What's New at Webshots

Enter this week's Creative Challenge and tell us where our mystery photo was taken!

In our Creative Challenge, we asked you to tap into your inner poet and write political haikus. We've chosen our favorite, so see who won!

As we enter the holiday season, we know many of you are taking lots of great pics—and we hope you're sharing them with your friends, family and members of the Webshots community. We have many ways to share your photos, so try one...or all!

and First Exposures, a collection of photographs by at-risk youths, does just that. Check out the amazing photos!

If you publish photos on Webshots, chances are good that you receive the stats email. Starting tomorrow, Friday, 11/10, there will be some added information in your stats email.

See who submitted the best "Bad Hair Day" photo for our weekly Creative Challenge.

Can politics and poetry mix? They can in this week's Creative Challenge, where we ask you for your political-themed haikus.

Looking for a member and their photos? Check out our specific searches!

We're always trying to make Webshots the best it can be, so take our survey and help us improve the site's speed.

Check out what we're featuring in this week's Webshots spotlight email, which features the best of Webshots each week, and sign up!

Get your curling irons and cameras ready because we want to see your Bad Hair Day photos.

Meet the Halloween caption challenge winner!

Show us your funny, creative and spooky Halloween costumes. Upload your photos to Webshots now!

Webshots is about to launch video! Get ready by checking out our length limits and accepted formats.

Do you have a way with words? Then take our creative challenge! We've got a funny photo and we want your captions.

We are rewarding our featured members with a little special something!

Looking for great fall-themed images for your desktop? Or even to decorate your walls? The fall frenzy in photos has begun! And if you just want to find the pro shots for any search term, you can use advanced search to help (though the images that come from the Community are pretty nice too!)

While Oktoberfest is officially over in Munich, Germany, the party is still raging on Webshots and around the world. We put out a call for your Oktoberfest photos, and so far, you've uploaded a few hundred images tagged oktoberfun!

Make a Difference Day is October 28th. Got any recommendations for photos or albums to feature?

Before you know it, the holidays will be here. Get a 12-page calendar for everyone on your list!

Our engineers have just rolled out fixes that make it easier for our community to grow, and they also squashed some bugs. Yeah!

The general manager of Webshots, a.k.a. "the suit" answers some tough questions from you.

What does RSS stand for and what can it do for you? Read on in our Tech Talk blog post!

Our engineers are on a quest to right the wrong. See the latest site bugs they've conquered.

The biggest party in Europe (about 6 million people attend) is going on right now: Oktoberfest!

Celebrate OneWebDay with Webshots and check out our photo collection featuring your photos!

Our engineers are hugging their computers with joy. Find out why.

We've set up some blog guidelines and policies to make the experience better for everyone. Please read them before you post.

Want to share your personal events and info with some style?

We're happy to say so long to these bugs on the site and welcome a great new feature!

How has the web impacted your life? Webshots and the organizers of OneWebDay.org want to know.

Now you can view photos in albums in full-aspect ratio with titles!

The latest fixes live on the site.

Looking for something in particular on the new site? Here's a quick guide to some of your favorite features.

Our engineering elves have been hard at work fixing the bugs on the site. Here's there list of what's done.

We improved the display quality of the photos on the photo page and the thumbnails. Find out how we did it.

At webshots, cool events are happening all the time! Get the best of webshots in the new webshots spotlight email.

That coffee seems to be working! Our engineers have fixed more of the bugs you've reported, and we have added a few of the feature requests.

Read about our latest updates to the redsigned site.

We're supplying our engineers with lots of coffee while they work on the issues on the new site.

The earlier bug which prevented downloading of today's pro shots photos has now been resolved. Enjoy today's downloads!

We are aware of the issue with downloading the pro shot images today, and we are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. More information soon.

