Flickr announced that it has added new features and made tweaks to its design. This includes new tools and an overhaul of its mobile apps to streamline the user experience across all platforms.
On the desktop, there’s a new Uploadr application for Mac and Windows. With its 1TB of free storage, Flickr says the new software can upload up to half a million photos on your computers, external devices, or wherever photos are stored. Taking on iCloud and other cloud services, Auto-Uploadr on Flickr mobile apps automatically uploads photos; a nice feature is that all the photos are marked private until you make them public, and Flickr automatically removes doubles.
Flickr has also introduced a new Camera Roll feature for an easier way to browse through all those photos. Previously, in the Photostream view mode, you would have to scroll forever and navigate through pages and pages. Now, thumbnails of photos are categorized by date taken or uploaded (each thumbnail also shows how many views each picture has, which is useful for those who care about “likes”), but there’s also a new Magic View component that sorts all your photos within 60 categories, like landscapes, panoramas, animals, etc.; Flickr says this is possible, thanks to image recognition technology. (When we tried to test this out, it wasn’t available and the Camera Roll has a “beta” logo next to it.) Flickr also made sharing easier, and you can now download multiple images as a zipped file — a long overdue, but much-welcomed feature.
As longtime Flickr users, our favorite thing to do is discovering other people’s cool photos — a popular pastime with any photo-sharing service. Using the aforementioned image-recognition technology, users can refine the search parameters by subject matter, objects, color, size, etc. The search function also applies to your images, and it’s useful for helping you find a particular photo that you aren’t sure when it was taken.
Many of these features aren’t new, as they can be found in other photo-sharing apps and services, but having these features makes the Flickr experience much stronger.
