Finally, Flickr as it was meant to be...

I popped onto the usual tech sites for my morning read and tucked in 2 lines with zero photos was "Flickr 3.0 redesign released today."  Wait, what?  How much could they have done differently?  I mean, it's Flickr. This is the same service that until a year or two ago had kept the same appearance for the better half of a decade.


I wasn't expecting much other than the usual mishmash they've been up to: old interfaces with modern slideshows.  My main complaint about the desktop version are the clunky changes that are bolted onto an old interface which was great for 2006, not so much in 2014. Uploading is much easier, galleries aren't as much as an eye sore, there's a decent slideshow option...Scrolling through your feed is a mess. You'd think they'd have taken a page out of Tumblr for a quick scrolling option.  But I digress...

So Flickr hasn't exactly been on their game and the last few years have seemed like playing catch up with the rest of the internet.  Their smartphone apps have been no different.  A desktop interface crammed into a 4 inch screen.  YEP, That's enticing.  I can honestly say I opened the Flickr app on an ipod touch and several android phones less than 20 times in 4 years.  It was that bad.

Fast-forward to today.  Flickr 3.0.  Dark grays and blacks like every photo editing program (a la Photoshop CS6), a minimalist grayscale graphical interface with words and icons sparse, natural gestures for navigation, a revamped feed.  And did I mention snappy?  Everything loads quickly and there's barely any lag, even on my 3 year old HTC device.

I applaud Flickr for the much needed upgrade! Though upon further inspection, it looks like another photo app....Instagram.  I don't blame them though.  It's the most popular photo app out there presently.  If you want to win over users, make the user experience as similar as possible.  But change just enough to avoid patent infringing (ha).  To be fair, I think it has a bit more in common with Twitter's interface.  Though this could just be the optimal user interface for mobile devices.  It's like the GUI when it first appeared at Xerox's early computers and then was copied by Apple, then adopted by the rest of the computing industry.  It's just the most optimal way to interact with that device.

Regardless, the result is an app I can finally see myself using on a regular basis.  If it's easy to navigate and quicker than my desktop, I'd say it stands a fair chance of usage. Better than 20 times in 4 years anyway.