The new webshots is here, and with any launch of a new website, issues can arise. But don't worry, we're on it

Thank you all for the reports of error messages when trying to download Pro Shots images. You should no longer be experiencing any problems with downloading images

It's finally here! The new webshots launched today, and we're so excited to show off all the great features and functions

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast with a vengeance, destroying nearly everything in its path

We have some exciting news: We're about to launch a brand-new Webshots. We've totally overhauled the site from top to bottom to make everything better for you! Before we launch the new site, we'd love to get your feedback, so we're inviting you to a sneak peak of the new Webshots: htpp//:beta.webshots.com.

Our team of engineers has been working diligently to identify the site problems you've noticed in displaying your photos and those pesky proxy error messages. We are happy to say that the issues have been resolved and Webshots should be back and better than ever—plus, we also updated the site's architecture and installed some upgrades along the way.

Eleven years ago, Webshots launched what is now the number-one photo-sharing site in the world. To celebrate that success, we're having an 11-day sale! Through September 1, you can save 11% on all Qoop products, such as Prints, Photobooks, Baseball Ts, Calendars and lots more!

We are experiencing unusual load times on some of our databases and are working to find the cause. Until we do, you may occasionally receive proxy-error messages when trying to access various parts of the site.

We love taking tons of pictures at Webshots, but we often ask ourselves, "What can we do with all of our digital images?" Gridlove has the answer! Now you can upload your photos to Webshots and then use them to create a photo "grid" on Gridlove.

Imagine this: You're out and about on a sunny afternoon when you run into an old friend who you haven't seen in years. So much has happened in your life, and you want to share it with your friend. The best way is to show photos from your Webshots albums, but you're nowhere near a computer. What to do?

Our hot summer sale of 2 for 1 prints from Qoop has been extended until August 7! That's right, less than 8 cents per print—and yes, we'll even cut the pennies in half for you!

We love techie info just as much as you do, especially when it comes to photography. So we're teeming with joy at our newest feature: showing data about your camera!

There's something for everyone at Webshots, and our new editor's collections are living proof :) We've compiled some great collections of photos shared by our members in perfect themes for desktop enjoyment: entertainment, home & garden, travel, and more.

We have two incredible sales in the Prints & Gifts area. There's something for everyone, whether you want to print your own personal photos or choose ones from our Pros.

We've been working hard at Webshots, and we're almost ready to unveil the efforts of our long nights and weekends: the new and improved Webshots!

Think you're seeing double? For a limited time only, you can get TWO prints for the price of ONE from Qoop. That’s right, just 7 and 1/2 cents per print–but please, don’t break your pennies in half!

At Webshots, we like to make things easy for our members. That way, you'll have more time to take great photos and share them with your friends and family. One way we're simplifying is with our updated Terms of Use. The new format is short and to the point, so you may actually read the entire thing! Here, you’ll find all the info about posting and using content on the site, the different types of memberships we offer, our rights and responsibilities as a photo-sharing site, and more.

Webshots has made its API available to the public, and some of you may be wondering, what in the world is an API? In laymen’s terms, an API, which stands for Application Programming Interface, enables other websites and applications to build cool widgets (interactive devices, such as our blog badge) that work with Webshots. Recently, Zimbio.com enlisted our API to let members contribute content to a shared page, using Webshots to power the photo searches for diverse topics, such as astronomy, Rio de Janeiro and Brazilian cooking. This collaboration lets us share our members’ terrific content from all over the world and bring areas of interest to one place. We’ll be announcing these types of API uses regularly on the blog, so be sure to check back often!

Photographer Stephen Matera truly has a gift for capturing the decisive moments of nature. He lives in the Pacific Northwest and regularly captures its beauty and spirit with a strong graphic quality.

The newly designed Webshots is coming soon, and we have a host of innovative features for you!

It's Friday, June 9, the start date for the largest international sporting event of the year, the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Thirty-two countries are striving for the gold trophy and will be travelling to various cities and towns in Germany to compete. In the weeks to come, we'll be highlighting some of these host cities in our featured albums, but in the meantime, check out the World Cup collection our editors have put together!

