Yahoo’s Flickr Update Lights Up Photos

By Geoff Duncan Published June 24, 2010

Yahoo’s Flickr photo sharing service may be the leading player in its industry, but on the surface it’s scarcely changes in more than 6 years. That’s now changed, with Yahoo rolling out a set of updates to Flickr’s photo pages that subtly refresh the site’s presentation and capabilities…and bring some long-wanted features in hand.

“We’ve been keen to build a better showcase for your photos for some time. Your photos—everyday captures and extraordinary sightings, local scenes and exotic moments—are central to our DNA because they reflect your individual stories,” wrote Flickr’s Josh Nguyen on the service’s blog. ” With the new photo experience, you can discover, share, and organize your visual stories in a new and improved way.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Flickr’s new photo pages most prominent change is the ability to display location information along with an image, with option photo location information being displayed to the right of the primary image, right alongside the photographer’s name, the image date, and camera information. Flickr has also tucked away many common actions into an “Actions” menu to get them out of the way of a photo’s presentation. Default images are now wider, expanding out to 640 pixel by default to take advantage of the wider screen real estate many Web surfers now have. Flickr has also updated its photo navigation controls with “Newer” and “Older” buttons within photo sets, and the preview filmstrip now enables users to preview the photos surrounding the image currently being viewed in a new photoset. When other Flickr users mark a photo as a favorite, that now gets noted in a photos comments—which could have privacy implications, since it effectively means the entire world knows if you’ve marked a photo as a favorite.

Recommended Videos

Perhaps the most noticeable feature in the significant update is a new lightbox view that enables users to take in images of any size using a dark background.

Yahoo expects to be able to roll out the new photo pages to all Flickr users in the coming weeks.

Former Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Topics

Computing

AI is finding Apple security flaws faster than Apple can sort through them

Apple has limited how many bug reports researchers can keep open as AI tools produce both genuine Mac vulnerabilities and a flood of questionable submissions

Lighting, Architecture, Building

Apple has capped the number of security reports researchers can keep open at once after AI bug hunting put its review process under pressure, according to the Financial Times.

Some submissions describe hallucinated or purely theoretical risks. Others uncover vulnerabilities serious enough to require patches. Bynario told the FT that it found more than 50 possible macOS flaws in three weeks, including a privilege-escalation chain that could give an attacker full control of a Mac.

Computing

Anthropic is paying $1.5 billion over pirated books, but it can still legally cut up purchased ones

The settlement addressed unauthorized ebook downloads, not the destructive scanning of lawfully bought physical copies, a distinction now alarming booksellers

Book, Publication, Indoors

A federal judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement over nearly half a million pirated books. The same litigation also protected a more physical method of feeding its AI systems. Anthropic bought print books, removed their bindings, scanned every page and destroyed the originals.

The legal divide came down to acquisition. The settlement covers books downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi, while the court treated Anthropic’s one-for-one conversion of purchased books into private digital files as fair use. Training AI models on lawfully acquired material was also considered transformative.

Computing

Google Earth’s AI misadventure lasted only a day. It was a tale of dangerous ignorance.

Nuclear reactors, tanks, and historical destruction on a life-like satellite map? Yeah, that's bad.

Nano Banana AI image generator representation.

Technology behemoths are clearly not reading the room, or they are just moving faster than they should when it comes to AI deployment. Google has already stuffed its Gemini AI in every corner of its software stack, from Android to daily productivity tools like Gmail that are used by hundreds of millions of users every day. AI is everywhere. Not all of it is bad, mind you. But in a few places, it just feels forced.

In its latest AI-fication experiment, the company targeted Google Earth. The idea was to let the audience use its Nano Banana 2 AI image generator and make images that can be placed on the map view. On paper, it's a cool idea. What would the Colosseum of Rome look like in your urban neighborhood? Yeah, fun stuff like that.