Flickr has announced a big update to its website with the hopes of competing with the likes of Google and Facebook.
The updates will enable users to more easily upload images and includes a new Camera Roll that will enable users to sort through their photos by date taken or date uploaded. Users will also be able to sort images using new image recognition technology, which will allow for users to sort their photos into categories.
"With Camera Roll, we've made it easy to access and view your entire catalog of images, then organize your photos with seamless, fluid gestures using your mouse or touch screen," said the company in a blog post. "You can view your entire history of photos by when they were taken or when they were uploaded, then edit them in a flash, thanks to new bulk editing features. Select the ones you want and quickly add titles, descriptions, tags and other metadata."
The new updates suggest that Flickr, and its parent Yahoo, are trying to regain the photo-sharing site's former glory. While Yahoo bought the service in 2004, it hasn't been given the attention that it should have since then.
Of course, users will certainly need the extra sorting capabilities now that Flickr is giving them 1 TB of free storage space for their photos, which amounts to around 500,000 photos. Users will also be able to search for images by orientation.
The image recognition technology is being applied to the website's search capabilities, meaning that if a user searches for "Apples," they will get results with actual apples, not just images that have the word "Apples" in the name.
According to reports, before releasing the changes, the team at Flickr asked Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo who spent many years working on search at Google, to give the new search capabilities a spin. While Mayer tried to stump the service by searching for different holidays like Easter or Christmas in an attempt to turn up generic pictures of Easter Eggs instead of family photos, she was surprised to find a picture of a pair of shoes that she was given as a Christmas gift one year.
Flickr will also be releasing new apps for devices running both Android and iOS, which will also receive the updates. Not all features will be available to mobile just yet, but they are on their way. This should give Flickr a much more uniform feel across platforms.
