Flickr has had a major makeover. The photo app now boasts image-recognition technology, a new intelligent search and a whole host of new functionality to make it easier to navigate and use the software.
The upgrade announced is taking place across mobile, Web and desktop applications. It's the most significant improvement to Flickr since the Yahoo-owned company increased the storage capacity for users to 1 TB back in 2013.
"We've redesigned Flickr and now you can easily and effectively upload, view, organize, edit and share your lifetime of photos and videos across desktop and mobile," said Tim A. Miller, head of engineering for Flickr, in a company blog post.
Probably the most significant upgrade is a new intelligent search engine that helps you find exactly the right picture you're looking for in the sea of 10 billion or so photos hosted on Flickr. The new search algorithm can understand the context of your search. For example, a search for "London Eye" returns images of the giant Ferris wheel by the Thames River, while a search for "Eye London" will return a host of images of human eyes. The engine can also take advantage of Flickr's new "Magic View," which uses image-recognition technology to identify the content of uploaded photos and auto-tagging, which organizes them across 60 categories. The search results are also easier to navigate and can be filtered by color, size and orientation.
The new "Magic View" makes navigation of the entire site much more user-friendly. It allows users to see the categories in which photos are tagged on the left-hand side, which encourages users to browse and search for more defined types of images. As you might expect, users can easily share images on social media with a few clicks or swipes, and you can now download large numbers of photos in .zip format for the first time.
There are also new uploading tools. Flickr's "Uploadr" has been upgraded for Mac and Windows, promising faster speeds. There's also the Auto-Uploadr tool for mobile, which will automatically upload and sync your photos across all of your devices and delete any duplicates.
There are also smaller changes, such as the ability to select multiple photos and manually edit their metadata in batches, if you ever have time to do that sort of thing. The upgrade also claims to make the Flickr experience consistent across all platforms.
The overhaul is the first big release since Marissa Mayer appointed Jeff Bonforte as the new Flickr CEO as part of a Yahoo's leadership team reshuffle. Bonforte, senior vice president, Communication Products, previously headed the startup Xobni, which Yahoo acquired in 2013.
