After recently joining the SmugMug family it seems like Flickr is finally starting to see some updates to its user interface.
Still one of the biggest photography communities online, Flickr is capitalizing on its penchant for higher-res images with a new gallery layout that emphasizes displaying “stories” from its users and taking advantage of modern display sizes for maximum visual impact.
In what is being hailed by some as a much needed modernization of the once-dominant photo service, Flickr has lost out to services like Instagram which capitalized on the explosion in the popularity of social media.
With more than a little catching up to do, the update promises to help users “tell your visual stories with new tools to facilitate your creativity” and “Flickr’s galleries have long been one of the tools available to our community for visual storytelling, though they have gotten dusty over time as the rest of the site progresses.” If that sounds a lot like Instagram and Snap to you well you’re not the only one.
One advantage of the Flickr platform is its preponderance of high quality imagery and the company hopes this update emphasizes that appeal.
Updates make it easier for users to catalog photos as well as see what is within a gallery. In addition the number of total photos within a gallery is larger.
Discussing the changes, Flickr wrote on their blog: “You can update your cover photo at any time by selecting an image from the gallery…You can edit your Title and Description at any time. You can reorder the images in your galleries as often as you like. You can share galleries outside of Flickr with an intuitive share sheet that will improve the presentation of your galleries on other social networks.”
Of course the company is soliciting user feedback in hopes of improving the experience in the future.
If you want to let Flickr know what you’d like to see they have some handy contact information here at the bottom of their blog post.