Summer is just around the corner, and we have got some interesting new changes and additions coming.

Flowers and caterers and cakes, OH MY! Wedding season is upon us and our editors have put together a gorgeous collection of cakes, dresses, flowers and more details from the big day.

The auditions, the red carpet, the judges, the finalists: it's American Idol mania and we've caught it! As Taylor Hicks and Katharine McPhee await the season finale, browse our member photos of the stars and judges that have made this show a cultural phenomenon.

The long-awaited movie blockbuster The Da Vinci Code opens at the Cannes Film Festival tonight. Webshots members can be a part of the buzz surrounding the film by exploring hundreds of the famous landmarks and locations from the book in

You will notice when you click on the My Photos tab, well, it will look a little different. All the old functionality is there, and some new features as well.

We know you love sharing your photos with, well, everyone, so we have made some updates to make it easier.

Motherhood is hot in Hollywood again, and just in time for Mother's Day (which is May 14, in case you've missed the hints and reminders), our editors put together a fun celebrity moms photo collection. We hope you enjoy it and we encourage you to invite your mom to check it out too!

With spring well under way (and the team rivalry to go with it), our editors put together a fun collection of baseball photos for your enjoyment.

It's no wonder why Don Paulson has become one of our most beloved artists on Webshots. Since 2002, he embraced Webshots to gain worldwide exposure and has regularly participated under several areas of our site.

Photos can entertain, enlighten, evoke emotion and enrich people's lives. To help bring interesting and/or exceptional photos to you, we recently launched a Staff Picks blog where a group of us are highlighting photos that we think are worth a second look.

There was a database failure on the blog, and we have moved the software to a different server. We are currently in the process of recovering most of the data and hopefully restoring it to this new server, but it will most probably take a couple of days.

It's a special section of Webshots for students. For the rest of us - sorry - no voyeurism - you have to have an edu email address to join. If you have an edu email address, click here to log-in.

We've done a few things to the album listing on the member homepage over the years, but not much, and seeing as this is currently the main page for presenting member content, it's worth a specific discussion.

Friday, March 31st we're featuring a Q & A with longtime Webshots photographer Larry Carver. Check back then if you want to find out more about him!

Maybe you've wondered to yourself: who works for Webshots anyway and what kinds of pictures do they like to look at? Wonder no more. We're introducing our Staff Picks blog today, where you can check out photos recommended by a group of passionate individuals who work for Webshots.

We have made a few changes to the member homepage this year. We have added Favorite Photos, profile photos, and a whole profile page. But it could always be better, and since it is your homepage, I thought I’d throw this out there for some member feedback.

Want to recommend a photo, album or a member to be featured on Webshots (even your own)? We'd love your input! Our editors are always looking out for rich, colorful images that tell a story or make an emotional impact on viewers.

We know that many of you have been asking for the ability to create photo books and twelve page calendars of your favorite personal photos, so we are excited to finally share these new products with you. In the past, it has been time-consuming and complicated to create a photo book or collage from a vacation or event, but Qoop and Webshots make this process really easy and fun. Log in with your Webshots username and password and all your albums will automatically show up - from there, you are just a few clicks away from a beautiful book. Our team has made a number of books and posters of vacations and events and we’re thrilled with the results, and hope you will be too!

For years members have visited the Webshots Gallery to download beautiful screensavers of photos captured from around the globe. You might be wondering “Who are these guys?” “What motivates them to get up at the crack of dawn to capture the perfect light?” and “How did they get started?” Since so many of our artists have such fascinating stories and backgrounds, I just can’t help but appreciate some of the images that much more when I hear what’s behind them. So, as a new feature, I would like to introduce you to some of the professional photographers whose work our members have enjoyed in the Webshots Gallery throughout the years.

The problem with random members showing up in your favorites and your fans lists has been resolved. I'm going to have someone investigate getting the correct info into the latest activity problem. There have been requests to be able to block someone listing you as a favorite member.

