Travel Photography: Krome Photos service edits pictures for you

by Amy Chen on

A funny thing happens to my travel photos after a trip. After uploading select pictures to Flickr or Picasa, my photos often languish unedited (and unseen) on my laptop. I tell myself that when I finally carve out some free time, I’ll go back and properly edit the rest of the pictures and create a photo book or scrapbook to remember my vacation.

Unfortunately, the photo folders keep multiplying and I never seem to find the time. Luckily, there’s now an affordable online service that can edit your photos for you: Krome Photos.

How It Works
Sign up for a free trial with 25 photo credits and 1GB of storage at www.kromephotos.com. Another special introductory offer gives you 100 photo credits for $2.50. See here for more pricing plans, including monthly subscriptions.

Download the Krome Photo Uploader to your desktop, and upload any photos that you want to be edited. Go off, live life, and about 24-36 hours later, you’ll get an e-mail notifying that your photos have received the “Krome Treatment,” or the talents of a personal photo editor who may improve your pictures with color correction, red-eye correction, cropping, or other tweaks.

You can accept or reject the photo enhancements; a photo credit is deducted from your account balance if you download or share an edited photo. Though it’s nice to have someone else’s perspective on your photography, if you don’t like how a certain photo is cropped or edited, you can easily undo the Krome Treatment. For each photo that you undo, a photo credit is refunded.

Need help deciding which edited photos to keep? You can click on a Before/After button to see the original picture and edited version side by side.As with iPhoto and Picasa, there are also tagging tools to help you organize your pictures.

You can e-mail a high-resolution edited copy to friends and family straight from the Krome Dashboard, which also has easy access to the requisite social-networking tools of Facebook and Shutterfly.

The Bottom Line
Though Krome Photos is not a replacement for Photoshop, Lightroom, iPhoto, or other photo-editing programs, the photo-editing service is a time-saver and could be just the thing to motivate me to edit the rest of my photos myself. As for creating a photo book, that’s still on my to-do list.

Topguest travel app review: Check in and earn more airline and hotel loyalty points

by Amy Chen on

Are you the type of traveler who checks in on Foursquare when you’re at the airport or your hotel? If so, your social media addiction can now translate into extra loyalty points, thanks to the free Topguest travel app.

Topguest rewards your Foursquare or Facebook Places check-ins by linking your hotel or airline loyalty programs with your social media activity. Nothing is posted publicly without your permission, so you can reap the rewards without worrying about divulging your whereabouts.

While in San Francisco for Thanksgiving, I tested out the Topguest app, which has expanded since its summer debut.

After downloading the free app, I was able to add my membership numbers for Virgin America (25 Elevate points for each check-in to a Virgin America terminal, clubhouse or ticket counter) and Hilton HHonors (50 points for each check-in at a Doubletree). Don’t know the numbers by heart? I was able to easily copy and paste the loyalty numbers from account statements in my e-mail inbox. Once your accounts are linked, you can just check in on Foursquare or Facebook Places like you normally would.Kimpton Hotels are another Topguest partner — you can earn an InTouch loyalty credit after your first check-in at any Kimpton hotel, restaurant, or bar, but you need to enter your loyalty number by visiting topguest.com on a computer. Unlike the other hotel loyalty programs, the app doesn’t currently let you enter your Kimpton number from a mobile device. (I had to e-mail the support desk to figure this one out — at least my questions were promptly answered even over the holiday weekend.)

Other hotel loyalty programs include Wyndham Rewards and Priority Club Rewards (50 points for check-ins at an InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, Staybridge Suites, or Candlewood Suites). Repeat visitors to luxe hotels like the Standard may earn “elite travel perks” like free drinks and spa passes, according to the website.

So far I only saw Virgin America listed as an airline partner, so it’d be nice if the Topguest program eventually expanded to JetBlue and other major carriers.

Though checking in is just one more thing to remember to do when traveling, using the Topguest app is also a relatively painless way to supplement your loyalty program account balance.

The Topguest app works on the iPhone and Android. Points are capped to one check-in per person per day.

[Photo by Amy Chen]

Travel Technology: No Netflix streaming outside the U.S.

by Amy Chen on

During my recent European vacation, I left my netbook at home and instead relied on my iPad for travel entertainment and on-the-road research.

With no individual in-flight entertainment screens aboard my Delta 767 flight, I was especially grateful for the TV episodes that I had downloaded onto the iPad. Other than the fact that my iPad kept toppling over when the person in front of me shifted in his seat, it was like having a personal seat-back entertainment system.

