In appreciation for Mother’s Day (just around the corner — May 13th!), Picplum is giving you free shipping as a gift when you send 15 or more photos.

What photos to send?

Send your mom some of your cherished memories for Mother’s Day:

• Your recent travel photos.
• Photos of you and your mother — from old photos all the way to recent memories.
• Photos of you and your significant other.
• Photos of your children to share with grandma.

Login to upload some photos now or email photos from your phone to photos@picplum.com. Remember it takes 3-5 days for shipping time in the U.S. so send out your photos as soon as possible.

Question: What are all these people with their smartphones doing?

Answer: They’re on a photowalk of course! This past Saturday I took part in a 3 hour photowalk with a group of San Francisco photowalkers. As described Continue Reading →

This guest post was written by Basheer Tome (@Sheero), a photographer, student and interaction designer in Atlanta. His camera of choice is the Canon 5D Mark II.

Some of our strongest memories aren’t just of events, or people, or things — they’re of feelings. Or at the very least, feelings play a huge role in our memories and the rest of the cast and crew serve to give them context for how you remember those feelings.

Seeing a tablecloth pattern can make us salivate, the creases in a map can trigger wanderlust, and even a single strawberry can trigger an entire memory.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to send your favorite photos as prints via Picplum. In this video Akshay sends 5 photos to his mom and sister. Visit Picplum to get started.

You can send photos prints via Picplum in three easy steps. Continue Reading →

Bokeh has become one of my favorite photography terms in the last few years. It describes a style of photography where there is an extremely shallow depth of field — the region where a subject will appear focused — and a blurry background. In particular, bokeh is defined as the quality of that blurred background. This helps make your subject stand out — it’s quite a neat effect. You can learn about the technical aspects of bokeh on photographer Ken Rockwell’s website.

A photograph I took of my nephew with a Canon 7D at f/1.4 (very large aperture).

You told us you wanted an easier way to switch between recipients when sending photo prints and we listened. There’s a new Picplum sending page that lets you add, edit and quickly check off whether each recipient receives photo prints in the mail or photos via email. If you have many recipients, a search box appears to make it easy to find and edit recipients.

The New Sending Page!

You will also notice several “i” info icons — there’s one next to Select Recipients and another next to the total price. Just hover over them to learn more about those sections. The latter Continue Reading →

Team Picplum just had a great weekend in New York City after attending Photo Hack Day at the spiffy General Assembly coworking space. We quickly realized that a barely 2 day visit to NYC was not sufficient to really get a good glimpse of the city and plan to come back again soon.

On the way to NYC

We used the Hotel Tonight iPhone app to find a place in Manhattan near General Assembly and luckily came across Ace Hotel. As a Foursquare tip put it, this place is “painfully hipster.” But we enjoyed the vibe in the bustling lobby that turns into a loud bar at night, the great coffee next door at Stumptown and the rather unique design of the place (dimly lit halls with the only light emanating from the number of your hotel room — adorned in kern-perfect typography of course).

But the part that caught my attention the most (aside from the ridiculously narrow room just barely wider than the length of the bed)? Each room comes equipped with a Polaroid camera for guests to use during their stay. Nice touch. But I digress, back to what we came to NYC for:

So what exactly is Photo Hack Day? Continue Reading →

We have added an easy way for you to invite your friends to Picplum. You can invite friends via email, Tweet or sharing it on Facebook. We also made simple link for you to share.

We really want people to try Picplum without having to commit or pay anything. That’s why when you invite your friends and family to Picplum, they get $5 in credits. The best part is when they send out their first set of photos, we also send you $5 in credits as our way of thanking you :).

Picplum Credits! There are no limits on invite credits!

You can also buy a gift and invite someone from our Picplum gifting page.
Gift Picplum

The invite link is located in the drop-down on the top bar where your name is.

We were in the middle of our first Picplum GrubWithUs meal (join our group; we will begin hosting monthly dinners!) and began discussing the recent move by Google to block Twitter in results. The conversation evolved into how I had begun working on moving the Picplum blog away from Tumblr to a Heroku-hosted custom Jekyll setup. Ben Guild of Mobile17 was curious why I would go through so much effort, including creating a new blog design, simply to avoid Tumblr.

A happy bunch at a Picplum GrubWithUs meal. L to R: Ben (Mobile17), Nate (AT&T Interactive), Hung (Cisco), Akshay (Picplum), Josh (Weebly), Semil (Votizen/TechCrunch), Chris (TutorCloud), Paul (me!), Pete (Omni Consumer Products)

Want to automatically add photos to your Picplum account when you post photos to other services? You can use the service ifttt (short for if this then that). It lets you create triggers and then do something when that happens. We have started seeing Picplum users making ifttt “recipes” for Picplum and other services like Continue Reading →