4 Free Ways to Download Facebook Photos and Albums

Facebook is a Worldwide Social Networking Leader. It has multiple built-in capabilities for convenient communication and virtual sharing of your life events. In this post, we would like to present several software utilities to help with one of the tasks associated with Facebook, and particularly downloading images and complete albums from the friend’s profiles. All the reviewed utilities are free for use.

1. FotoBounce

FotoBounce offers one of the most convenient and comprehensive ways to download pictures from Facebook and manage them easily on your computer. FotoBounce is offered both for Windows or Mac platform. It works locally from your computer and provides simple way of downloading pictures.

Fotobounce utilizes advanced face detection and recognition technology to automatically detect faces when photos are found or imported. As faces are detected by Fotobounce and tagged by the user, this “trains” Fotobounce to learn who people are and helps automate the tagging process. The process is similar to the Picasa Web Album as to this feature.

While this post focuses on photos downloading, you can enjoy other features of FotoBounce like uploading photos to Facebook gallery and Flickr. Photos are uploaded directly from Fotobounce – with tags and descriptions intact. There’s no need to spend additional time painstakingly re-tagging photos and no browser-based transfers or third-party software is required.

Fotobounce Viewer is a separate product that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.  The Viewer makes it easy to browse photos and share them on the go from any platform and practically any mobile device.  A version will be available soon for the iPhone (iPad and iPod) and the BlackBerry Playbook.  For devices not supported by the Fotobounce Viewer, users can use Fotobounce Mobile.  

Photos or albums can be sent to Twitter from Fotobounce. Fotobounce is the only solution in the industry that allows an entire album to be attached to a single tweet.

Website: http://fotobounce.com/

Direct Download Page: http://fotobounce.com/download/

2. Bloom

Bloom is another multi platform desktop app that let you upload your photos and videos easily and efficiently to Facebook, and, what is important for the matter of this post, download albums and view your friends' photos.

Main features include ability to download albums or individual pictures from Facebook

Website and Downloading Page: http://antaki.ca/bloom/

3. PhotoGrabber

PhotoGrabber is very simple desktop application which allows you to download Facebook Photo albums to your computer with no technical knowledge. It is available for Windows and Mac platforms.

Website: http://code.google.com/p/photograbber/

Direct Download Page: http://code.google.com/p/photograbber/downloads/list

4. Pick & Zip

Pick&Zip is not a software utility, but totally free online tool allowing you to download photos from Facebook in a single ZIP or PDF file. In this case, you do not have to download any software on your computer to use this web application.

To start using this service, you just have to log in with Facebook credentials. Pick& Zip allows you to download your own pics for backup purposes, tagged photos of you (even if they were not uploaded by you), and also, the albums of your friends. When you login with your Facebook login credentials, you can see all your friends on the left side as a list. When you click on any of your friend’s name, all the albums of that person are listed. You can download a particular photo or the entire album.

Website: http://www.picknzip.com/

4 Free Services to Unfollow Inactive Followers: Twitter Tips and Tricks

1. ManageFlitter

Formerly known as ManageTwitter, ManageFlitter is considered by many as one of the best application for unfollowing Twitter users. It is a very simple, bur features-rich and powerful, tool to unfollow on Twitter. This app may take a couple of minutes to load if you have multiple followers, but it allows you to quickly unfollow lots of people in few steps.  It loads all the people who you are following, and points out on the people who are not following you back, giving you an easy opportunity to select uses you would like to stop following. Click the "Unfollow" button, and the request will be instantly filled. This is also the only application that gives you the option to unfollow people who are inactive, haven't tweeted in a while, or have not posted a profile picture.

At the top of each page is a nifty ordering tool. This tool allows you to rearrange the people in the list below. It's a fast way to find out which accounts you follow have the most followers. Maybe you'd like to find the people who haven't tweeted for the longest time. You can do this by ordering based on their last tweet time.

Website: http://manageflitter.com/

2. JustUnfollow

JustUnfollow makes it easy to unfollow those who are not following you back on Twitter. It displays 50 of your non-followers at a time and lets you decide whom you would like to un-follow and whom you would prefer keep following. It uses Twitter oath for authentication so your password won’t get leaked in the process; signing in process requires using your Twitter account.

Note that free accounts can unfollow up to 50 users in a day. If you are searching for a bulk unfollow twitter app then you should know bulk unfollows aren't allowed by twitter. You get to check and unfollow only those users that you want to.

