Spectaculr Flickr!

With digital photography becoming almost ubiquitous, showcasing one’s work has become of prime importance for professional as well as amateur photographers everywhere. Recognizing this, a number of social media platforms such as Facebook and Google+ have revamped their designs recently to accommodate better visibility of photographs. And then, there are platforms like Flickr. Flickr is an image and video hosting website and online community that was first created by Ludicorp in 2004, and later acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. Since its creation, the portal has been through at least two major redesigns (including the latest one in May 2013), and remains one of the most widely used forums on the Internet for sharing photographs, images and videos. Flickr does not release data about its user database, but recent estimates place its number of users as close to 100 million with close to 10 billion images being shared on the website. The recent revamp of the portal has changed the whole look and feel of the portal, adding a lot of new features. To start off with, Flickr now offers 1TB of free storage to every single of its users – free or paid. That’s a whole lot of space, and a tonne more than the competition is offering (for comparison, Google+ Photos offers 15GB, while Picasa Web Albums offers 1GB of free storage). This allows the portal to store all the images uploaded to it in their original resolution, without the need for compression or loss of quality for storage purposes. In addition, the redesigned Flickr gives you easy access to all your photographs and videos, in the same format as they were uploaded and without restricting them to boxes or particular dimension/ orientation constraints – your landscapes stretch just the way they’re supposed to, while portraits stack up perfectly. Each user’s “photostream” ( Flickr’s timeline) showcases their work in a seamless continuous layout that is great to look at, and that lets you organize your photos easily using built-in tools. A new slideshow mode completes the new look by letting users simply scroll through images one-byone easily. As expected from any good social media platform, Flickr features excellent on-the-move support. The portal’s iOS app went through a major overhaul in December, and the new Android app was launched along with the latest redesign in May, letting users stay connected to their images while mobile.

As with any overhaul, the new redesign of Flickr has had its share of detractors screaming themselves hoarse about “how bad the new Flickr is”. In a recent conversation, Markus Spiering, Product Head, Flickr, acknowledged the reactions, “There has been a lot of feedback, negative and positive, about the new redesign... There’s a lot of emotional reactions and opinions from professional photographers, and we’re going through all of it. But, from what we’re seeing, engagement of people connecting with each other? Super positive.” All things taken into consideration, the new portal is a major improvement from its previous iteration, and using the facilities provided would be recommended. Flickr may not be the ideal place to showcase work for the “serious photographer” (shouldn’t they have their own portfolio blog/website for that?), but meanwhile, if you’re looking for a great place to share your snaps, or simply post backups of your precious photographs, look no further. Flickr will solve all your needs.