Filed under: Software, Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store, First Look, App Review
Yahoo! A first look at the official Flickr iPhone app
At long last, the official Flickr iPhone app is in the App Store. This free app allows Flickr users to upload their iPhone photographs to their Flickr accounts as well as view photostreams that have been created by themselves and others. The app has the following features:- Shoot, upload and share photos and videos
- Geo-tag photos or add to a set
- View photos by set and tag
- View photos from friends and family
- Search and view photos by contact
- Make comments on photos
- Search by subject, people or places
Flickr does the same thing for the photo date -- if you wait a few days to upload a photo, it marks it with the upload date, not the date that the photo was actually taken. In addition, the Recent button is supposed to show recent activity and uploads, but even after 30 minutes it still didn't show that I had uploaded several photos.
I'd also like to see the app offer the ability to look for photos taken near your current location. While this is a long-awaited addition to the App Store, the app doesn't appear to be very well thought out or executed. At least it's a first release, so we can expect upgrades in functionality down the road.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Martin said 12:39PM on 9-08-2009
On the bright side, the m.flickr.com web version still works in awesome fashion.
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Tomahawk said 7:02PM on 9-08-2009
I actually hate m.flickr.com for one simple reason...it won't let me ZOOM in on any photos.
Martin said 7:05PM on 9-08-2009
Yeah, that can be a downside. Fortunately for me the only time I use flickr is for cursory glances at landscapes or vistas, etc.
Valid point though!
Joanna D said 12:45PM on 9-08-2009
"If you try to add a geotag to a picture that's already in your photo library, the Flickr app adds your current location -- not the location where the photo was actually taken."
Blaming the Flickr application for this is ridiculous, and yet another example of the lax journalism here of late. How can anyone possibly expect the application to invent the geotag when it wasn't added to the photo when it was taken? The phone does not know where it was taken, so why would this app?
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jgenzuk said 12:58PM on 9-08-2009
Photos taken on the phone actually do geo-tag themselves, as is evident when you upload it to iPhoto. That said, I'm sure this is something that will be fixed in the future and probably just requires some cooperation between Apple and Yahoo.. Of course, that in itself might be a problem, but I digress..
srimlinger said 12:58PM on 9-08-2009
Silly Joanna:
Not lax journalism. Not at all. This is a missing feature which seems to have been overlooked by the Flickr team.
Geotagging is something you can do on Flickr's site, so why not in the app? All you need is to have it talk to your map on the phone and peg it there.
This is an iPhone App, so having it consider the location metadata would have been nice. Perhaps you didn't realize iPhones actually DO know where the photo was taken.
Sounds more like lax commenting, if you ask me. And yes, I'm matching the negativity you placed in your comment with negativity back to you. Please think this through in the future.
Liam said 1:00PM on 9-08-2009
Aren't iPhone snaps tagged with meta data like place (if your location services are on) and date? At least my iPhoto seems to recognise them when imported off the phone.
Jason Martin said 2:33PM on 9-08-2009
No, this is a missing feature. For instance, I use a multitude of apps to modify and manipulate my iPhone photos. Sometimes the geotag information gets lost in doing that. While that may not be Flickr's problem, it would be much easier if they gave you the option of either tagging it with your current location OR allowing you to manually enter a different location. That's the missing feature.
Not lax journalism.
PSM said 3:25PM on 9-08-2009
Definitely a lax commenter. The Flickr app Mobile Fotos is very full-featured and uploads photos using the geotag from the place they were taken, not where they were uploaded. This alone gives me no reason to even look at the official app, if it can't duplicate this feature. I highly recommend Mobile Fotos, at least until the Flickr app matures.
splat said 6:59PM on 9-08-2009
Why is the blogger without a lot of flickr experience the one reviewing a flickr app? Surely someone at TUAW is a rabid flickr user and would make a better reviewer for this app.
I'm not saying everyone needs to be experienced in every web2.0 site but flickr is extremely popular and it shouldn't be hard to pick the appropriate staff for this.
parisi2274 said 12:56PM on 9-08-2009
I just downloaded the app and I must say it is nice to finally have an "official" flickr app for the iPhone, I have to say I am a little disappointed that it doesn't have some features that are in the 3rd party flickr apps...namely the ability to upload a photo to a group. I used that feature a lot, and would love to see it in a revision to this app!
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gavinovz said 1:02PM on 9-08-2009
Hopefully they will put more skillz into this app.
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Ben said 1:05PM on 9-08-2009
It's funny that the features of the Flickr app are actually more limited in several ways than the Flickr iPhone website, as m.flickr.com can easily show you photos taken nearby. In fact, it's on the first page that loads.
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jackson.myers said 1:07PM on 9-08-2009
I'm a huge Flickr user and I've been waiting a long time for this. Hopefully they will take your advice on the geotagging thing and continue to refine this app in future releases.
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Jonathan said 1:09PM on 9-08-2009
Am I the only one who misses the use of Groups in both the mobile version of the site and, at first glance, the mobile app?
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Bryan Corey said 2:18PM on 9-08-2009
I have been told numerous times by app developers that the metadata stored in the photo such as its original geo-tag and date aren't accessibly via the iPhone APIs to 3rd party devs. If this is true, it's not Flickr's fault and I believe any app that uploads photos after the point of being taken geo-tags them with the current location, not the original. Unless they changed this with the 3.x releases of the OS....
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Ratkat said 3:20PM on 9-08-2009
The iPhone adds the location to the picture (if enabled) when you take a photo, the trouble with the new flickr app is that it actually overrides the existing metadata and replaces it with the upload date and location.
Pixelpipe maintains original metadata inc date and location when uploading to flickr, Koredoko can browse your photos and show the location on a map, so other apps can use the location data.
Hopefully Yahoo will fix it in an update.
Bryan Corey said 7:45PM on 9-09-2009
Per the iPhone Dev site (found on a third party site, however, so not first hand)... "You need the original image data to extract the metadata, and we don't provide API to do that, nor do any of our APIs produce image data with metadata attached." So, as it has been pointed out by other devs, any application using this information is doing so through undocumented APIs, which means it could be pulled, broken, etc at any moment.
FoO said 1:29PM on 9-08-2009
>_< Are any of the flickr apps going to allow multiple image adds? Doing them one at a time makes it feel like 1999. I wish it offered a view of recent events like darkslide does, with groups of images instead of comments. ::shrug:: It has a pretty opening interface though!
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christine said 3:39AM on 9-09-2009
For batch uploads, you could try that FlickIt app
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=304182296&mt=8