Website: http://www.justunfollow.com/

3. The Unfollow App

As the service name suggests, The Unfollow App offers you to clean up your Twitter directory by un-following those who are inactive and do not follow you back. The application recommends you these profiles and even gives you the detailed information of all the connected users in your social network. Therefore, the Unfollow App makes it easy for you to make informative decision on whom to follow and unfollow on Twitter.

Website: http://www.theunfollowapp.com/

4. Twit Cleaner

Twit Cleaner is helpful because it analyzes the Twitter users you follow and presents you with a (free) report highlighting those who you may want to unfollow for one reason or another. The application is especially useful if you like to keep the Tweeter account as clean as possible, removing not just inactive uses, but may be active as well, whose activity does not meet your desired requirements to your Twitter profile page.

This application allows you to analyse the people you follow in details, locating time wasters, spammers, the boring posters, bots etc., providing you with smart recommendations on how to improve your own Twitter presence.

Website: http://thetwitcleaner.com/

Free Online Wordpress Theme Generator

If you plan to start a new Wordpress blog, or you are going to refresh design for your existing blog, you may be looking for the nice template, which may fit your format, color scheme, design, and structure. No problem, if you have knowledge and experience on the web development, and you can make template for your blog exactly as you want. If you are not proficient on web design, or you have no time or interest in doing that yourself, there are multiple readymade templates on the Web, both free and commercial. But any template you find has limited set of the adjustments and changes you can make, so it is quite possible that your blog appearance will look similar to thousands other blogs, using the same template.

In this post, I would like to present free online services from Lubith.com, offering Wordpress themes creator.

Main Features

• Intuitive interface. Move and resize the theme elements just by dragging the two knobs.
• No code required. You can design, edit and use your theme without needing to write a single line of code.
• Every theme is being kept on server for 7 days after your last save and then it will be erased. So, you can get back and make adjustments to the theme you have initially generated.
• You cannot work on several themes in parallel. If you reset the theme, the previous layout will be lost.

Installing your Theme in WordPress

• From WordPress admin panel, go to the Appearance ->Themes.
• Click the Install Themes tab (at the top).
• Click the Upload link.
• Browse for the zip file downloaded from Lubith and click Install Now button.
• Click the Activate theme link to activate the theme.

Website: http://www.lubith.com/

Dynamic Views Templates Enhancement in Blogger Blogs

Back in June, we presented the Blogger enhancement allowing your blog visitors to see your blog differently through new and refreshed Blog appearance through Dynamic Views. Encouraged by a positive feedback from blogs’ owners and blogs’ visitors, Blogger recently extended these feature capabilities.  

In brief, the Dynamic templates are new templates designs, which were made available to apply to Blogger blogs. In comparison with the standard templates as were used for your blog before by default, these dynamic templates are quite advance aesthetically, giving a new look and new feel to your website. Built with the latest in web technology (AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3), Dynamic Views offer a unique browsing experience that will inspire your readers to explore your blog in new ways. The interactive layouts make it easier for readers to enjoy and discover your posts, loading 40 percent faster than traditional templates and bringing older entries to the surface so they seem fresh again.

You may choose from seven various Dynamic Views Templates that display text and photos differently. For example, if you have lots of photos on your blog, you may prefer Flipcard or Snapshot. If your blog is more text-heavy, then Classic, Sidebar Timeslide may be preferable. Here’s a quick description of each of the new views, along with links to some of our favorite blogs where you can check each of them out in action.

• Classic: A modern twist on a traditional template, with infinite scrolling and images that load as you go
• Flipcard: Your photos are tiled across the page and flip to reveal the post title
• Magazine: A clean, elegant editorial style layout 
• Mosaic: A mosaic mix of different sized images and text
• Sidebar: An email inbox-like view with a reading page for quick scrolling and browsing
• Snapshot: An interactive pinboard of your posts 
• Timeslide: A horizontal view of your posts by time period

On top of adding two more templates to the initial offering, Blogger invested time and resources to their customization. Now, you can choose which view should be shown to your blog readers by default and enhance the preferred view with several options, like uploading a header image, changing background, or customizing the colors and fonts.

Adding a Dynamic View to your blog is as easy as changing your template. Log in to Blogger, click on the Template tab on your dashboard, and select whichever view you want to set as your default.

Note that readers can still choose to navigate your blog in a different view by selecting from the pulldown in the upper left of the screen.

While adding most of the widgets available for the normal templates, are still not embeddable, it is the forward-looking development direction for the Blogger team. Adsense widget, however, can be already seen on some templates.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/09/dynamic-views-seven-new-ways-to-share.html

http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/10/dynamic-views-update-2.html