After letting its mobile app languish for several years, Flickr is getting regular, major updates of late. This time around, Flickr 3.0 for iPhone gets a complete interface overhaul. It also puts the Yahoo-backed app in the ring with Vine, Instagram, and other video-sharing apps, with its newfound ability to shoot videos. The previous release did just about everything you could want photo-function-wise, but the interface still looked stodgy. That changes with the release of Flickr 3 for iPhone, which sports a more hip, iOS 7-style interface.
Flickr has long had more flexibility than Instagram in both social and photo-centric ways: For example, you could zoom to see higher resolution—how many of us have been frustrated when trying to "unpinch" an Instagram photo? In fact, Flickr's preservation of each photo's full, original resolution is one reason I far prefer it to photos uploaded to Facebook. Flickr's filter and image-editing tools also go beyond what you get in Instagram, as do its social features.
Setup/Signup
In the iTunes App Store, the same new Flickr app states both iPhone and iPad are supported, though the app only appears in the iPhone section. Unfortunately, on the iPad, the app is formatted with the small iPhone-size image; you can hit the 2x button to fill most of the screen. Of course, you could just go to the full Web version in Safari on the iPad. I tested the app on my trusty iPhone 5( at Amazon).
On first run of the app, you're greeted by a simple three-page overview of what it can do. Then you hit the Get Started button. At this point you'll have to sign in to a Yahoo! account. If you don't have an account for Flickr, you can sign up with your Facebook or Google account. Once you're signed in, the Find Friends page offers to connect you to your Facebook, Twitter, or iPhone contacts who use Flickr.
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Next comes Auto Sync setup. With Auto Sync on, any photos you shoot with your iPhone camera are automatically uploaded to Flickr—as private images that only you can see, in case you were worried. Facebook, too offers auto-syncing, but as I mentioned, you have to live with inferior image quality if you go that route. Remember, Flickr gives you a whole terabyte for free—the best cloud storage deal on the planet. If you want videos auto-uploaded, too, though, check out OneDrive. Both Flickr and OneDrive are far cheaper and more capacious than iCloud, which maxes out at 55GB for $100 per year. Dropbox also can auto-upload photos and videos, but you only get 2GB free storage with that service, and extra space is pricey, at $10 a month for 100GB.
New Interface
The Flickr 3.0 app interface looks a lot like the service's redesigned website—and that's a good thing. Instead of the older style of separate, white-bordered panels, you now see a justified view with a dark background that gives the images the limelight. With this update, Flickr also addressed a concern I'd previously raised, now including a prominent search box at the top lets you find photos based on tags, users, or groups. Groups are one of Flickr's really strong points, and something with no equivalent in competitors like Instagram or SmugMug.
Shooting with Flickr
Unlike Instagram, the Flickr app lets you see live filter effects while you're shooting. It also lets you switch between front and back cameras and turn flash on and off. But you don't get much in the way of shooting goodies like you do with Camera+—separate focus and exposure points, and timer shooting, to name a couple.
Flickr has a truly impressive set of photo-editing tools for after you've taken the shot. Even though you can shoot with a filter active as mentioned above, you can actually change a photo's filter after the fact, and adjustments to the filters are also at your disposal. You can adjust the vignette (darkened edges), tilt-shift (selective focus in linear or circular areas of the image), and apply or remove aging and color-burst effects.
Beyond these special effects, you can do a whole lot of standard image editing if you tap the … button, including brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure, and white balance. But that's not all, folks! If you don't want to mess with any of that, there's an auto-adjusting magic wand control that does a respectable job of improving photos.
If you prefer precision, the Flickr app includes a control that blew me away: an adjustable histogram. This is a feature not even found in the supposedly pro-level Lightroom for iPad, which only includes a static histogram. One thing neither app includes, however, is noise reduction. That you can get in Photoshop Express, but only as an in-app purchase. A final adjustment on this page is a sharpness slider, which works just as you'd expect.
Cropping, leveling, and rotation are nicely handled as well: there's even a protractor control for leveling, and you can choose from among four standard aspect ratios, including Instagram's famous 1 by 1.
Video
As with shooting still photos, you can see the effect filters in action while you shoot video in Flickr, but you can't change the filter after shooting video, as you can with still photos. Like Vine and Instagram, you can shoot video in segments, by pressing and releasing the Record buttons repeatedly. With Flickr's video-shooting feature, you can delete the last segment you shot, but you can't remove any other segment in the video sequence, as you can in Instagram and Vine.
Video recording in the Flickr app is limited to 30 seconds, which feels like an eternity compared with 6 seconds for Vine and 15 seconds for Instagram. I expect, however, that this feature won't turn Flickr into the social video kingpin that Twitter's Vine is; the addition of video to Instagram didn't do it for that app, either. The Flickr website used to allow a generous 90 seconds of video, but recently upped it to 3 minutes.
Sharing
After shooting, you can directly share to (of course) Flickr itself, where you can choose whether the photo should be for your eyes only, for those of friends, family, or the public at large. But you can also share directly to Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. A geo-tagging location button proposes a list of local establishments, similar to checking in on Foursquare or Facebook. You can choose which album you want to share to on Facebook and Flickr, but you can't share directly to an individual or to a Flickr group till after the photo's been uploaded.
Once a photo's uploaded to your Flickr photo stream, you can then share it to even more places—email, and iMessage, but not through AirDrop or Airplay. Very few apps use the AirDrop sharing capability, which lets you transfer files directly to a nearby iPhone 5 or iPad Air user, so maybe this isn't an overly large concern. Nevertheless, it's a cool feature—one I wish more apps would offer.
Exploring the Flickr Universe of Images
I already mentioned the new, big search bar lets you find photos based on tags, users, and groups. There's also a compass button that shows you the "Explore" photos—the top images on the site based on "interestingness." There are some truly gorgeous images in there, but in past years they tended more towards artsiness. Nowadays, with a larger Flickr audience, perhaps thanks to the free 1TB of storage, they tend towards sunsets on the beach, cute kids, and traditionally pretty landscapes.
Conclusion
Flickr has long had many advantages over Instagram from both photography and community standpoints. With Flickr, you can view and upload full resolution images with support for that iPhone pinch-to-zoom that we've come to know and love. Flickr also offers far more in the way of photo adjustments. And Flickr has long offered everything in Instagram and more for community and sharing—favoriting, commenting, following, tagging, and very active and specific-interest groups for every topic under the sun. Nor is the size of Flickr's audience anything to spit at.
But Instagram had better social chops when it first came out, and has built massive community and cachet. It's always made fancying up otherwise pedestrian images extremely simple for laypersons. The updated interface design in this new Flickr app is also dead-simple to use, too, but whether any of this is enough to revive Yahoo's photo editing and sharing service, only time will tell. Clearly, we like it a lot here at PCMag. Flickr is our Editors' Choice for photo-sharing apps on the iPhone.
Flickr is a great option for photo sharing and backup. The latest update makes for an even more-compelling iPhone experience, now with video capabilities.
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