces Tumblr share

By: jonas

15-03-2012

From the lab, Instructions

Tumblr: more addictive than crack? Discuss. Or, just spend hours browsing the photos and thoughts of urban tech and media folk and teenagers. There are fashion Tumblrs to drive home just how underdressed you are, and a-day-in-the-life-of-my-kitten Tumblrs to waste hours and hours of productivity.

And now, it can all be ThingLinked. Moar content! More fun! Who needs sleep?

Yes, ThingLink now offers sharing to Twitter, Facebook AND Tumblr on all ThingLinked images. Users could, of course, post ThingLinked images to Tumblr before we made this change — but now the sharing is automated.

Take for example this Soundcloud Heroes post originally posted on their blog. It’s easily sharable to Tumblr. Try it out yourself on the embedded image below.

We’ve also made it easier to reblog images on Tumblr — when you reblog a ThingLinked image in Tumblr, it is now reblogged with the tags intact.

And the tagged image can now also be viewed in your Dashboard — you only need to click the Play button to see the interactive image.

If all that wasn’t enough, those of you who love to look at your Tumblr pages in Flipboard will be happy to know that ThingLinked images also work in Flipboard. There’s no excuse not to start posting and reblogging ThingLinked images in the hottest micro-blogging platform around!

Watch this video of one of our awesome employees, Thomas, showing off how great ThingLinked images look in Flipboard:

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ThingLink Ramps Up PR Photos

By: jonas

07-12-2011

From the lab, Instructions, Why we do what we do

Originally published by O’Dwyer PR.

Digital PR photos can be enhanced to include links and other content through an expanding service called ThingLink.

Neil Vineberg, the veteran PR pro who is chief marketing officer of Finland-based ThingLink and heads its North American operations, sees the service as a “generational shift” in how users interact with images.

“The job of photo editor becomes more interesting and puts publishers or PR professionals in a position to keep people on their own content,” he said.

With the service, users can embed website links, video content and pop-up info within images, without learning complicated Flash or programming. The “ThingLinked” images are then embeddable by fans, users and journalists within standard web publishing software, creating a trackable PR image unit.

“Instead of emailing a publicity photo to journalists, you can tell them to ‘take my embed code,’” said Veinberg.

Updates made to the images by ThingLink users are distributed to the embedded content so, for example, if a reporter embeds an ThingLinked image in a story, the creator of the image can update the image’s content.

While adopted early as a publicity vehicle in the music industry, use of the service is spreading to publishing and beyond as infographics and other news illustrations are given interactive and tracking capabilities with the service. The popular rock group Evanescence, for example, used ThingLink for its album release Oct. 11 to include embedded links in an image of the album cover to the band’s Twitter and facebook feeds, iTunes and YouTube, among others.

Mashable recently used the service for an infographic on the iPhone (below) while Canada’s National Post created a powerful graphic of the twin towers embedded with links to the windows where victims of 9/11 worked.

Vineberg believes ThingLink has vast potential for the PR sector because of its measurability, ease of use and ability to include information directly from a client (captions, links to websites) within an image.

“It’s a generational shift in how we interact with images,” he said.

(Roll your mouse icon over the image below to see its embedded content)

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« Older entries

ThingLink Blog

ThingLink Updates Editor with Search and Preview

ThingLink unveils image icons for creative storytelling

Featuring hidden clips and tracks in your ThingLink images

ThingLink Rich Media Tags: An overview

Thrillcall and ThingLink Launch Ticket Sales Inside Photos

ThingLink Ramps Up PR Photos

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