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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 Launches ThingLink Mobile –Interactive Image Creation for iPhone and iPad

By: Neil

28-05-2013

Education, From the lab, Images we Love, Partner announcements, ThingLink Mobile, Thinglink users, Why we do what we do

Take picture + add videos + add text + share

ThingLink today launched its free mobile app, ThingLink Mobile, available for download via the iTunes store, ThingLink Mobile is the first iOS app to let users create interactive images with video players and text instantly embeddable into pictures taken with their camera. The free app for the iPhone and iPad creates interactive images that are shareable to Twitter and Facebook, and are designed to live within the platforms themselves.

ThingLink’s web-based app has been used by major publishers and advertisers to increase engagement with their content. The Washington Post was the first news outlet to use a pre-release version of the ThingLink Mobile app, creating interactive images of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“ThingLink Mobile has one goal: to give more meaning to your camera images, allowing them to instantly come alive in new ways,” said CEO and founder of ThingLink, Ulla Engeström. “As a storytelling tool, ThingLink Mobile unleashes creative ways to capture deeper moments. It also brings the ability to microblog within images to anyone with a smartphone.”

Even in the beta version, users have found interesting uses for the app including: travel images with details of exotic meals, images of newlyweds with the first dance from the wedding embedded into an image, birthdays that come to life with video, and second hand sellers using videos and notes to illustrate the details of the items they’re retailing.

When users download ThingLink Mobile and sign up, they have a free channel for their images at ThingLink.com. Within ThingLink, users can add additional apps (tags) to their images with content from: SoundCloud, Spotify, Google Maps, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites. Those images are instantly shareable to Tumblr, Pinterest, Google!+, Facebook, Twitter, Edmodo and email.

ThingLink’s web-based platform has long been popular among advertisers and publishers for its ability to engage readers and encourage participation. ThingLink Mobile will bring that experience and ability to create compelling personal content to the individual user. People are invited to download the app to make their own interactive images.

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Shoppable Images with ThingLink: One Size Does Not Fit All

By: Neil

20-04-2013

Education, From the lab, Images we Love, Instructions, Thinglink users, Why we do what we do

If you’re a retailer, a seller on Amazon, eBay or Etsy or a record label driving sales around songs, now you can use ThingLink to transform photos into Shoppable Images that are instantly shareable in social channels and embeddable on any web page.

ThingLink is the most popular shoppable image solution. Retailers and Etsy, Amazon and eBay sellers can use our free account to add standard shopping tags and icons to any image. When you share them interactively into social channels like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, you’ll drive higher conversion rates. Post them onto web pages and folks will spend more time on page and shop through your images.

Custom Retail Solutions — And because top brands know that one size does not fit all, ThingLink offers brands an enterprise level account that lets you customize shoppable images with unique shopping apps and branded tag icons. Build and upload your own shopping apps with product previews, prices, preference, and shopping carts — and drive higher conversion. Use ThingLink to make your images uniquely yours with branded icons that speak directly to your customers.

Want to make your own images shoppable? Sign up for a free business account and get started today. And contact us if you’re interested in ThingLink Custom Retail Solutions.

Touch these images by Giorgio Armani, Vogue magazine, Home Depot, Interscope, Cirque du Soleil, Ikea, Two for Fashion, and Olivia Palermo.

Giorgio Armani

Vogue Magazine

Home Depot

Interscope Records

Cirque du Soleil

Ikea

Two for Fashion

Olivia Palermo

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Great meeting you at SxSW2013!

By: Neil

14-03-2013

Events, Images we Love, Staff News, Thinglink users

We had a great time at SxSW meeting so many ThingLink users among musicians, film makers, brands and agencies.

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ThingLink Launches Copy and Paste for Tags

By: cyril

05-02-2013

From the lab, Instructions

How many times have you wanted to take the tags from one image and place them on another?

Many users upload several images and want to use the same tags on each one – a twitter and facebook tag, purchase links etc.

Until now, you had to manually create a new tag on each image.

Now you can simply COPY and PASTE tags from one image onto another. Keep in mind that you must have access to both images in your channel.

