Flickr Overhauls its Website
The popular image and video hosting website, Flickr, is going through a major change. The company decided to overhaul its website, search and apps (both desktop and mobile versions) in order to make its services easier to use for everyone. This update brings improvements in crucial areas such as uploading, editing, organizing, searching and sharing. As for the new features, Flickr now has auto-tagging and image recognition capabilities.
Let's begin with the updates made to Camera Roll as everything else is connected to this feature. The interface of the application was revamped. The latest update to the Camera Roll makes it easier for the users to view, organize and share their images. For example the application can automatically detect and group pictures based on the date they were uploaded or when they were taken. Furthermore, now you are not only able to easily share any photo by clicking on it, but you can also select and share multiple images at once by drawing a box around all of them with your mouse pointer. Lastly, you can also batch edit the metadata and privacy settings for all the pictures that you have selected.
The new Magic View feature is also a very important addition as it allows the service to recognize the content of your pictures (image recognition technology) and auto-tag them accordingly. At the moment there are 60 different tags used by the service, but the number will probably grow larger in time. What's really cool is that although this technology is not perfect, it is adaptive so if you correct one of its mistakes it will learn from it and never repeat it again.
Another thing to check out is the new versions of desktop (Windows and Mac) as well as mobile apps for the service. The desktop version allows the users to upload photos from hard-disks, SD cards, external hard drives, etc., then automatically dedupes and syncs them across all your devices. Furthermore, all the items you upload are automatically marked as private until you change the respective setting. An additional advantage is that all the apps allow you to effortlessly set expiration dates in case you don't want your pictures to stay shared indefinitely.
The search has been unified and the algorithms have been drastically improved. For example, you can now search by metadata, tags and the technology even understands word combinations (if you search for apple pie you will no longer get bunch of images of apples). Moreover, you can also filter the results by color and style.
Source: TechCrunch
