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Yahoo Releases Official Flickr iPhone App

Arvind Srinivasan — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:31:17 -0500

Flickr always had a good iPhone optimized web interface, but in terms of speed and uploading, it was always one step behind. Yahoo! has just released a Flickr app that hopes to remedy this, and not only delivers a speedy way to access the Flickr ecosystem, but also adds in a few features that make it a killer app.

Commenting, uploading, and tagging are all more streamlined, and you can set favorites of friends' images easily. The search functionality is also richer, letting you browse through thumbs, view details like number of views and geo-tagging, and timestamps. As a final Easter egg, if you let the Flickr app idle, it plays back a screensaver-esque slideshow of various Creative Commons licensed images.

You can download the new Flickr app here.

iPhone Becomes One of the Most Popular Cameras on Flickr

Cory Bohon — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:59:05 -0500

With the 3GS's 3-megapixel autofocus camera, the iPhone has quickly replaced our point and shoot camera for everyday photos. Leave it to Flickr to find the most popular cameras used on the site, and you'll see that the iPhone is number 2, with a bullet.

According to Flickr's camera page, the iPhone is second to only the Canon Rebel for being the most popular camera on the photo sharing site.

Not only is the iPhone near the top of the overall cameras, but it is in first place for the most popular camera phones. MacRumors notes that the charts are updated daily and is the proportion of users who upload at least one photo for that device. You can see photos taken by iPhone users by clicking here.

Flickr via MacRumors

Connected Flow FlickrExport 3 for iPhoto

Ray Aguilera — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:16:00 -0500

FlickrExport adds ninja-level precision to your Flickr uploads, from within iPhoto.

Photography nuts love photo-sharing site Flickr.com. And for years, third parties have provided iPhoto plug-ins that let you export your images directly to your Flickr account. For ease-of-use, these plug-ins beat standalone apps--and Flickr’s Web-based uploader--for getting images from your Mac into your photo stream. And since most photo geeks frequent Flickr anyway, it’s always made the most sense to us to be able to post your stuff there from within iPhoto itself. In iPhoto ’09, Apple introduced support for uploading to Flickr. But in our tests, the power and flexibility of Connected Flow’s FlickrExport makes Apple’s efforts look like amateur hour.

iPhoto’s native support for Flickr is the essence of Apple simplicity. Select some images, and choose Share > Flickr. The first time you do this, iPhoto will prompt you for your Flickr log-in info, and iPhoto will ask you to set a privacy level for the uploads as well as relative sizes. Nice, but this doesn’t give you much control--even for Flickr newbies. FlickrExport, by comparison, offers tons of options for customizing and controlling your Flickr uploads.

FlickrExport installs as a plug-in, and in our tests, worked more reliably than iPhoto’s Flickr support. FlickrExport adds a Flickr tab to iPhoto’s Export pane (File > Export). From there, you can edit Titles, Descriptions, Tags, and Privacy settings for your photos--as a group, as well as individually. FlickrExport also allows you to add photos directly to Flickr group photo pools and add to your own existing photosets or create a new photoset as you upload images. And for users with free accounts, a handy status gauge shows how much of your upload quota has been used for the month. If space gets tight, FlickrExport can automatically resize your images to conserve bandwidth. Users of previous versions of FlickrExport will be interested in new features, including presets for uploads to Flickr groups and the ability to incorporate location data into your photos manually or via GPS track logs, perfect for documenting your travels visually.

We were able to easily import large and small groups of images to our Flickr account, and in all cases Tags, Titles, and other metadata were correctly applied, even when we supplied a complicated mishmash of data to certain images and not to others. Our exports were reasonably quick, and we didn’t notice FlickrExport bogging down our iMac while we zapped large groups of photos up to Flickr’s cloud. And for Aperture users, Connected Flow offers a version of FlickrExport tweaked to take advantage of Aperture’s features as well. For active participants in Flickr groups, the ability to save sets of groups within FlickrExport is a huge timesaver--although we had a few problems with presets selecting incorrect groups. And the only options for managing presets are deleting or renaming them--an editing interface to tweak presets would have been nice.

Flickr Extends Video Uploads to its Free Users

Florence Ion — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:17:16 -0600

Flickr, the popular online photo sharing service, has announced that it is now extending its video service to its free customers, allowing them two free uploads a month.

In addition, Flickr Pro members can now watch video in high definition. There is still a 90-second limit, however, which can seem constricting for those hoping to upload full-blown videos and store all of their personal media on one site.

Users interested in Flickr’s video sharing service should download and install the free Flickr Uploadr program.