PROS
- Minimalistic interface
- Smooth, snappy performance
- Lots of filters
- Integrates social sharing and Flickr's community
CONS
- No iPad version
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.
Fans of Flickr, Yahoo’s
community dedicated to photography enthusiasts, will absolutely love the
new iOS app – the app has finally come of age, ready to take on mobile
shutterbugs all over the world. As much as this is a battle to rekindle
lost love and reinvigorate its loyal fan base, Yahoo’s refreshed Flickr
iOS app makes a great case to make inroads into the Instagram crowd,
possessing all the bells and whistles that makes it a formidable
photo-sharing and camera app.
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.
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.
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.
Source : ThinkDigit
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