flickr for ios

Flickr for iPhone Gets an Upgrade

It be an understatement to say that the Flickr app released in late 2012 was an important move for the service. It probably helped save the farm. Now that great app just got another shot of adrenaline with some great upgrades. 

Yahoo's release of Flickr 2.1 for iOS has a slew of new features. Here are my favorites:

  • Picking photos from your iPhoto Photostream to save to Flickr. This is great because not every photo I want to share exists on my phone's camera roll. And often I'll save some heavily edited DSLR shots to my Photostream. This makes that whole process a tad easier.
  • uch faster uploading. I noticed a significant speed bump under the hood. When they first released the app I saw slow upload times. Thanks Yahoo.
  • Snap photos using the iPhone's volume up button. This is a no-brainer and I don't understand why more camera apps don't take advantage of this functionality now that Apple allows access to these buttons in the SDK. Afterall Apple lets you snap pictures this way while using the built in camera app.
  • This update saves an original photo to your camera roll in addition to your heavily post-processed version.
  • Higher resolution photos are now displayed in the lightbox view.

And there are a few more bells and whistles like quickly tagging your contacts in photo comments by typing @screename, and now you can get notified when contacts mention you. 

Now that Flickr is back with a vengeance I'm still struggling to figure out how it fits into my overall photo workflow. But the way I see it no other service offers the same level of high resolution photo sharing that Flickr does.