All posts tagged ‘Flickr’

File Under: APIs, Multimedia, Web Services
May
24
2012

Flickr Amps Up the Social With New ‘Groups’ Features

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Flickr's new group pool pages, now with "justified" view.

Flickr has made some small but welcome upgrades to the cornerstone of its social features — Flickr Groups. The changes include a new way to view group pools and the ability to post directly to groups using Flickr’s new HTML5 uploader.

Flickr lacks the hype of more recent photo-sharing services like Instagram, but remains popular with pro and amateur photographers alike at least in part because of the community that continues, despite some stumbles, to exist on the site. Much of that community is built around Flickr Groups, like-minded photographers banding together to share images of anything from beautiful mountains to sushi to a shared love of RAW images from micro 4/3 cameras.

In an effort to make it easier for Flickr fans to contribute to Groups, Flickr’s recently updated photo uploader now offers an option to share your photos with any group you’ve joined directly from the upload page.

Perhaps more importantly, Flickr is extending the Flickr API with the same features, making it possible for third-party applications — like your favorite iOS and Android photo apps — to add the same group sharing features. Developers can check out the Flickr code blog for more on what’s new in the Flickr API.

As part of today’s Groups upgrade, Flickr is also extending its “justified” view — which tiles images to fit more photos at larger sizes in a smaller space — to Group photo pools. Along with the justified view, Group Photo Pool pages now have a persistent (but collapsible) sidebar where you can quickly access group discussion threads, view tags and see the top contributors.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Services
May
15
2012

Flickr Goes Big With Larger Images, Responsive Redesign

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Flickr: now with bigger images and a (mostly) responsive design.

Flickr recently changed its “lightbox” photo pages — the darker photo-friendly interface on the site — to display much larger photos. Now the grandfather of online photo-sharing sites is rolling out a site-wide redesign that uses the same big, beautiful images to put your photos front and center on every page.

The larger images in Flickr’s revamped photo pages put the emphasis where it belongs — on your photos. Peripheral information, like comments, maps, tags, set info and so on are still there, they’re just now (rightly) dwarfed by the actual image.

The result is a much more photo-centric site that does a nice job of differentiating itself from the current trend of low-res, filter-heavy photo0sharing services.

Web developers, take note: Flickr’s new layout isn’t just eye-catching, it’s also somewhat responsively designed — adjusting to the myriad screens on the web today and displaying the best photo possible without clogging your tubes with huge photo downloads. Flickr does stop short of scaling pages down to phone-size screens — for which there is a separate mobile website — but it resizes nicely to handle tablets.

That’s right, Flickr is the latest (and perhaps the largest) website to embrace not just a mostly responsive design with a liquid layout and media queries, but also a responsive approach to images.

We’ve looked at dozens of ways to handle images in a responsive design, but Flickr has opted for a custom setup that uses a bit of server-side PHP and some JavaScript to serve images based on screen size. Flickr is also using a custom algorithm that takes the width and height of the screen into account and “will display content at a width that will best showcase the most common photo ratio, the 4:3.”

For more details on how Flickr is handling the responsive aspects of the new design, check out the Flickr code blog.

Developers working with the Flickr API should note that the new photo sizes are now available through the Flickr API if your app or website would also like to display larger images.

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File Under: Visual Design, Web Apps
May
4
2012

Flickr: When It Comes to Photos, Bigger Is Better

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Size matters: Flickr's lightbox view now offers much larger images.

Yahoo is once again lavishing some attention on Flickr. Flickr has already launched a new photo uploader and a new photo editor in recent weeks, and now the site is making your images look even better with new, higher-resolution photo displays.

It’s been nearly two years since Flickr last redesigned its photo pages to display larger images. Since then screen resolutions have only improved, and when it comes to viewing photos you don’t have to be a pro photographer to know that bigger is better.

To make your uploaded images look better — especially when you’re browsing in fullscreen mode — Flickr is introducing two new photo sizes, 2048 and 1600 pixels.

Right now you’ll only see the new larger images when you enter Flickr’s “lightbox” view with its darker, photo-friendly interface (just click an image to enter lightbox view). At the moment the regular photo pages remain unchanged. However, the Flickr blog reports that the larger images will soon be available through Flickr’s API and “a few other places over the next couple of weeks.” While the new image sizes are probably too large for the default photo pages, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Flickr refresh the photo page layout with larger images in the near future.

The larger of the two new photo sizes also seems like a future-friendly choice since it works well with very high-res screens like what you’ll find on Apple’s latest iPad. Although Flickr does not appear to be doing so just yet, serving the larger images to the iPad would make for sharper photos on the iPad’s high-resolution screen. [Update: The Flickr team tells Webmonkey that it "just enabled hi-res photo sharing to the new iPad this morning."]

