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

Scott Gilbertson — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:12:33 +0000

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.

New Flickr Is Bigger, Wider and Uncut

Scott Gilbertson — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:38:41 +0000

The new Flickr photo page

The grandfather of online photo-sharing sites is rolling out a revamped design. Photo pages on Flickr have been redone to feature larger images, maps, and a much cleaner, more intuitive interface.

For now, the new look is opt-in, but Flickr plans to make the new page design the default some time next month. To see the new photo page in action, log in to your Flickr account and visit any photo page. You’ll see an option to test the new look. You can also use links provided by Flickr to switch between the two experiences.

Flickr's old look: Click for larger.

It’s been a long time since Flickr did anything major to its main photo pages. Flickr started with a limited set of features and has been bolting new features onto the old design ever since. The result has been a slightly cluttered collection of buttons, tools and bits of data that can distract from the main point of the site — your photos.

The new look changes that, streamlining the navigation and tools while “embiggening” your photos (as Flickr refers to it).

The first thing you’ll notice is that the primary image is much larger. The long edge of your image is now 640 pixels across, a 30 percent increase. If that’s not big enough for you, just hover your mouse over any image and you’ll notice the icon changes to a magnifying glass. Click the image (or the new button between the Newer and Older buttons) and you’ll enter what Flickr calls the Lightbox view.

Similar to popular JavaScript slideshow tools, Flickr’s Lightbox view enlarges the image and overlays your screen with a slightly transparent black background. The nice thing about the new Lightbox view is that you can browse through photos without closing it, as well as leave comments and favorite photos.

Perhaps the single most-useful enhancement to casual viewing found in Flickr’s redesign is the addition of new keyboard shortcuts — yes, left and right arrow will now flip through photos just the way you’d expect. The keyboard navigation works in Lightbox mode as well.

The new look consolidates all the tools previously scattered around the page — adding notes, viewing EXIF data, editing images and a dozen more — into a single Actions dropdown menu. The result is a far less-cluttered page that still offers easy access to anything you’d like to do with your photos.

The new Flickr sidebar shows a map and EXIF data.

The sidebar has been similarly cleaned up and widened. The thumbnail filmstrip preview is now five images wide, allowing for faster browsing through photostreams, groups or pools.

The filmstrip has dropped in priority though, moving down below the new top billing — the who, what, where and when of your images.

Assuming you uploaded your images with EXIF tags and geodata, the top portion of the sidebar will now tell viewers where the image was taken, the camera and lens used, and the date the photo was taken.

Just below that is a very slick map that shows a country-level view of where the photo was taken. Hover your mouse over the map, and it will automatically zoom in to a city-level view. Hover the mouse over the actual map pin, and the map will zoom in again.

If you want an even more detailed look, just click the map, and it will bring up a larger map that overlays the current page and allows you to zoom and pan around the area. It would be nice if the overlay showed nearby photos as well, but it doesn’t, though there is a link that will take you to the Nearby map page.

Beneath the map you’ll find a quick overview of your image — how many times it has been viewed, the number of comments and how many people call it a favorite.

The reorganized thumbnail preview area is now context-sensitive. For example, if you land on a photo page while browsing a user’s photostream, then the photostream thumbnails are shown. If the photo is part of any sets, groups or pools, clicking on those will bring up a filmstrip of the next photo in the group. However, if you land on a photo page while browsing through a group, the group’s thumbnail filmstrip will be shown by default. It’s a subtle change, but it makes browsing images much more intuitive.

Flickr “favorites” have always been a sort of quick-comment feature, and Flickr is embracing that use even more by moving Favorites inline with comments. Comments have also been revamped, so that posting a comment no longer requires a page refresh. (That it previously did gives you some idea of just how long Flickr has been around.)

While Flickr’s redesigned photo page is a vast improvement, it’s not without a few quirks. For example, some of the links on the photo page bring up inline overlays — like Lightbox view and the map — while the rest do not. In testing the site yesterday I found myself sometimes hesitating, trying to decide if I was about the leave the photo page or if an overlay would appear. The varying behavior might make the new page a tad confusing for those not familiar with Flickr, because you never know exactly what’s going to happen when you click a link.

