Flickr beefs up back-end for better search & access
Yahoo! Inc. has released a number of major updates to Flickr, desktop and mobile, introducing a more intelligent search tool and set of features that make it easier to access, organise, find and share photos and videos across devices. The overhaul brings a seamless, unified experience to the community of over 112 million users, and allows them to more efficiently manage over 11 billion photos on Flickr today.
“At Flickr, we’ve always dreamed of creating a space where you can store and manage a lifetime’s worth of memories,” said Tim Miller, Head of Engineering at Flickr. “Today, we’re taking that one step further as we bring users a brand new set of tools to unlock the power of 1,000 GB of space. These tools coupled with our advanced image recognition technology will give our community the power to not only access those special moments from their iPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple TV, Android, or on the web, but to uncover the ones that they thought were lost forever,” he added.
Three new significant components of this launch include:
- Uploadrs: Users can upload as many as half a million photos from their desktop, an external hard drive, iPhoto, their mobile phone and more, using Yahoo’s new Uploadr for Mac and Windows and Yahoo’s new Auto-Uploadr for their mobile device. Photos and videos currently on the device or captured as new will be uploaded automatically and marked as private, and duplicates will be removed.
- Camera Roll in the Cloud: The user can navigate through thousands of photos and videos in the new interface, supported by advanced image recognition technology. The dynamic Magic View feature organises a user’s photos automatically across over 60 categories (landscapes, animals, black and white, portraits, etc.). Users can also browse their Camera Roll by date. For the first time, users can bulk download photos and videos or share privately via link, email, Instagram, Facebook and more with one swipe.
- Unified Search Experience: Flickr’s advanced search technology and powerful computer vision algorithms also provide a smarter and faster search experience. Users can easily search for images of specific items or places, or search by holiday, date or location. Just as easily, users can search for images of the London Eye because now Flickr understands a user’s intent and finds photos of the giant ferris wheel, not just photos of countless eyes taken in London. A user can also filter images by color, size, and orientation, discovering panoramic shots of the sky with blue and magenta hues.
