Review of Official Flickr App

On Saturday, Yahoo! released the long awaited (and frankly, overdue) official Flickr iPhone app. Below is my review.

First, the good. By far the best news is that the app is finally available. I personally have been waiting for a long time for an official Flickr app, as the other 3rd party options were not very useful (to me). I found other applications to be too complicated and over-thought, with the developers trying to see how many features they could cram in their app. That is not my style. I prefer a limited application that looks beautiful and performs well. Thus, I have found myself relegated to using the Flickr web app. Not anymore. The new native application meets most of my needs quite well. The biggest problem is that it is SLOW. I’m pretty sure this will be remedied by Yahoo! in the not too distant future.

When you first open the app, you are greeted by a nice splash screen. Provided you are logged into your Flickr account, you will see photos from your contacts scroll by with the so-called “Ken Burns Effect”. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the order in which photos are pulled, although it does seem that they come from recent uploads. Tapping on the uploader’s name at the bottom as the photo is scrolling by will take you to the page for that photo. Beneath the photo are three buttons: “Recent”, “You”, & “Contacts”.

Under “Recent”, you will find two other buttons. “Activity” and “Uploads”. The Activity button shows you comments and notes left on pictures that you have uploaded, as well as any updates on photos you have commented on. It’s a very functional system, and quite possibly the best part of the application. However, if you “mute” activity on a photo on Flickr’s website, you will not find that the photo is muted on the iPhone. A little strange, but not too big a deal. In the recent Uploads section, you are given a nice screen with 3 photos maximum from each daily upload of your contacts. Rather than label each contact separately, all photos are grouped in one collective pool. While this sounds nice, it is in effect, poorly put into effect. You do not know who took the photos displayed until you tap on an individual photo. A better solution would be the ability to tap on the number to the far right, which would then classify photos under username and date, rather than just pool them all together.

The next button to be found at the bottom of the main screen is “You”. It does exactly what it sounds like- you are shown your photostream. It does show you some neat data, such as how many time each photo has been viewed, what the photo’s privacy setting is, as well as how many comments each photo has. This section is set up nicely- no complaints here.

The last of the buttons is marked Contacts. This is the area that I think could use the most improvement. Very simply, you are given an alphabetical list of your contacts usernames. You don’t even get to see their “real name”, if the flickr user has opted to put it in. Nope, all that is accessible is this simple list. Upon tapping a user, you are dumped to their stream. You are able to see their sets, tags, and favorites- something that you can’t do through the web app. That’s about it for pluses in the contacts tab, though. I think it needs a major face lift to make it more useful.

Of course, the Flickr app does include a search bar at the first screen. The major bonus in the search function is the ability to search only your photos, your contacts’ photos, or just the general Flickr community. From that point on, viewing photos works like it does everywhere else in the app.

Briefly, I discovered an odd note: even with no connection to Flickr’s servers (E.G. , no wi-fi or cellular connection), it appears that the application caches some of the photos. Anything you can see a thumbnail of without being online has a full picture behind it. The images on the splash screen still go by, and tapping on one will take you to that photo. It’s a bit strange…

Some people may wonder why I didn’t mention the app’s uploading feature. Here’s the deal. It’s there, but it’s really crummy. Not only does it resize your photos, but it also strips EXIF data and limits your uploading to one at a time. Yuck. For all iPhone Flickr uploading needs, I highly recommend FlickIt. It allows multiple image uploading at a time, as well as full-size pictures. It also has a wonderful UI.

And so closes this review. It’s probably way too long…

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