For those using Flickr every day, such quirks will quickly fade and there’s no doubt that the redesign is a vast improvement. Flickr also claims that page load times are faster, though we didn’t notice a huge difference while previewing the test site. Still, loading a larger photo without slowing down the page will likely be good enough for most users.

Flickr’s official blog post has more details if you’re curious.

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Flickr Hooks Up With Facebook for Photo-Sharing Love

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:35:19 +0000

Photo-sharing website Flickr has announced a new Facebook integration tool that syncs your Flickr photos to your Facebook account. Flickr’s sync tools are built on top of parent company Yahoo’s Updates platform, and will push photo thumbnails, titles and descriptions to your Facebook feed.

Of course, Facebook also offers way to pull in your Flickr images with RSS, as well as about a dozen third-party photo syncing apps that let you post to both services at once. If you use any of those tools, make sure you disable them before turning on Flickr’s new features, otherwise you’ll end up with duplicate photos in your new feed.

The integration of the two services is the result of a new partnership between Yahoo and Facebook announced this week. Yahoo will continue to let its visitors consume Facebook feeds on various Yahoo properties and post to the social network from its pages. Once users link their Yahoo and Facebook accounts, they’ll see news feeds from their Facebook friends on the Yahoo homepage, the web’s most popular news page, and in their inboxes in Yahoo Mail, the web’s most popular webmail service. Flickr, a powerful social network in its own right, is the next testing ground for this integration. Yahoo plans to integrate other social networks, like Twitter, this summer.

To enable the new Flickr-Facebook integration, head over to Flickr and turn on the Facebook Updates feature. Once that’s done, any new photos you post will be pushed to Facebook. By default, only photos marked public will be sent, though you can tweak the privacy settings on your Yahoo Pulse page (bet you didn’t know you had one of those, did you?).

The new Facebook support certainly makes it easy for fans of both sites to get the best of both worlds, but we’re hoping this doesn’t signal a mad rush to add dozens of sharing tools to Flickr.

Flickr, which helped popularize social photo sharing when it launched in 2004, has long been something of a lone wolf on the social web — the Share This tool on its photo pages is admirably spartan. But it’s also a great reminder that, before the isolated model of Facebook gained popularity, there was just the open web. To that end, anyone clamoring for more sharing tools on Flickr are missing the obvious — all your photos and photo collections have a unique URL attached, and you can share that anywhere you like.

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Flickr Adds People-Tagging for Finding Friends in Photos

Michael Calore — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:26:14 +0000

Popular photo sharing service Flickr added a new feature Wednesday that lets users tag each other in photos. In addition, Flickr has updated its privacy controls, so users can opt out of being personally identified in individual photos.

The new feature lets you tag particular people in pictures by drawing bounding boxes around their faces. Flickr then asks you to ID each person, and if the person is a Flickr member, the system suggests the member’s name to you as you type the tag.

Once people are tagged, it makes finding them in searches much easier. Instead of searching for somebody’s name and only seeing photos blindly tagged with your search term, Flickr now shows you where that person is located inside the photo — especially helpful if you’re looking at a group shot.

Flickr has over 40 million members according to Yahoo, which owns the service.

People-tagging features have long been available to users of other photo-sharing web services like Facebook and Google’s Picasa. And Flickr’s new feature doesn’t go as far as Picasa, which will actually find the person’s face in the picture and take a guess at who it is. Google debuted this technology in 2008 and enhanced its capabilities just last month.

But while Flickr’s new people tags are close to what you’ll find elsewhere, Flickr’s implementation offers more user controls for privacy by letting you opt out of being ID’d.

As Facebook users know, you often get tagged in a photo that you didn’t approve of, isn’t particular flattering or shows you in a, shall we say, “compromising position.” But once you’re tagged in a picture on Facebook, that photo with you in it gets tied to your profile. It shows up in image searches, whether you want it to appear or not.