It's March and as the surrounding Northern California hills turn bright green, we are reminded that St. Patrick's Day is just around the corner. Here are a few images that I thought you might enjoy if you were looking to add a little Irish flavor to your desktop. Most of the images are from our

We have added a Profile tab and new Friends functionality. Check it out!

In 1871, Ferdinand Hayden led an expedition that included artist Thomas Moran and photographer William H. Jackson. They brought back images that helped convince Congress that the area known as Yellowstone needed to be protected and preserved.

You chose 5 new topics for US Travel: Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Webshots member teamchina captures the amazing feats of Chinese acrobats.

You chose 5 new topics for the Middle East Category in World Travel: Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey

Team Italia congratulates the Canadian hockey team in Torino last week.

Member worldtripper has been around Webshots since 2002, delighting us with photographs from all over the world. In fact, one account is not enough, worldtripper3 is the second edition from this talented member.

We thank kittypie312 for bringing us the serenity of this spectacular photo of Lac Blanc in in the French Alps.

Shake the the winter blues with this palm tree paradise. This stunning acrylic painting is by Webshots member dunedingerry.

Ahh... Escape to the tranquil blue waters of Bora Bora. This photo was shared by longtime Webshots member marc_pelissier .

New York's Central Park is one of the world's great parks, and is particularly beautiful in the snow. Webshots member perlasart shares photos of a record-breaking blizzard in the Northeastern US. Snow day!

Here's a nice aerial photo of Olympic village from Webshots member jonmccullough. And take a look at the new Winter Olympics albums if you have a chance.

It is time to choose some new Community Topics. Participate in our poll and view a few photos.

Webshots Member magnatronus captures the agricultural show in the small market town of Penistone, South Yorkshire, England with his mobile device.

Sometimes we see a photo that evokes a certain mood, that transports us if only for a moment. The colors and the composition in this photo are beautiful and timeless. This photo comes to us from Webshots member fourleafproductions.

View brown bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska.

The Olympic flame dates back to the Games of ancient Greece. Webshots member palclaud3 took these great photos as the torch reached his village of Castiglione Torinese, outside of Torino. We’re happy to share this exciting moment with all of you too.

We will be down for a brief period of time on 2/8/06 starting around 9am Pacific Standard Time.

Valentine's Day is a little more than a week away, and it's our busiest season for eCards! If you'd like to send a free eCard using a Valentine-themed photo, vist the Valentine's Day collection in our Gallery. If you’d prefer a traditional illustration for your eCard (like Garfield), visit our Valentine eCards collection.

There has been a lot of conversation about the search index, and a few questions asked about how we generate relevance. So here is what I dug up:

There are millions of Webshots members all around the world, uploading and sharing their images every minute of every day (a few hundred a minute, last time I checked). Some of our members say that they think of Webshots as a ‘window to the world.’ And often, we like to think of that world as being a place of beauty and tranquility. You’ve probably noticed that many of the photos on Webshots are travel and nature photos. As part of our effort to bring you interesting photos to look at, here we highlight some photos of timely or topical issues and current events to show you that Webshots is a place for ‘citizen journalism’ as well as a place to see the world through the eyes of our members.

Lastest site information.

Last night we released another update to the Webshots Desktop for PC users. The latest version is 2.5.0.5135.

Here is a bit of information for those of you are still plagued by slow photo downloads.

Check in for the latest information.

Our conversation on stats continues.

As the Olympic torch approaches Torino, we'd like to invite all of our members who are planning to attend the ceremonies to grab your cameras and document the events as they take place, then upload your photos to Webshots. We'll be creating a special subcategory under News & Events where you can find all the albums. And we'll be featuring the best of these on the homepage as well.

Are you still waiting to update your office wall calendar for 2006? Choose a personal favorite photo or one from our professional gallery of photos and you’ll get 20% off through the end of January!

Happy Monday everybody! Get your latest site information.

The latest information about the site.

