You had a journal once.

Then, your little sister found it and told your crush all about your dreams of running away to Disneyland to fulfill your dream of meeting Ariel IRL.

That was embarrassing.

Days is totally not that. It’s a journal (disguised as an iOS app) that you’ll *want* to share with friends.

The goal behind the app is to have you document your life in photos as it happens.

Shoot photos throughout the day, and publish your post of photos the following day in a visually delightful grid of time-stamped pics.

How the heck is this different from Instagram? So many ways. Cool ways, too.

1. You can’t upload photos. Your photo must be taken at that very moment.
2. No filters. Just pure, raw, unadulterated snaps.
3. GIFs! You can make real life, honest-to-blog moving images.
4. The interface is so adorable, you’ll want to break something.

Documenting your life is so much more fun in photos, and your little sis won’t have any ammo against you. Win.

Photograph Your Days with Days

p.s. WE ARE HIRING A WEB DEVELOPER. If you love photography and San Francisco and codes, APPLY HERE.

p.p.s. WE ARE ALSO HIRING AN EVANGELIST/BIZ DEV HERO. Creative deal-maker types, APPLY HERE.

photoBot photo by Claudine Quinn

No, they won’t.

But they’ll take over when you want to take a break from shooting at a party or want to document your day without having to stop what you’re doing!

Meet the anthropomorphic party cameras:

• photoBot is a ‘bot that uses an ultrasonic ranger to detect where people are in a room. Like an adorable T2, he detects people to shoot and shoots them.
• NAO is a humanoid robot that can shoot based off the rule of thirds and the golden ratio. It actually learned what makes a good photo based on these two photography principles.

These robo-photographers are meant to be worn, so they’ll document your day from your perspective:

• The Autographer has 5 sensors that use a super smart algorithm that decides when it’s just the right moment to take a photo.
• The Memoto comes with no buttons because it simply shoots a photo every 30 seconds. Similar to the Autographer, you clip it on and have your day documented!

Other robo-cameras of note are Sony’s Party-Shot camera that sits on a base and takes photos of your party for you and the Instaprint, a little box that prints out Instagram photos based on hashtags.

It’ll be a while before humans are completely replaced with robots, but we wouldn’t mind handing over the duties when our hands are full. How about you?

photoBot, the Anthropomorphic Camera [via It's Nice That]

p.s. Win a JPEG necklace to wear around your neck with pride, just follow our Pinterest today!

Normally, you don’t want your pixels to be seen.

You like the pristine, fine-grain look. But what if you went to the other extreme and really let your pixels show?

Vic Nguyen is taking commissions for turning your photos into awesome pixel portraits! His vixels, as they are called, are a little reminiscent of 8-bit Twitter avatars, but turned up a few degrees with way more detail.

Mustaches, beards, dimples, even your haircut are turned into exact pixel replicas.

So the next time someone tells you your pixels are showing, it’ll be a compliment!

Have Your Pixel Portrait Made from Photos [via Uppercase Magazine]

p.s. Hey, Hot Shot! has a photo competition with $15,000 in prizes and some pretty amazing exposure up for grabs. Deadline is 11/14, so get those hot shots in!

If you could make your own photo hack, what would it be? Personally, we’d figure out a way to make CatPaint real life.

Over a hundred developers dreamed even bigger at Photo Hack Day Berlin last week!

With judges from Facebook, Getty Images, and EyeEm and participants like the Loopcam & InstaCRT team, competition was fierce and yielded some amazing apps that we actually wish we had on our phone right now.

These were the top three winners!

1.Helmut: The fastest scanner in the world! A simple box in which you place a film negative. The accompanying app shoots a photo of the film & inverts it into a positive image. We watched them scan a frame in under 5 seconds.
2. Tourist Eraser: Kinda like Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill for your phone. It detects tourists in your photo and erases them without you having to do any work.
3. Visual Weather: Pulls together Flickr photos of what the weather looked like on a day similar to today’s. (To figure out what to wear & such!)

EXTRA COOL THING! We helped celebrate with an online photo challenge with EyeEm. See the winners’ photos, which were actually shown at Photo Hack Day!

The Best Photo Hacks from Photo Hack Day Berlin

p.s. Looking for even more of the best DIY photo ideas on the interwebs? Follow us on Pinterest!

Last week, 180,000 photo fans from all over the world came together in Cologne, Germany for Photokina.

What’s a Photokina? It’s Disneyland for photo nerds!