Flickr’s new face-tagging system lets users opt out of being tagged in individual photos. So, you can pretend that’s not really you holding that bong or shotgunning that can of PBR. You can also set your preferences so you can never be tagged in a photo, or you can determine which users are allowed to tag you and which users aren’t. You can also opt out of the whole face-tagging system in general.

Non-Flickr members can be identified in photos as well, but they’ll need to approve the ID before it appears within the system.

That won’t stop users from adding your name as a tag on the photo. Users can also draw a box around your face and add your name as a note. But neither of those options physically connect the tag to your Flickr account the way the people-tagging feature does. Instead, it’s just another piece of metadata attached to the photo.

For those who want to play along, just watch your Recent Activity page. Every time you’re tagged in a picture, you’ll see a little notifier in your Recent Activity stream telling you who tagged you, and offering a link to the picture.

Once a photo is tagged up with people, the photo page displays a list of all the people identified within the picture, along with links to their Flickr profiles.

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Seam Carving GUI: a Free Way to Intelligently Resize Your Photos

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:13:44 +0000

Seam carving, or intelligent resizing as it’s also known, is one of the more jaw dropping features available in the latest version of Photoshop. But seam carving isn’t something Adobe invented so, if the stock market crash vaporized your Photoshop CS4 upgrade fund, there are other options.

In fact, there are several options for seam carving tools that don’t involve Photoshop. The online editor Fotoflexer has long offered seam carving tools and there’s also a free cross-platform app Seam Carving GUI that offers the most of what you’ll find in the new Photoshop CS4.

Seam Carving GUI is a little utility app that allows to you to intelligently resize an image without distorting the main element. You can also remove elements that you don’t want in the cropped version.

To give it a try download the code from the Google code page and then open up an image. Just paint in green over the parts you want to keep and mark anything you want to get rid of with red. Then resize your image to your desired dimensions and be amazed. The photo above shows just how extreme seam carving tools can be.

We’re big fans of seam carving and it doesn’t take a genius to see that these tools are going to change the way we look at photographs. Fortunately, thanks to Seam Carving GUI and Fotoflexer even those of us on a tight budget can get in on the fun.

[via Download Squad, photo from the Seam Carving GUI site]

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Video Tutorial Demonstrates Photoshop CS 4’s ‘Content Aware Scaling’

Scott Gilbertson — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:34:53 +0000

Photoshop guru Russell Brown has posted a video demonstrating the power of Photoshop CS4′s “content aware scaling,” which is difficult to describe, but fairly mind-blowing once you’ve seen it in action (video link).

In a nutshell, content aware scaling enables you to resize an image on single axis without distorting any of the primary content. It works by analyzing your image and figuring out what is important and what isn’t. Generally speaking, that means that foreground subjects are left alone and backgrounds are resized independently, though the exact behavior will depend on the image you’re working with.

But squeezing backgrounds isn’t the only thing content aware scaling can handle, you can also use the “protect” feature to manually control which parts of your image are preserved and which are resized. In the video Brown walks you through how to use an alpha channel mask to selectively resize parts of your image.

Of course to get your own hands dirty with content aware scaling, you’ll have to wait until Photoshop CS4 is available later this month. In the mean time, you can drool over the possibilities highlighted in Brown’s demo.

And note that yes, Brown is, well, a bit eccentric shall we say, but he knows Photoshop better than most. If the nerd version of the monster truck rally voiceover makes you cringe, just hit mute and watch the video — content aware scaling speaks for itself.

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Rainbow Vomiting Panda Bear Takes Over Flickr

Scott Gilbertson — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:08:11 +0000

Flickr has added a new and very odd way to explore photos on the site — via a rainbow vomiting Panda Bear.

The feature itself isn’t anything too exciting — it scrolls through images based on Flickr’s “interestingness” criteria — but the interface is perhaps the most bizarre design choice we’ve ever seen.

We’re not sure what’s in the water over at the Flickr headquarters, but we want some.

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Picasa for Linux 3.0: Photo Management Done Right

Scott Gilbertson — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:39:13 +0000

Google’s Picasa photo editing tool for Linux has caught up to its Windows sibling with a new beta 3 release. The latest version of Picasa for Linux packs in all the features from the recent Windows beta, save one — there’s no slideshow movie feature.