Here’s how it works:

Go to edit the image you would like to copy tags from.
Inside the Editor right click anywhere on the image.
Choose from the menu “Copy X tags”.
Now go to edit the image you would like to paste the copied tags to.
Right click on the image and select “Paste X tags”.
Voilà! Now you have tags copied from one interactive image to another.

Questions? Write to support @ ThingLink.com

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The ThingLink Twitter Card – How does it work?

By: jonas

09-11-2012

From the lab, Instructions, Partner announcements

This week we released our ThingLink Twitter Card, which allows anyone to browse the live tags in ThingLink interactive images inside a Tweet at Twitter.com.

You can now create an image on ThingLink with in-image links to video and sound players, share it on Twitter, touch the image and interact with the links without having to leave Twitter. This innovation opens up for new opportunities for personal expression as well as marketing opportunities for businesses and brands.

ThingLink and Twitter – How to set it up

Now if you haven’t already signed up for ThingLink, do it now. We’ll wait, it only takes 30 seconds.

Then upload or import an image and tag it with any of our supported rich media tags, which you can see in the presentation below:

Share the interactive image on Twitter by clicking “Share” or “Tweet” on top of the image or right clicking the image and selecting “Share image”.

Any user seeing the tweet can now browse the live tags on Twitter without having to leave the image. Click “View Media” and the interactive image opens up. The image is also viewable by clicking the date/time stamp on the Tweet and the status update version of the Tweet will appear with the image and interactivity.

The image must be shared from ThingLink.com to be viewable inside Twitter. We also suggest that you set up your own channel on ThingLink to allow for people to easily find other interactive images that you’ve created.

NOTE: Twitter is still testing Twitter Cards with certain users/sessions. The ThingLink-Twitter integration works on ThingLink.com, Twitter’s mobile client and Tweetdeck’s web version. Hopefully it will work on third party clients in the future.

Tips & Tricks

Twitter will scale down any image that you share from ThingLink.com to 280 or 560 pixels on mobile and 435 pixels on desktop. That means that any messages in the image should be written in larger text and be more prominent for users to quickly see them. It also means that it’s better to use vertical images since the height of the image is not restricted.

BONUS!

We’ve implemented another fun feature for the Twitter Card. If there are Twitter tags in the image, we will detect them and automatically mention the users when you share the image on Twitter. That way the users in the image will be notified of it whenever the image is shared by you or anyone else. Check out this Twitter example below:

Visit ThingLink now to create your own account!

Read more about ThingLink and Twitter @ Mashable and TheNextWeb.

Read What ThingLink’s Interactive Tweets Mean for Brands @ SimplyZesty.

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ThingLink images are now interactive on Twitter.com

By: jonas

06-11-2012

From the lab, Instructions

We’ve created our very own Twitter card! You can now experience ThingLink images directly on your Twitter page! This means that every time you share a scene on ThingLink to Twitter, the interactive image will show up live in Twitter’s stream. Isn’t that cool! It allows you to show your highlighted party pics or display products directly to your Twitter followers.

But… how does it work? The image below explains it:

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New this week: Email sharing and improved Facebook sharing

By: jonas

25-02-2011

From the lab

As we announced a few weeks ago ThingLink allows you to easily share your tagged images on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks to our active community, we noticed soon that the Facebook sharing is not working as smoothly as it could, because the thumbnail that appeared besides the shared link on FB seemed to be any random image from the same page – and not necessarily the one indicated in the link.

To solve this, we built our own Facebook application that shows the shared image in the wall post. You can also add your own comment above the image.

We also added our sharing panel one of the most common ways of communicating: email. Email sharing allows longer messages and serves those who prefer not to comment images via Twitter or Facebook.

ThingLink is nicely on a roll and we are developing new feature ideas daily. Remember to let us know what features would be useful to you, and what you would like to improve. Also, we are always happy to hear what you think about our existing features so please visit our community forum and have your say or send it to info@thinglink.com.

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ThingLink Blog

ThingLink Updates Editor with Search and Preview

ThingLink Launches ThingLink Mobile –Interactive Image Creation for iPhone and iPad

Shoppable Images with ThingLink: One Size Does Not Fit All

Great meeting you at SxSW2013!

ThingLink Launches Copy and Paste for Tags

The ThingLink Twitter Card – How does it work?

ThingLink images are now interactive on Twitter.com

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