Naturally, to take advantage of the new larger image sizes Flickr is now creating, you’ll need to be uploading photos at least that large. But given that most phone cameras produce images in that pixel range these days, there’s a good chance you already are.

Flickr Pro members can control how large their images are displayed; just head to the new image size settings page. By default Flickr sets this to “best display size,” though if you want to stop people from downloading high-res copies of your images you can limit the display size to 1024 pixels. The new image size setting doesn’t affect who can download your original files, just those created by Flickr. But since the sizes Flickr creates are larger than what most original images would have been back when Flickr first launched, the new setting makes sense.

One thing to note with the new image sizes: they only apply to photos uploaded since Mar. 1, 2012; older images won’t be resized. The other thing to know is that if you upload something with a long edge of less than 2048 pixels, Flickr won’t upsize it so there’s no need to worry about small images being pixelated.

The new image sizes may not win over fans of filter-happy, low-res image sharing websites, but for Flickr aficionados it offers a compelling reason to stick around.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Services
Apr
25
2012

Easily Upload Photos With Flickr’s New Drag-and-Drop Tools

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Flickr's slick new HTML5 uploader.

Photo sharing service Flickr has announced a new HTML5-based photo uploader with drag-and-drop support and a better interface for adding captions, titles and other annotations to your uploaded images.

The new HTML5 photo uploading tool comes on the heels of Flickr’s recent move away from the Flash-based Picnik photo editor to a new HTML5-based image editor. Not only is the new uploader faster and better, it adds further foundation to the hope of Flickr fans everywhere — that, despite some recent personnel changes at Yahoo, the company still believes in and will continue to develop Flickr.

Despite the advances the web has made over the years, uploading files remains a clunky, confusing process for many users who always want to know why they can’t just drag and drop files like they do everywhere else. Like Gmail’s similar drag-and-drop file uploader, that’s exactly what Flickr users can now do, provided of course they’re using a supported web browser. Flickr’s new uploading tool will work in the latest versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

The switch to an HTML5-based photo uploading tool means that you can now simply select a group of images on your hard drive, drag them over to your browser and drop them on the Flickr page. From there the uploader offers a revamped photo organizer page that now sports a darker look reminiscent of the interface in Adobe’s Lightroom editor. Click on an image and the left-hand sidebar will show fields for adding a title, description and tags to your image. You can also add the image to a set, tag any people that appear in the photo, as well as control privacy settings or change the license.

The new Flickr uploader's large image previews

To go along with the new uploader Flickr has also bumped the file size limits for both pro and ordinary users to 50MB and 30MB, respectively. For Flickr pros that’s enough space to handle photos taken with the latest DSLRs, though it’s worth noting that Flickr still doesn’t support storing RAW images.

Still, Flickr remains one of the web’s most popular photo sharing sites and while the new uploader and larger file size limits may not win it any converts from elsewhere, it should make current users happy. Note that, as with previous upgrades, Flickr will be rolling out the new uploader over the next week or so, if you don’t see it just yet, fear not, it’s coming.

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File Under: Mobile, Multimedia, Web Apps
Apr
5
2012

Flickr Ditches Flash Photo Editor for Mobile-Friendly Aviary

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Editing your Flickr photos in Aviary. Image: Aviary

Flickr is swapping out its existing Flash-based photo editor for a new HTML-based app that will work on any device.

Aviary, as the new editor is known, will start appearing as an editing option for your photos today, though some users may have to wait since Yahoo is staggering the rollout over the next few weeks.

Part of the change is out of necessity. Flickr’s previous photo editor was Picnik, which was purchased by Google in 2010. Google has since announced it will shut down the service Apr. 19 and roll its features into Google+.

To use Aviary to edit your Flickr photos, just head to the photo page, click the Actions tab and select the new “Edit photo in Aviary” option. That will open up the image in the Aviary window as an overlay. From there you can crop, rotate, add effects, adjust brightness and contrast and other editing basics.

Obviously Aviary is not aimed at people who takes their photo editing seriously, but for the casual user who just wants to crop an upload or add some punchier contrast, it works well. The learning curve is almost nil and it more than handles the 80 percent use case for casual Flickr users.

In that sense Aviary is a step up from Picnik, which was more of a Photoshop-inspired editor than an amateur-friendly option. However it’s surprising to see Flickr continue to ignore the Instagram-inspired trend of one-click image effects, which are not part of Aviary’s arsenal. Some may decry Instagram’s retro-inspired results, but there’s no denying the simplicity and popularity of its filters.

While Flickr obviously had to replace Picnik since Google is shutting the service down, Aviary offers another huge advantage over Picnik — it doesn’t use Flash. Dropping the Flash requirement means that Flickr users can now edit their photos on iOS devices and upcoming Windows Metro tablets, neither of which run the Flash plugin.

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