MySpace is acquiring Photobucket for $250 million in cash. TechCrunch is reporting that there is also an earn-out for up to an additional $50 million.

Photobucket has been looking for a buyer since March, when they hired Lehman Brothers to help sell the company. They were looking for $300 million or more, but may have had few bidders other than MySpace.

The companies have been in serious acquisition discussions for the last couple of weeks – A dispute that involved Photobucket videos being blocked on MySpace led to acquisition discussions, and the block was removed.

Photobucket generated $6.3 million in revenue last year and planned on hitting $25 million or more this year. They have 40 million registered users and add another 85,000 per day. (more…)

Yahoo Inc. is shutting down Yahoo Photos, its first-generation photo storage site, and asking users to move instead to Yahoo’s Web 2.0 photo sharing site, Flickr, a Yahoo official said on Thursday.

In June, tens of millions of registered users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of various options including upgrading to Yahoo’s Flickr service or various outside-photo storage sites, according to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

Yahoo also will offer consumers the option of loading their photos on competing sites when users are notified next month.

These include PhotoBucket — the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp.’s MySpace — or more conventional photo printing and storage site such as Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly Inc. or Snapfish, he said. (more…)

If you need a cool tool to resize your images, this is something worth checking out.

Resize allows you to resize a batch of bitmaps or convert to jpeg or both. This is useful for creating many thumbnails for websites simultaneously. It is also useful for resizing the frames for animated gifs.

The cool thing about this is that Resize uses pixel averaging for shrinking images which gives much better quality than sub-sampling. The resizing algorithm produces high quality images because it uses all available information from the source image.

The latest version, Resize 2.7 which just hit the software market has these latest changes:

• Faster resizing – especially when resized by an integer ratio
• Message telling you when processing is complete and where the images have been saved to with a link

Ready to see what it can do for you? CLICK HERE

This is a free online service which enables you to add comic book style captions to photos. You can then send your friends the url of your captioned photo.

It’s simple to use, you simply go to the site and then enter the url of the photo you wish to add a caption to, this can be your own photo, or one you find online, anything at all really. On the next screen you can type your caption in a speech bubble. To position the speech bubble you just click and drag the edge of it.

On the next screen you just click “save scene” and now you can bookmark the url or send it to your friends.

Pretty cool site that’s sure to get some laughs when you add funny captions to your friend’s photos. Check it out here.

Have you ever had the need to photocopy something? who hasn’t! But you don’t have a photocopier, right? So you have to go pay for photocopies someplace. Well not anymore!

At least not if you have a scanner and printer anyway!

iCarbon is a small freeware program that enables you to combine your scanner and printer to act just like a photocopier does. It’s compatible with TWAIN-compatible scanners. Configuration options include the paper size, color type (black and white, grayscale and color) contrast and quality settings.

It’s a useful little tool to have around whenever you need a quick copy of a document and it’s easy to use. Check it out.

Check out this cool tool that can help you download images automatically. It is called GSA Image Spider.

GSA Image Spider can download all the images from a webserver automatically and this it does as you like it, with or without sublinks. It is a very easy to use software with a good user interface and it gives you amazing results in seconds.

Looking for relevant images from different websites? You can enter a keyword to find the relevant image from websites around the world easily.

Want to try out the demo version first and get a feel of the program? It provides only limited functionality and does not include many functions available in the registered version. You only get 10 images with the demo version but you will still get a feel of how it works and be able to make an informed decision whether to buy it or not.

Go check it out! Visit http://gsa-online.de/eng/image_spider.html or CLICK HERE!

Want to have fun with photo slideshows? InAlbum makes it happen.

InAlbum is a fun and easy to use software to turn your digital photos into a stunning photo slideshow. You will love the fact that you can start with ready to use templates or custom templates which let you mix & match background animations, buttons, photo frames and transition effects.

That’s not all you can decorate with animated clipart, speech bubbles, sounds, MP3 music and even your own voices.

And if you want to morph your friend’s face into animals, aliens or whatever or create high quality DVD movie with menu, Super VCD, and Video CD (playable on TVs), this software can do the trick.

So as you can see it’s a fun software that is really very useful. Want to check it out? Go to http://www.inalbum.com/

Although there are many image manipulation and photo editing programs out there. Some of us like finding a cheaper alternative that does the job well. Photofiltre Studio is a superb image and photo editor that will enable you to touch up your digital photos, add effects to images, quickly edit and grab sections of photos and it will handle your scanning and other image importing requirements.Best of all, it’s designed and presented in a well designed interface, along with a nice toolbar. As this program is plugin based, you can program and create your own modules or include some of the available modules, such as the red eye corrector and others, it also includes some cool filters. For a full list of its cool features that are too numerous for me to go into detail about here, go check out it out here.

Sometimes you need to capture a screen. The easy way of course is PrintScreen, but sometimes that is bamboozled by software taking over the keyboard map. An easy way to capture those hard to get images, especially scrolling pages, and even audio and video is CaptureWizPro.

The new Windows Vista compatible version has a pop-up capture toolbar with easy to use tools, easy to see visible over any screen, and simple three step capture process thats easy to follow. You also have additional utilities like sticky notes, a thumbnail viewer and programmable hot keys.

Go here to get it and find out more. And here you can find out some useful tips.

If you’ve been looking for a fast and convenient way to take screen captures from your Windows screen and you’ve not found one yet, you should try using HyperSnap-DX.

HyperSnap-DX is a screen capture and image editing tool for Windows. What makes this program very useful is the fact that it doesn’t only take screen captures from standard desktop programs; it goes all the way to capture otherwise difficult stuff like DirectX, Direct3D, 3Dfx Voodoo, and Glide mode games easily. It can also capture frames from many software DVD players and other video playing software.

The latest version, HyperSnap-DX 6.13.02 has some very useful features, that makes it better than the previous versions. Some of the top features include:

• New in ver. 6 TextSnap™ feature to capture editable text from almost anywhere on the screen, when running under Windows 2000, XP or newer. Starting from ver. 6.10 can also capture tab-delimited data for easy paste into MS Excel.
• New & powerful image capture, editing, annotation and manipulation tools.
• Snags also those difficult-to-grab screens from DirectX™ and Glide™ games.
• Image stamps, frames, drop shadow, free-hand capture, FTP server uploads, more!
• Automatic color substitution!
• Non-rectangular window capture!
• Button Capture – perfect for professional technical writers who need to snap and document dozens of buttons!
• Fully customizable user interface. Rearrange menus and toolbars any way you want, assign any keyboard shortcuts you like, tear off menus to create instant toolbars, even control HyperSnap with voice commands!

You should check it out. CLICK HERE for more info and trial download.