Flickr Revamps Site Navigation and ‘Explore’ Page

Flickr’s redesigned Explore page. Image: Flickr

Hot on the heels of its awesome new iPhone app, Flickr has rolled out some changes to its web interface, revamping the navigation bar, which Flickr says makes it easier to get around the site. Flickr has also added the popular “justified” view of photos to the Explore landing page.

The Flickr blog says the changes are rolling out to everyone over the next few days, so if you don’t see them yet just be patient.

While Flickr says the new nav bar is “designed to make browsing Flickr faster and easier,” whether or not that’s true depends a little on which features you frequently use. The new navigation definitely simplifies things, but it does so by moving more than a few menu items off to obscure places. For example, options like browsing through your tags or looking at your collections have been moved out of the “You” menu to “More.” Similarly, the link to log out or get to your new mail have been moved to a new menu hidden in your user icon.

Flickr hasn’t outright deleted most menu items; they’ve just moved them to new locations. Sometimes that’s a good thing — for example, removing the “your” from all the options under a menu already named “You” makes sense — and other times it’s annoying, for example if you frequently browse by tags.

Less confusing is the new Explore page, which adopts the “justified” view that Flickr previously introduced for its Contacts, Favorites and Group Pool pages. The new layout tiles images to fit more photos at larger sizes in a smaller space and makes, well, exploring, more interesting.