WEDONOTKID. We saw lenses the size of buildings, ladies swinging from the ceiling, zoetropes made of Legos and so much more.

It’s the world’s biggest photo conference that comes around only every two years. Along with the conference came camera announcements.

And with it, a flood of tech specs.

If it seems to have blurred into an indecipherable cloud of hyphenated terminology, allow us to translate!

A Guide to the Latest in Digital Cameras

p.s. Woot! We teamed up with our chums at Threadless to help you pack sweet threads + photo gear for your next trip. Enter here.

Extra photos for bloggers: 1, 2, 3

The Big Day. You’re outfitted, rehearsed and have a belly full of butterflies.

This isn’t your wedding day. It’s the day you’re shooting one with your phone!

So what apps are you going to use and what lenses will help you along the way? And OMG whataboutbatterylife.

Photojojo’s very own *pro* photographer Kim Thomas will tell you just what you need to shoot a wedding with your phone!

She recently shot one here in San Francisco for the lovely couple pictured, Jonathan & Brandi.

It’s a big day. Not just for them, but for you and your phoneography chops, too.

Kim’s Wedding Phoneography Guide

p.s. Way cool opportunity here! Kenneth Cole is featuring Instagrammers on its Collection Site. Enter your photos for a shot with this week’s theme “iconic”.

Extra photos for bloggers: 1, 2, 3

We have to admit, here at Photojojo, we love our job.

Our favorite part of our job? Sharing all the cool stuff we find with YOU!

That’s why we’re spilling our secrets and letting you in on the inside scoop.

Check out this article to meet the Photojojo team and find out what our favorite gadgets are.

Take a Look Inside Photojojo’s Camera Bag

p.s. Our mates at 4by6.com have a special dealio for you guys! Pick up a free pack of cards from your Instagram snaps and enter to win $500 in Photojojo and 4by6 dollaroos!

p.p.s. Now hiring: World’s Best Web Designer. Learn more.

Just a few weeks ago, 300 hackers got together for Photo Hack Day in San Francisco.

With the help of finger sweat-bands and a few pallets of energy drinks, they made 70 hacks in a short 24 hours!

A panel of judges chose three winners to receive funding and make their photo app dreams come true. So what were they?

1.Pics with Friends: A guessing game! Figure out what a portion of a photo from a friend actually is.
2. Sizzly: Turns photo-editing into group collaboration. Post a photo & other users will edit it or vice versa.
3. Just a Second: Turns 1 second phone videos into GIFs that you can post on Tumblr & elsewhere.

Two note-worthy ones are This Is My Cam!, a web app that looks at your Flickr photos’ EXIF data to figure out which cameras you use the most, and Actually, a web app that lets you view a “global stream” of photos from around the web.

To think all those apps were created just to make us photo fans’ lives awesomer! We <3 you, developers.

More Apps Made at Photo Hack Day
[via The Next Web]

p.s. You can win your fave Photojojo gadgets by following us on Pinterest!

p.p.s. Work for Photojojo! We’re hiring one awesome designer and a part-time photographer in San Francisco.

There was that time your nephew accidentally deleted a month’s worth of photos. Or how about that time that your sister borrowed your camera and forgot to give it back?

To say the least, there are gaps in the photo timeline of your life.

That’s why we were pretty excited to hear about Pictarine!

It’s a web app that collects your photos from all the different places you’ve posted them on the web — Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox and lots more. It then turns them into a clean timeline that you can browse.

It’s even able to pull in photos your closest friends snapped, so you can see photos from the get-together that you didn’t get on camera.

We could tell you how nostalgic it’ll make you feel, but scrolling through your life in photo-form is something you’ll have to experience yourself.

Make a Photo Timeline with Pictarine via Netted

p.s. We’re judging a self-portrait contest by our friends at ViewBug. Check it out for chance at $100 in Photojojo bux and more!

Have you ever wondered what Photojojo’s deepest dreams and desires are?

What does Photojojo think about in the wee hours of the night?

Maybe you’ve just wondered how to make the best DIY home studio or which DSLR is hot right now.

We went to Twitter to ask Photojojo fans what question you would ask us if you could.

Here are our answers! Amit, Jen, Billy, Kiran, Kelly, Julieanne, Laurel…

See the faces behind the names along with our expert photo and DIY advice!

[Have a question? Ask us!]

Our Answers to Your Questions

p.s. Wanna work with us? We’re hiring in and outside of San Francisco. Seeking web developers, product buyers and sourcers, photographers, and writers!

p.p.s. Come eat pizza and photo walk with us!