This overhauled Flickr app for iOS, specifically the iPhone, gives Yahoo’s social network dedicated to photography enthusiasts a much-needed shot in the arm. Not only does it add a whole host of features previously absent from the app’s numerous versions, it actually holds its own in front of stiff competition from the likes of Instagram and Photobucket.
Yahoo has literally overhauled the Flickr app from scratch, throwing out everything from the past interface. In its place, you find a simple, minimalistic interface that is better than ever before. As soon as you fire up the app for the first time and login with your Flickr account details, you’ll notice the homepage which always has an assortment of photos to display on the screen, all in justified layout. It looks pretty cool and in a way focuses the attention less on the app and more on the photos from the outset. Compared to the old app’s three action tabs (or buttons), the new Flickr iOS app showcases five buttons on its home screen – Contacts / Groups, Interesting / Nearby, Camera, Account data, and More.
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The first of the five buttons on the Flickr app’s screen lets you access photos shared by your Flickr contacts or groups. You can scroll through multiple contacts or groups by swiping the screen up or down and individual photostream of a contact by swiping the screen left to right. Pretty nifty interface addition this. The second button which resembles a globe lets you toggle between photos selected by Flickr’s algorithm – Nearby throws up all pics clicked and tagged near your geographic location, and Interesting is a near infinite scroll through a stream of photos that Flickr chooses randomly every day.
The middle button launches the app’s camera functionality, letting you snap a quick photo through your iPhone (for now) and upload it on Flickr. The app lets you touch the screen with two fingers and decide on the focus and exposure on two different areas of the impending image – a great little feature. Immediately after clicking a photo, the Flickr app shows you its range of filters – 15 of those compared to Instagram’s 17.
You can edit a photo by clicking a tiny icon overlay on the top right, adjust its orientation, brightness, contrast or enhance it. Also, the crop tool under the app’s editing tool is better than Instagram’s, as it allows a free crop orientation, not sticking to a fixed frame dimension like on Instagram. In the final step, you can name the image file, write a short description and do a bit more. In the same screen window, the new Flickr iOS app throws up tiny Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Email sharing icons to push the image on to your desired social network. There’s also an advanced tab which lets you set priorities and visibility options for the photo about to be pushed into your Flickr account. The camera feature of Flickr’s iOS app is an absolute joy to use, and it’s easily one of the best we’ve seen for a while.
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We can’t forget Flickr’s more than just an app, it’s a community of photo enthusiasts. It’s great to see that this new iOS app does a great job putting the best foot forward on both these fronts. Features like the Interesting tab is an ideal way to deep-dive into Flickr’s community and discover great photos or artists. When you like a photo, you can comment on it easily and mark contacts through the “@”, and even tag it with a hashtag (a la Twitter and Instagram). Click on the small “I” icon at the top-right of any photo in the Flickr app stream to check out its EXIF data.
The app’s interface is designed for swiping left to right or up and down, as much as clicking tabs or buttons, which gives a sense of fluidity to the overall experience. With the new iOS app, you can do almost everything that you can on Flickr’s website – editing, managing, sharing and exploring photos. Throughout our usage, we faced no bugs or performance issues with the Flickr app, everything just worked like a breeze.
While this may sound like a glittering review of Flickr’s revamped iOS app, we should point out that most of the app’s previously unforeseen features aren’t unique breakthroughs by any means. Flickr – as an app and a photo-sharing web service – has been languishing down in the doldrums for quite a few years under Yahoo’s neglect, until the company’s recent push to revitalize it. There are a couple of bases that Flickr for iOS doesn’t quite yet cover viz. there is no native iPad version for the app (which is absolutely foolish) and it doesn’t make a compelling case for interacting with video content.
Still, the Flickr app for iOS has everything you’d want from a photo-sharing and camera app, not to mention a large community of like-minded photo enthusiasts to explore. Sure Instagram stole Flickr’s thunder and has a sizable lead on the mobile photo-sharing revolution, but with this new app Flickr is back with a bang.