Tag: photos

Flickr Gamma

Post ImageFlickr launched a new redesign yesterday, and upgraded the site from Beta to Gamma. I heard the redesign mentioned at Mesh by Chris Messina, who wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the changes. I for one love the new design, and think it is long overdue!

  • The menu at the top has been simplified and now contains dropdown menus to access various areas of the site. I found the old, two-tiered menu structure kind of confusing, so for me, this is a welcome change.
  • Search has been improved, and no longer just looks in tags.
  • There’s a new person menu on buddy icons.
  • Your Photos now shows to columns of photos instead of just one.
  • The Organizr is vastly different, and I haven’t really had a chance to play with it yet.

Great job Flickr, keep it up! I hope the site does eventually leave it’s greek editions to go final, but at least they are not stuck on beta forever. Perhaps a lesson (and new model) for others to follow?

Read: Flickr Blog

New Flickr Features

Post ImageI continually find myself getting lost in Flickr. Not lost as in, where am I, but lost as in, there are so many interesting photos to see! And the Flickr team has gone and added features that make getting lost even easier:

First up is clustering, a better way to explore photos through tags. You can still see the most recent photos with a given tag (say, summer) but now you can also root around the finer distinctions: summer beach vacations versus summer flowers and nature – and all the clusters are collected on one page. It’s neat!

At first I didn’t get what the big deal was with clusters, but now I understand, and it’s neat indeed. A good example is the tag turkey – the clusters show you the country, the food, and the holiday all in one page.

The other new feature is called interestingness and it’s huge! A long time in the making, interestingness is a ranking algorithm based on user behavior around the photos taking into account some obvious things like how many users add the photo to their favorites and some subtle things like the relationship between the person who uploaded the photo and the people who are commenting (plus a whole bunch of secret sauce).

That last new feature, interestingness, will be the end of me. Give it a try, and you’ll see why!

Read: Flickr Blog