BeFunky's Way Cool Portraits

My friend Gareth Branwyn, chief blogster at Makezine.com, had a picture of himself drawn as a robot that I thought was pretty cool. Investigating that idea led me to the befunky.com website. Tons of interesting ways to rendering your portrait without having to know or have Photoshop. The interface is easy too. Impessive!

• [chgoliz]

  I was unable to navigate to the “about us,” “terms of service,” and “privacy statement” sections of the site – which is a concern in and of itself – but as a result, I can’t find an answer to the question: who owns the resultant images, or are they merely temporary files on the server if not stored offline or in the BeFunky Plus account?

  • [Boondocker]

    @#1

    I able to navigate to the Terms of Use. Here are the bits you wondered about:

    BeFunky’s rights with respect to your BeFunky Images

    If you make your BeFunky Image available to the public on the Site, BeFunky has the right to use your BeFunky Image: (i) anywhere on the Site (including, but not limited, displaying your BeFunky Image on BeFunky’s Editors Choice page); (ii) in BeFunky’s marketing and promotional materials; and (iii) as otherwise elected by BeFunky.

    3.If you post Content to the Site, unless we indicate otherwise, you grant BeFunky and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content solely in connection with: (i) providing and promoting the Site and/or the Services; and/or (ii) exercising the rights granted in these Terms. You grant BeFunky and its affiliates and sublicensees the right (but, not the obligation) to use the name that you submit in connection with a BeFunky Image (only if you have elected to make such BeFunky Image public on the Site or by the nature of your service account your BeFunky Image is deemed public on the Site.

    Also,

    In order to cooperate with legitimate governmental requests, subpoenas or court orders, to protect our systems and users, or to ensure the integrity and operation of the Services, our business and our systems, we may access and disclose any information we consider necessary or appropriate, including, but not limited to, IP addresses and traffic information, usage history, and posted Content. Our right to disclose any such information will supersede any terms of the Privacy Policy.

    • [chgoliz]

      Logging in to BB is screwed up now…must be something the computer ate!

      This is Chgo_Liz, thanking Boondocker for the info. That’s exactly what I was looking for.

      Oh, lo-and-behold, the page just refreshed itself (6th time, but who’s counting?) and now I’m apparently logged on for realz.

• [Derek C. F. Pegritz]

  This is AWESOME.

• [Anonymous]

  Hi,
  This is Baris from BeFunky. Thanks to Boondocker for helping out. To summarize that, BeFunky may use your image on the website (explore page) or other places, if you save to your gallery with setting the privacy option to “public”. We would ask you if we want to use your public images for any other reason. Other than that everything is kept private. And if you don’t save to your gallery, the images are deleted from our servers.

  William, thanks a lot for the post. You’ve chosen some of our best effects. Also try out impressionist and oil painting effects for portraits.

  • [chgoliz]

    Good to know…thank you!

    My children are fans of exactly this sort of digital fun. I’m not usually quite as fanatical about privacy for myself.

• [ROSSINDETROIT]

  I’ve now changed my FB Profile photo to a Cartoonized version of me. We’ll see if anyone notices…

• [dannyats]

  BeFunky is cool but a little bit complicated for me,

  I recently tried http://www.picitup.com/NewMatch

  It extracts your face from the uploaded picture and makes some cool image effects on that, great for an fb profile image.