Around 7pm last night, our weary engineering staff found a major problem and launched a fix, and as many of you noticed the site improved. So things are better. However, there may indeed be some remaining peformance issues.

I just sat down with our engineers to get the latest scoop and this is what I know:

Since we've brought the site back up, our engineers have been making ongoing refinements. In order to fix everything as soon as possible, instead of packaging those small code pushes into batches, we've been pushing them out one at a time.

This is NOT affecting all members, but if you have noticed that some of the photos within your albums are missing, or a recently uploaded album is not showing up, we'd like to ask for your help in resolving this as quickly as possible.

We have migrated the data to shiny new fast machines, we checked it once and we checked it twice and now Webshots is ready for you once again.

So that we can continue to store the hundreds of millions of photos our members share on Webshots, we have been making a few architectural changes to the site over the last few months. We are now ready for the last major change, but it is a big one and we will have to take the site down for an extended period of time.

A bunch of Webshots and CNET Networks folks are at CES this week (the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas). We're asking our members for their input in the most exciting new consumer electronics products this year: vote in the People's Voice award now through Saturday, January 7

Great news! After many months of hard work, we've released a new version of the Webshots Desktop for PC. We've added some new features to this release and fixed some bugs that have been plaguing Webshots members. (Sorry, this version is just for PC users. We are recommending that our Mac users try PictureSync while we continue to develop our Mac client).

All of us here at Webshots would like to wish all of our members and viewers a Happy New Year!

As we wrap up the year 2005, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on all that we have accomplished together with our members, and to thank all of you around the world for a wonderful year.

Still hunting frantically for the perfect holiday gifts? You still have time to order and receive your gifts in time for the holidays. Whether you prefer a personal photograph or one from our gallery collection, there is something for everyone in the

Ready for a trip to an island paradise? We have the photos for you.

The editors over at our sister division, CNET Reviews, just posted a really terrific article on Holiday photo taking blunders

You have picked five beautiful states to add to our community topic directory this week: Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

We know how important it is for our Mac users to get the functionality and fun of Webshots on their desktops, and we heard you ask for the ability to both upload photos and download screensavers to enjoy throughout the day. Thanks to all the great feedback you provided on the release of the PictureSync upload application for the Mac, our friends at Holocore have developed a free screensaver application just for Mac users. iPhoto functionality is available as well. Thanks Holocore!

In the spirit of the season of giving and sharing, we'd like to highlight some of our members' albums that document volunteer work and service to others.

For all of the Webshotters out there who wish you had profile photos or wish you could program the Daily Photos or the Community Featured Album, your time has come. We have listened to your feedback and we have made some significant updates to member homepages.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and this year, we at Webshots have much to be thankful for. We're thankful for our professional photographers who travel to the most incredible places on earth to find and capture unexpected beauty (like Dennis Flaherty, who took the photo above).

Good news. On Thursday, we released the first of a series of architectural changes we had planned for improving our site's performance. We added an extra shared cache layer in front of our databases, and our site has responded well to higher traffic. What does this mean? New albums and photos are now visible everywhere on the site more or less instantly. The same goes for album and photo edits and deletions. This solves the frustration experienced by some of you at peak upload times (like Halloween). Thank you for your patience while we made these improvements to the site.

It's great that so many of our members are interested in participating on the blog. We know that many of you are looking for a place to make your product suggestions, so please make them here. Thanks.

We have added new topics to the Community, and we think you will find some interesting and beautiful photos. Check out our four new additions to Asia and US Travel.

The blog has been very effective at opening up communication between Webshots employees and members of our community. We're thrilled to see how many of you have been participating here. And better late than never, we’ve drafted some guidelines to help make the Webshots blog as useful as possible. We are committed to the freedom of expression on the blog, and we would prefer to moderate or your comments as little as possible. With that in mind, please follow these guidelines:

Some of our members live in places where famous people seem to gather, like New York or Los Angeles. Some hang out on the red carpet for awards ceremonies or movie premieres. And some of you just seem to be in the right place at the right time.

