Flickr – iPhone App of the Week
This is a regular feature of the blog looking at various Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive.
This week’s App is Flickr.
Get the power of the world’s largest photo-sharing site in the palm of your hand! The all-new Flickr App is a complete redesign of the previous version. It’s now easier to use, more beautiful and includes more of the great features you love using on Flickr.com
Free
When the iPhone first had apps there was a Flickr app released, which to be honest wasn’t much good, so I used FlickStackr instead, which I did review back in 2010. Yahoo have now updated and released a new version of the Flickr app and I have to say I am very impressed with both the ease of use and the functionality. This is the app that should have been released back in 2010, it would have certainly made people think twice about signing up to Instagram. With their change in terms, more people now might want to look at Flickr instead.
Starting the app off you can either sign in with your Flickr account (as I did) or through the ubiquitous Facebook.
Once you are signed in you are able to easily browse your uploaded photographs. It certainly is quite fast and very easy to swipe and browse through your collection (or someone else’s).
You can move between your different sets, very useful if you have a lot of sets as I do with my pro account.
Likewise want to see the photographs from your contacts, again very easy.
One of the really useful features of Flickr is groups, these are collections of similar photographs.
You can of course just browse all the photographs on Flickr too.
Browsing Flickr is only part of the story with this app. The other key part of the app is the ability to not just upload photorgraphs to Flickr, but also image editing and filters. You can either take photographs using the iPhone camera or take a picture from the camera roll. Once you have taken (or chosen) a photograph you can apply a filter. These are for some bizarre reason named after animals. However you get the usual types of filters, like the ones in the Instagram app or the Facebook Camera App. You don’t need to apply filters of course.
If you click the pencil icon then you will be able to edit the image.
You can enhance the image, change the orientation, crop (even to a square shape) and adjust the brightness and contrast. In addition swiping to the left brings futher tools, including changing the saturation, sharpness. There are also “Skitch” style drawing and text tools.
Once you have finished editing the next stage is uploading to Flickr. You can add all the metadata and tags as you can on the Flickr website. You can also tell your Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr accounts that you have uploaded an image, or some images to Flickr.
The end results in terms of filters are okay, and certainly just as good as Instagram. For me the most useful aspect of the app is the uploading of photographs from the iPhone.
About time 😉
http://eduvel.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/why-hasnt-flickr-got-a-belting-app/
What a pity that, after well over three years now, they’ve still not produced a version which will run natively on an iPad – neither as a separate app nor by upgrading this one to be a universal app. I’ve never come across any sort of official excuse for this.
If all you have is an iPhone, then this obviously wouldn’t matter. But, speaking for myself, I prefer to minimise the ‘work’ I do on my iPhone and, where possible, carry it out on my iPad.
Ahh – finally, an encouraging hint:
https://twitter.com/spieri/status/285928990903001088
@Spieri is described as “Head of Product @Flickr”