Finally! A Flickr App That Doesn’t Suck

Flickr’s new iPhone app

Flickr announced a new iOS app today for shooting, editing, sharing and discovering photos. Based on the demo Wired saw, this is exactly the kind of gorgeous application that Flickr users have been longing for and that Flickr has always needed.

Flickr basically missed the boat on mobile photo sharing, and this release needed to not only play catch up, but also to set a new standard for what a photo sharing app can do. Amazingly, it largely manages to pull that off, thanks to the viewing experience and an emphasis on sharing when others are backing away from it. In short, if this app had existed three years ago, it’s highly possible that Instagram would not be a thing at all.

It’s the second major new product announcement from Yahoo in as many days, following Tuesday’s Yahoo Mail news. It indicates that the company’s new CEO Marissa Mayer is clearly focused on revamping Yahoo’s product line.

Although Flickr isn’t nearly as popular as some of Yahoo’s other services, it’s beloved by a passionate user base. Shortly after Mayer took over as CEO, there was a huge outcry from users to “make Flickr awesome again.” The company responded in kind, launching its own single-serving site as a response to note that it was staffing up. With this app release, those users are getting their wish.

When you fire up the app, you scroll vertically through your contacts’ photos, which are presented chronologically. But if you want to stop and scroll through someone’s entire photo stream, just swipe horizontally. Each photo displays all the social interactions — comments and favorites — up front. Hit a button, and you can also view the photo metadata, like location or the type of camera used. You can add a photo to favorites by double-tapping.

But the killer experience comes when you flip the phone sideways. That launches a full-screen view of the image that you can pinch to zoom in on. Do this, and the app loads a higher-resolution version of the image in the background, so you actually get a bigger image with more detail as you zoom in. You can surf someone’s entire photo stream in this manner.

The app also has a camera function with basic editing options. You can take a photo, or grab one from your camera roll, and apply Aviary-designed filters to it (Aviary is the same company that built Twitter’s new photo filters). You can also perform some basic editing options, like cropping, straightening, or adjusting saturation.

It’s also built for sharing, with buttons to export pics to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. When you export, it makes sure your audience will see the big picture. Send a photo to Facebook or Twitter, and Flickr will display those pictures directly in the timelines in similar fashion to the way native photos look in those apps.

“Today photos shared from Flickr to Facebook are tiny thumbnails, starting [Wednesday] they will be big and beautiful,” Flickr’s product head Markus Spiering told Wired. Similarly, Flickr is using Twitter cards to display actual photos within tweets, rather than just links back to pictures.

“We are embracing [cards],” he explained. “We think working with Twitter is the best possible way for presenting photos within Twitter. The thinking is, what do you as a user want. We may get more return traffic if we just post the URL, but that isn’t what the user wants.”

This is, essentially, the opposite strategy that Instagram went with when it abandoned Twitter cards. That may have made sense for Instagram, which has a clear and large network effect all its own, but Flickr’s decision to let people share the photos the places they want to share them makes a lot of sense for both users and the photo service itself.

There are also revamped features for exploring photos, and a new navigation system on the Flickr website itself.