Yes this is old news by now but I still needed to leave my 2 cents on the matter here.
There’s no denying Flickr’s doing everything within its power to remain relevant. It wasn’t that long ago that the photo-sharing site brought on a fresh coat of paint to its user interface, plus one not-to-be-easily-dismissed terabyte of free storage for every user.
Last week it was Flickr’s mobile app for iPhone and Android getting all the love in the form of a 3.0 version update. After downloading it to my phone and trying it out for a while, my first impression was that Flickr is now hell-bent on turning into some sort of Instagram with the stream of square photos and all. They’ll let you upload up to 30 seconds of HD videos and have brought auto-uploads to the mix, a la Google+ so yes, it is indeed a nice upgrade but one thing remains the same: photos still take forever to load, both on the browser version and on the mobile app.
Profile and photo stream
I kind of like the new design for profiles (which you can see in the image above) but they do tend to leave a little Twitter after-taste, wouldn’t you agree? And of course, you can now use your phone’s camera to take photos straight from the app, which will let you add all sorts of filters and effects to your images. Yup, just like Instagram.
A couple of things I noticed this app won’t let you do is tag your photos (before or after uploading them) and move or place said photos in different albums. You can tell the organizational skills Flickr’s always been known for are taking a hit in favor of it becoming a more hip, glamorous, mass-oriented service. Not sure how the more serious, pro photogs are going to take this.
So all in all I guess you could say this update is pretty neat if you’re a die-hard Flickr fan and you must stick with their products. I myself plan to keep the app on my phone to upload the occasional photo to my stream but I think SmugMug and Google+ will continue to be the home of most if not all, of my shots.
That’s going to be it for now, folks. Download the app here, if you’d like and after you’ve taken it for a spin let me know what you think in the comments section below.
Dad's Pixels 