We're looking into expanding our Gallery so that we may offer our members a greater variety of professional photos. In addition to favorite download categories such as travel, animals and nature scenes, we want to offer a selection of photos of a more journalistic nature: news, entertainment, sports, weather, etc. These kinds of photos don't lend themselves to our current Gallery format, which is geared towards screensavers, wallpaper and printed merchandise. Yet we believe that many of our members would enjoy browsing and enjoying these kinds of photos in the Webshots Gallery.

Webshots is proud to announce a new photo contest just for dog lovers. The theme is: "What would your dog do for a Milk-Bone treat?" Be creative. Be clever. Be cute.

Just in time for the holidays, Webshots is excited to announce we've recently added new products to our prints & gifts store. Our 5×7 greeting cards are perfect for sending out personalized cards to friends and family using a photo of your own, or one of our professional Gallery photos, like this one

Due to the database latency issues our Premium members have experienced when uploading new photos to Webshots, we had promised to look into a form of compensation and get back to you with the details. After discussion and consideration of the requests from our members, we are providing a TWO MONTH extension to Premium members who have tried to upload photos to Webshots during the month of October. Members who have attempted to upload during the month of October will receive this credit automatically, it is not necessary for you to contact us in order to receive the credit.

We've been featuring a lot of pumpkins and fall foliage lately, so I wanted to post an inspiring photo from one of the albums we featured earlier this week.

Webshots has reached another notable milestone in our member photos. Last night, at 7:32 pm PST, we gathered our 300,000,000th photo. It was just a year ago we were celebrating our 100,000,000th photo! Thanks to all of our members who continue to make Webshots the largest and most fascinating collection of public images on the web!

Fall is the holiday season, and holidays bring pictures, lots of them. We have anticipated the tremendous growth in our site’s popularity and prepared for the increase in demand for photo storage. In the past few months, we’ve been working on migrating to a new technology platform that will dramatically increase capacity. We’re close to 80% complete, but the remaining work has to be continued during this time of high demand – this makes it challenging for us to introduce changes. We’ve been optimizing, caching, re-writing, and adding a lot of hardware, but our members’ demand has exceeded each leap of extra performance that we have created. We have the necessary technology and engineering talent, and I am confident that we’re going to overcome our current problems very soon.

I know that some of you are having problems with the order in which your uploaded photos appear in albums. I also share my photos on Webshots, and I am experiencing this same problem. We apologize for the frustration this is causing. Our engineering team thought we had a solution to this problem in our most recent release, but unfortunately, our solution did not work, and the problem is still occuring. We are making every effort to fix this as soon as possible. Please be patient as we try to work out this problem. We will let you know when it has been fixed.

Travel is one of your favorite community photo topics for uploading, browsing and downloading photos. So we decided to expand your options in the Webshots Community Travel topics. We�ve already split Travel into World Travel and US Travel. We plan on expanding both US and World travel to include every place you�ve ever been or ever wanted to go. And we plan to get to them all, but we thought we would let our members decide where to begin. Go to our poll and vote!

Video sharing is the big buzz in the office these days. Sure, it's a natural progression to go from sharing photos of your baby's first steps to sharing live footage so your folks back in New Jersey can really live the moment. And since almost everyone is on broadband these days, we all want a more engaging and interactive experience when we're online. But pretty soon, those wacky college party pics will turn into really embarrassing party clips, and I'll be the first to admit that we're a little scared! Anyway, lend us a hand by giving your input in our video poll.

October is one of the most beautiful months in Northern California. The summer coastal fog lifts, autumn vegetables like pumpkins and butternut squash appear in the farmers' markets, and the wine country smells like freshly crushed grapes. Unfortunately, the leaves don't change colors much here in San Francisco, a fact that makes some of us yearn for the trees of Burlington or Cape Cod or Madison. Luckily Glenn, our photo editor, put together this great Fall Colors collection with photos from the Webshots Community. We hope you enjoy it. And on another note, those bowls of candy corns on your coworkers' desks are a sign that everyone's favorite spooky holiday is coming. Take our Halloween poll and while you're at it, do a search on Halloween to see what goodies you find!

