Flickr unveils apps update, search service for desktop and mobile

Washington: Yahoo owned Flickr has rolled out an updated version of its website, software applications for desktop and mobile, as well as its search service. According to the TechCrunch, the updates are focused on making every aspect of the service easier to use and more efficient, including uploads, edits, organization, search and sharing.

Some of the more notable changes include the addition of auto-tagging and image recognition capabilities, the latter of which will now see Flickr competing more directly with Google's photo service, Google+ Photos. It is biggest update since the company's decision to increase user's free storage space on its photo-sharing site to 1 TB back in 2013.

The company claims to have 100 million members on its service. Flickr has released new desktop software applications for both Mac and Windows which allow users to upload photos directly from their PC, SD cards, external hard drives, and other devices. The new photos are immediately displayed in Flickr's new Camera Roll view on its website and apps when they are uploading, which now serves as the site's new interface for interacting with photos.

The photos gets automatically synced across all devices, de-duped, and marked as private until the user specify otherwise. Aditya Kashyap, Product Lead says the idea of Flickr's updated interface is to give users an improved toolset that allows them to more easily organize and edit photos and it offers a number of different viewing options for filtering and sorting photos, organizing them before sharing them publicly.

Camera Roll lets users view their photos by either the date uploaded or the date taken and then group photos into separate sections based on their timestamps. Users can now download multiple photos as .zip file. Users can also share a batch of photos via email, Instagram, Facebook and more, as well as add identifying tags.

Also, the new 'Magic View' feature, as with Flickr's upgraded search service, takes advantage of computer vision technology to automatically recognize what's in user photos and tag them accordingly. Flickr can now identify if photos are landscapes, screenshots, text photos, photos of people, children, animals, vehicles, architecture, sunsets, water, and much more. At the time of launch, there are 60 some categories that Flickr can identify but thousands are still in testing.

In addition to this, Flickr lets users tap into advanced search tools for searching by various metadata like date taken or uploaded, minimum size, orientation and more. Users can also filter search results by style or color.

Also, search now shows a unified experience that is, when user perform any search on Flickr, he is first shown a group of their own photos that match his query, followed by a group of photos from the people he follow on the service, and then everyone else's photos are below.Most of the updates are also present on Flickr's updated mobile apps, except for the Magic View. The apps and the desktop website both support simplified sharing.