Finding photos on the internet is like being a tiny spacecraft adrift in a vast, starry galaxy. How will you ever find what you’re looking for in that cosmos of tags?

What you need, weary traveler, is a guide.

We hear Carl Sagan isn’t taking much new work these days, so allow us to present an alternative. Follow us to Tag Galaxy, where swirling solar systems of Flickr tags abound.

Say you want to find a memorable photo of poodles. Type in “poodle,” and it becomes a fiery sun, orbited by related tags like “dog” and “silly haircut.”

Click on more tag planets to create new suns (”poodles+noodles+strudel”). Or click on the sun itself to see all of the photos tagged with your search terms projected onto a rotatable spheroid planet.

All you need now is a turtleneck for your computer, and it’ll be just like having Carl at your side.

Find Photos with Tag Galaxy

Until recently, if someone said the word “sharpening” to us, we’d whimper and hide under the table.

We mean, what the #$% is a threshold anyway?

Well, we finally got fed up with it, so we did some research. And you know what? Sharpening’s actually not that bad, and it makes a HUGE difference on digital images.*

Here’s our no-nonsense, jargon-free guide to sharpening your photos using Unsharp Mask. It’ll change your life. We promise.

*If you’re printing directly from film, feel free to be smug at this time. You don’t need to sharpen a darn thing.

Photojojo’s No-Nonsense, Jargon-Free Guide to Sharpening with Unsharp Mask

p.s. Hey San Francisco! Wanna help us out with the Photojojo Book? We need people to photograph and places to photograph them in. Check out our wishlist! We’ll make ya book-famous, baby!

You know that Photoshop whiz kid friend of yours? The one that plays his keyboard like a Steinway as he dodges and burns his way to photographic perfection?

That could be you.

When we saw these custom-fitted keyboard skins for Macs*, we knew we had to have ‘em.

The color-coded covers show you all the hard-to-remember shortcuts for your favorite apps and are available for Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Pro Tools, After Effects, and Logic Pro.

You wouldn’t learn how to type with a keyboard with no letters on it.

So why learn key commands without seeing them right on your keys?

Photo App Keyboard Skins
$30 - $40 in the Photojojo Shop for Apple Laptops and Desktops

* Prefer Seattle to Cupertino? We’re on the lookout for something similar for you guys.

Extra photos for bloggers: 1, 2

The white walls in your place have begun to loom, haven’t they?

Glaring down at you, bare as the Gobi Desert when the camels are on holiday.

And hark! That box of photos in the closet that you’ve been meaning to organize is starting to whisper to you. “Put me up,” the photos mutter. “Show me off!”

Of course, hearing these things means you are probably insane. But before the funny farm comes to take you away, you might as well sort out your wall and photo problem.

Grab a handful of bulldog clips and a few nails and put up some pictures. That’ll show those imaginary voices who’s boss.

Poppytalk and amberminty gave us the idea.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to carry a camera with you everywhere, your little snapshooter may be looking a bit bruised by now.

Fear not, intrepid reader. We have a guaranteed* way to guard your camera from scratches, bumps, political persecution, alien invasion and fire ants.

Pink Penguin’s tutorial shows you how to make a stinkin’ cute padded case for your compact camera. All you need is a little scrap fabric, some padding and a sewing machine. (Or a friend who has those things and can be easily bribed.)

Protect your camera: fire ants are wily and they are everywhere!

*Guarantee meaningless: we had our fingers crossed.

Sew Your Own Camera Case
via Craft

A recent major university double-blind study has concluded that games are fun.

In addition, 63 percent of licensed phlebotomists agree that fun is nice.

These ground-shaking, revolutionary results have caused us to revise our staunchly anti-fun philosophy.

In an effort to explore these new (and somewhat suspicious) avenues of “fun” and “games” we respectfully present our findings on the subject: five games you can play with your camera and photos.

We are informed by reliable sources that they qualify as “fun.”

Photography Games

p.s. Been messing around with perspective lately? Post your photos in the “Tunnel Vision” thread on the Photojojo forum.

Your point & shoot camera has been keeping things from you.

Has it mentioned, for example, that it has a motion sensor for photographing lightning, or that it can shoot in RAW format? We’ll bet it hasn’t even told you that it can shoot at speeds up to 1/25,000th of a second.

Well, if it happens to be a Canon, it can.

The Canon Hacker’s Development Kit (CHDK) is a free download that can expand your camera’s options like strapping a JATO rocket on a Chevy Impala.

CHDK’s been around for a while, but Lifehacker just wrote an article that makes it understandable for mere mortals. What is it? Why do you want it? How do you use it? It’s all there.

Open up communications with your camera. Let the healing begin.

Supercharge Your Point & Shoot

p.s. Free hugs for Twitter friends! Follow Photojojo on Twitter. Recent faves: Photo bombers! Fake infrared photos! & more!

Photo credit: Fir0002

Extra photos for bloggers: 1, 2

We recently saw this cool post on Craft Chi* about inkjet transfer stamping, and our brains nearly exploded.

“Hmmm,” we thought, “we could use our inkjet printer to mimic rubber stamps, only we could use our own pictures.”

“In fact,” we mused, “we could go beyond plain old stamps and go full-color. Golly Moses,” we postulated, “we could transfer photos onto paper, or wood, or nearly anything, just like Xerox transfers but without the fumes!”

We would have gone on thinking huge and glorious thoughts, except the bus driver got tired of our muttering to ourselves and waving our arms around and kicked us off the bus.

But our humiliation is your gain, sweet reader, because after we walked home, we wrote an image transfer tutorial just for you. Armed only with an inkjet and some copier transparencies, you too can put images on anything you like.

*via Craft!

p.s. Thanks to all our peeps who came to see us at Maker Faire this weekend! We feel so loved.

If you send Damien Weighill a photo, he will draw your face and put it on his blog.

When he does you will have a mustache. Or perhaps there will be a gorilla behind you. Maybe you will be a dinosaur.

He is unpredictable. Approach with caution.

Your Face
via Jennifer Daniel. Send us links!

p.s. Remember that Squarespace Portfolio Makeover Contest we had? We hear our winner Jennifer Konig is pretty excited about her new website:

“It’s gorgeous!!! You ROCK!
The admin UI is really, really intuitive.
I’m seriously impressed.”

Check out her swank new portfolio!

We’ll be at Maker Faire on Saturday May 3rd demonstrating our ever-so-fabulous photo block kits. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, come by the Craft Zone at 5:00pm and watch us rock the house. It’s gonna be huge. Arena-rock huge.