As an advertising-supported website, we rely on a number of ways to deliver advertising messages to our members. Some of these ways have been more, shall we say, popular than others. And popunders (ads that pop up under the page you're on) were always pretty low on everyone's list. You told us they were annoying. You told us they were sneaky. You told us they got in the way of you enjoying your photos. And you know what? You were right. So we got rid of them. And we're sorry we ever had them. Please continue to enjoy Webshots and keep sending us your feedback. Thank you.

We've given our member homepages a new and more sophisticated look. This is our first phase of a series of improvements to this popular page. We've started by introducing a new layout that puts the photo albums higher on the page and lists albums from newest to oldest as a default. Another cool new feature is that you can see how many times someone has been listed as a Favorite Member. You can check out the new format by taking a look at one of our favorite Webshots member homepages, andybandi. And stay tuned; we'll be introducing more great features in the coming months!

The Gulf Coast states were caught completely off guard by Hurricane Katrina. As photos documenting the destruction started appearing on the site, we put together this collection from our members. As a group, the photos tell an interesting story, one slightly different from what you see on TV.

Webshots is celebrating its 10 year anniversary on August 23, 2005. To celebrate, we are offering 10 days of savings on 10 of our most popular print and photo gifts. Now is a great time to purchase gifts for the upcoming holiday season (it will be here before you know it) and to remember a great summer vacation, family reunion or event. Check out all 10 days of savings!

Congratulations to Geoffrey Dela Cruz of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, for uploading the 250 millionth photo to Webshots! To thank Geoffrey for helping us reach this exciting milestone, he has won a Canon PowerShot SD4000 and a framed print of the winning picture from the Webshots Store. Check out Geoffrey�s winning photo!

With almost 200 categories of photos in the Webshots Community, sometimes it's hard to keep track of everything. One trend we've noticed lately is a steady stream of photos of this summer's red hot concert season. Members are sharing photos from shows like Dave Matthews, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ryan Adams, Coldplay and the Vans Warped 2005 tour. You can find it all in Music. Also, we'd like to point out that Weddings has a few real gems: yummy cakes, fancy dresses and some very memorable proposals. Whatever you're interested in, you're almost guaranteed to find it on Webshots.

As the space shuttle Discovery makes its journey back to Kennedy Space Center, we'd like to point your attention to some great new photos (courtesy of NASA) in Space Shuttles and in Astronauts. The shuttle Discovery is NASA�s first orbiter to fly since the Columbia STS-107 disaster, and we're proud of their accomplishments and awed at the images they've sent back to Earth. Enjoy.

Our technical team has been working on a new architecture to allow for faster photo uploads and page display, but there have been a few bumps along the way and we're sorry for the frustration this has caused. We appreciate your patience as we work out the remaining issues. We're about to hit 250 million photos stored on the site, and we've definitely experienced growing pains as we've made room for all of them. (You guys take a lot of photos!)

We've fixed some major bugs: the incorrect ordering of photos uploaded from the Webshots Desktop, access to photo options in My Account and errors in the notification bubble for new Daily photos and Favorite Members' photos. We're sorry to report that you may still experience a few more problems until early next week (like with Webshots Mobile).

If you are running an older version of the Webshots Desktop, please upgrade to version 4644 now. This page will detect which version of the client you are running and will let you know whether you need to upgrade or not.

After that, it should be smooth sailing, and you'll be able to focus more on browsing and sharing photos. Thanks for your patience; we're working hard to keep Webshots going strong!

