Flickr is an image and video hosting website, a web service suit, and online community. In addition to being website for user to share and embed their personal photographs, Flickr is used by bloggers to host images that they later embed in their online content. Flickr is a nice platform of recognition for amateur photographers as their work gets viewed by thousands of people.
Flicker was developed by a Vancouver based company and was launched in February 2004. Early versions of Flickr focussed on a multiuser chat room called Flickr live with real-time photo exchange capabilities.
Some of the key features of Flickr not initially present were tags, marking photos as favourites, and group photo pools. Now Flickr has partnership with Picnik and has many more features of interest. Picnik is online photo editing application and a reduced feature version of picnik is now the inbuilt photo editor of Flickr.
Few days back Flickr unveiled the new face if itself. Flickr has gone wide-Both photo pages and the sites home page have been stretched out to accommodate users with wider screens. Photos now get 640 pixels of space which earlier was 500 pixels. The extra space helps in filling up the page in a more pleasing manner when viewed on a wide screen display. The size change also ends up benefitting videos as many of them can be played in their original resolution.
The recent changes released by Flickr are not restricted only to the looks though. Flickers Head of the product Mathew Rothenberg said that this update includes faster loading pages which frees the servers for other tasks than just getting the pages loaded to the users screen. As per the statements given by Flicker, now Flickr page loads 50% faster than before.
Flickr has also enabled the keyboard support for browsing through images. This support has always been there on Flickr but was disabled. Now users can use the right –left arrow keys to move front and back.
Another feature added is customised background of Flickr. Earlier it was a prominent white background but users can put any image of their choice there. Customised desktop feature of Flickr is an option of a newly added mode on Flickr called as “Light Box”. Another new option available in Flickr is slideshow, which presents automatic transition of all the images and videos at the same time.
Now Flickr has its own world map and users can tag the photos with the actual location where the photos were shot.
The new look of Flickr currently is available as an option for the members till the time it is being tested – Once tested it will be released permanently for a new look and feel.