It is easy, however, to forget that the tools that I rely on for domestic travel aren’t always readily available for international travel. For example, instead of forking over $8 for the hotel’s pay-per-view channel, I often use my Netflix account to stream movies in my hotel room. (After spending hours walking around during the day, I find it relaxing to fall asleep while streaming a movie or some TV shows.)

Unfortunately, when I logged into my Netflix account from my hotel room, I received this message: “Watching instantly is not available outside the U.S. We noticed that the computer that you are using is not located within the 50 United States or the District of Columbia. Due to studio licensing reasons, movies are available to watch instantly only in those locations.”

I ended up downloading more episodes from iTunes, which was painfully slow using the hotel’s Wi-Fi.

As it turned out, Netflix wasn’t the only travel tool that was unavailable on my trip — I couldn’t access Yelp in many cities (I kept getting the message that there were no nearby restaurants even though that clearly wasn’t the case). Interestingly enough, Foursquare had a few check-ins — unfortunately many check-ins appeared to be several months old, so I didn’t feel like I could trust that as a travel resource.

Lessons Learned: Had I known that I wouldn’t be able to use my Netflix account while overseas, I could’ve saved time by downloading extra movies and TV shows before I left on my trip. I also should’ve done more advance research on where to eat instead of assuming that Yelp restaurant reviews would be available. Instead, I had to resort to Google searches, old New York Times travel articles — and following the crowds (a travel tip that never seems to let me down).

[Photo by Amy Chen]

Test driving the Zipcar iPhone app

by Amy Chen on

My brother got married last weekend in Los Angeles, which meant that I had to fly out Thursday night and back to New York City on Sunday. Rather than deal with getting off a long flight and renting a car from the airport — I didn’t think navigating an unfamiliar city at midnight when your body thinks it’s 3 a.m. was the best idea — I cabbed it to my hotel and retrieved a Zipcar the next morning.

I’d also been meaning to test out the Zipcar iPhone app, which lets you unlock your rental straight from the phone. This seemed like the perfect time to give it a whirl.

Here’s what I learned:

Make sure you still bring your Zipcar membership card. Once you activate the app, you need to unlock the car first with your membership card by waving it over the designated area on the windshield. Next, you have to enter your membership number into your phone. Don’t know your number? It’s on your membership card. Though these preliminary steps seem to defeat the purpose of ditching the membership card, your iPhone is now all set to start unlocking and locking your car.

Using the iPhone app to unlock the car isn’t always the most efficient. There were a few times when it took longer to unlock the car with the iPhone — as in, it was much faster for me to open my bag, dig out my wallet, and wave the key over the windshield. Once the novelty wore off, I ended up using the keycard about half the time and the iPhone app for the other half.

Zipcar isn’t necessarily the cheapest option, but it can be more convenient.
My two-day rental cost about $180, including gas and insurance. And unlike major car rental agencies where you reserve a certain vehicle class, Zipcar lets you call dibs on a specific make and model, so I knew exactly what I was getting. The last time I was in L.A., I used Zipcar to rent a Mini Cooper. Unfortunately no Minis were available on this trip, so I settled for the Toyota Prius.

Zipcar requires a $50 membership, which I auto-renew each year. Unfortunately, I’ve only used my membership once so far this year, so I haven’t yet maximized the value. If I factor in the membership cost, the two-day $180 rental increases to $230 — pricey. Tack in the $50 cab ride to and from the airport, and you’re looking at $330. But I’ve long believed that traveling on a budget isn’t always about finding the cheapest price — it’s also picking the smartest option to reduce your stress level. And since I was traveling to my brother’s wedding, I figured it was worth paying a little extra money to preserve my sanity.

The Bottom Line: Consider the Zipcar app as an alternative to your keycard, not a total replacement. I will say the app is good for at least one thing — making sure that I didn’t leave my cell phone in the car (or lose it).

[Photo by Amy Chen]

Space tourism one step closer with Virgin Galactic’s first manned flight

by Sean McLachlan on


The VSS Enterprise, also known as SpaceShipTwo, has taken its first crewed flight. It stayed in the air for six hours attached to its mother ship, the VMS Eve. Two crew members stayed aboard and conducted systems tests. This is the latest aviation milestone in an active month that saw the first overnight flight by a solar airplane and the first unmanned solar plane to fly for a whole week.

This “captive carry” flight was the third for the ship. The first flight of the VSS Enterprise was only three months ago and it appears that the project is developing rapidly. Testing will continue into 2011 before commercial flights start. Tickets for the suborbital flight will be $200,000. Another space tourism company, Space Adventures, promises to offer flights for $102,000, although this won’t happen until 2012 at the earliest. While the VSS Enterprise will detach from VMS Eve and soar into suborbital space, the Space Adventures capsule will launch from a traditional rocket.