The lack of slideshow movies is due to shortcomings in Wine, which powers Picasa for Linux. But the latest version packs in enough new features to keep most users happy.

The most notable of the changes are vast improvements to the way Picasa integrates with other apps. For instance, it now uses your preferred file manager to show files on disk and can use your default e-mail program to send photos directly from Picasa.

There also new support for the camera detection features in both GNOME and KDE flavors of Linux, so whenever you plug in your camera, you’ll be prompted to open Picasa.

And yes, the rest of the new features from the Windows release are all here — faster performance, automatic web syncing, all the new retouching tools and more. Our personal favorite: you can now move entire folders around on your hard drive from within Picasa 3.

Mac users, however, will have to wait. Google still hasn’t released any more details about the long-awaited release of Picasa for Mac OS X. Since there were some rumblings that a release could be right around the corner as far back as the Macworld conference and expo last January, a release can’t be too far off.

The facial recognition “Name Tags” feature is a component of Picasa Web Albums, the online sharing component tied to the Picasa desktop software, so all Picasa Web members should have access to that feature regardless of which operating system they’re using.

For a complete rundown of everything that’s new, check out the release notes. You can grab the latest version here.

[screenshot via Google]

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New GIMP 2.6 Gives Photoshop a Run for Its Money

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:43:57 +0000

The developers behind the GNU Image Manipulation Program, better known as GIMP, have released a new version that features a major overhaul to the program’s user interface. The result is a version of GIMP that behaves much more like Photoshop and makes a very capable replacement for those not locked into an Adobe workflow.

Perhaps the most welcome change to the UI is that the palettes (toolbox and docks in GIMP parlance) are now utility windows, which means that they won’t show up in your dock or task bar as separate windows — a long-requested feature for GIMP.

GIMP 2.6 doesn’t move to a single unified window, as Photoshop has done, but it does now feature an “empty image window’ which acts as a container for all your open images. That means that closing an image no longer closes the app and it also means there’s drag-and-drop support for opening images.

The result is a much more pleasant UI experience, which has the secondary benefit of being much more familiar to those coming from various versions of Photoshop.

Aside from the interface changes, GIMP 2.6 also represents a huge leap forward on the image-depth front. Although many people claim that GIMP is a viable replacement for Photoshop, professional designers have long balked at the GIMP’s limited color depth — 8 bits per color channel.

GIMP 2.6 moves to remedy this issue with the new GEGL image back end, which includes support for 32-bit images. For the time being the GEGL support is experimental and disabled by default, but you can turn it on by heading to Colors >> Use GEGL.

The new version of GIMP also includes a much more robust plug-in framework.

If you’d like to read about the rest of the changes, head over to release notes, and for a look at some more changes in store for the GIMP UI, be sure to read through the redesign wiki page.

GIMP 2.6 is free download for all platforms. Grab your copy from the downloads page.

[screenshot from GIMP.org]

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Adobe Lightroom 2.1: More Cameras, Fewer Bugs

Scott Gilbertson — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:21:29 +0000

Adobe has made a Lightroom 2.1 release candidate available for download on the Adobe Labs site. The update eliminates a number of bugs, improves performance and adds support for some newer DSL cameras.

The main focus for this release is stamping out bugs introduced by the recent 2.0 upgrade, so don’t expect any new features.

But if you’ve got a new Mac, Lightroom 2.1 should be a bit faster thanks to improved rendering performance on 64-bit Intel machines. For the rest of us, the update promises to solve a number of bugs, including some image rotation issues and problems that could arise when transferring files to Photoshop.

Lightroom 2.1 is also notable for including all the additional RAW profiles that were of the recent Camera Raw 4.6 update.

While Lightroom 2.1 is a release candidate and should be stable, it isn’t intended for production work. Still, if you’ve got a new camera, or have been bitten by bugs in Lightroom 2.0, it might be worth giving 2.1 it a try. And of course if you find any bugs, be sure to let Adobe know.

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