You're always telling us you'd like to see more photos of exotic travel destinations. And frankly, who can blame you? We know Webshots is a great way to escape to remote and beautiful places. That's why we're excited to be working with Lonely Planet (yes, the same folks who bring you those great travel guides). Enjoy this scenic shot of New Caledonia and expect many more destinations to come. We're also thrilled to welcome master photographer of the American landscape, Willard Clay . He's yet another great addition to the Webshots Gallery.

Webshots is about to hit a major milestone: 250 million photos stored on the site. These are active photos that have been visited by their owner at least once in the past six months (inactive accounts are removed after six months). To celebrate this exciting milestone, we're offering 20% off everything in our store and we're giving away a Canon PowerShot SD400 to the lucky person who uploads the 250 millionth photo. So go ahead, start adding more photos! View now

With an index of over 195 million publicly searchable photos, we often wonder, "What's going on in the Webshots Community?" Our members are uploading and sharing photos of everything you could imagine. Sure, you'd expect vacation photos and family reunions, but hundreds of sock monkeys? Purple wigs? Chocolate mousse? Webshots employees often challenge each other to search on fun topics or places, but one of our favorites is searching for the town where we grew up. Eric in Engineering found a bunch of good photos of his hometown, Pittsburgh. And Amy, our Director of Services, got to reminisce about her hometown of Tyngsborough, MA. Go ahead, search for your hometown. See what other fun topics you find!

We're testing out a new way to bookmark photos from around the Web. It's a project that's still in beta, and it's called the shoebox. Let us know what you think!

We always feel patriotic this time of year, and we're happy to introduce a tribute to the USA in honor of our nation's birthday, July 4th. Enjoy this collection of professional photos of America the Beautiful.

We recently signed contracts with two new professional photographers, Russ Finley, who specializes in the beauty of America's National Parks, and Stan Osolinski, who shoots colorful landscapes and wildlife. Take a look at Finley's Petrified Forest National Park photo and Osolinski's Turret Arch to see why we love these guys. And if you're a professional photographer interested in submitting your work, check out our photo submission guidelines.

The creators of "America 24/7" and the best-selling "Day in the Life of" series selected Webshots as the official online photo submission partner for their new books, "Dogs 24/7" and "Cats 24/7." Over 77,000 photo entries were submitted from Webshots members. See the great cats and dogs that were selected to be included in the books. And while you're at it, create a custom cover for the book with a picture of your own cat or dog.

As the world's largest photo sharing site, we've added Community Guidelines to our Terms of Use to help educate our members about their photo sharing choices. As an extra service, we've also included some security and safety precautions. View the Community Guidelines now.

As part of our effort to increase server capacity, a problem arose which resulted in many requests to our site returning "Server Busy" messages. We have located the source of this problem and have made changes to prevent it going forward. We apologize for the degraded service and the inconvenience to our members.

We've combined our Daily page and our homepage into one starting point for Webshots visitors. The biggest change is the introduction of the Community section in the middle column of the page where we will feature three hand-picked public member photo albums a day. As the world's largest photo sharing site, we think the best way to demonstrate what Webshots offers is to show how members around the world are sharing their photos.

The Gallery section in the right column is where we continue to introduce the latest professionally licensed photos for your screensaver and wallpaper. Everything else is still there, we just gave it a new look.

Learn more or let us know what you think!

With over 200 million member photos, sometimes it's hard to find the most interesting or the best ones. We've added a couple of areas to the Webshots Community that highlight good photos, like Top Downloads and Favorite Members. Plus we've redesigned an old favorite, Newest Photos.

Get photo updates where you want. Webshots has enabled the latest RSS feed technology to help you stay current with the new photos you're interested in, like new Daily and Community photos, featured Community albums and your favorite members' photos. Now you can automatically publish updates to any RSS enabled website or reader.
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We've listened to your feedback and added new products to our store that you've been requesting! First, we added matte finish for personal prints and second, we added 4xD prints, which are formatted to print the entire frame of your digital images. Most digital camera photos don't fit onto a 4x6 print, so some cropping is required. Now you can choose prints that will show exactly what you see in the frame and on your computer. View now