A new Flickr application for iPhone was recently launched by Yahoo! Mobile. I had a try on my colleague’s iPhone, and believe it, this is the first time I touched and used the iPhone 3G.
iPhone’s large screen makes the viewing experience great. Be it viewing my own Flickr account images or others, images are first presented in thumbnail view, then when selected, I will get the full-screen view. Flicking my fingers left or right allows me to view the next photos quickly. The iPhone screen displays the Flickr photos nicely, and in most cases, loads quite fast.
I can also use the iPhone camera to take a snapshot and upload. There is a button to go into camera mode, and after the shot is taken, it will bring to the upload page for me to select the keyword tags and privacy. The only drawback is that the iPhone 3G’s camera quality is not the best in the market, so it’s most likely I will upload the post-processed photos in the iPhone rather than direct from camera. Nevertheless it’s a good feature for on-the-go photojournalism. The uploaded images are only in 450×600 pixels, not sure if I can actually set the upload image to a higher resolution.
Logging in is also seamless. It uses Safari browser to authenticate, and so if you already had a Yahoo login saved in the browser, it will auto recognise and log you in. In my case, I was using my colleague’s iPhone, so I had to log-out and login with my own account.
If you are not a Flickr user, sign up for a free account that comes with limited storage space, although it’s not likely for you to run out of space if the uploaded images are resized to 450×600 pixels. Still, you should, like me, pay US$24.95 for 1 year and get a whole lot of features:
- Unlimited photo uploads (20MB per photo)
- Manage and group your photos into sets and collections. You can add the same photo to multiple sets, unlike folder methods.
- Unlimited video uploads (90 seconds max, 500MB per video)
- The ability to show HD Video
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Archiving of high-resolution original images
- The ability to replace a photo (ed: I only just found out they actually had this feature!!)
- Post any of your photos or videos in up to 60 group pools
- Ad-free browsing and sharing
- View count and referrer statistics
The Flickr application for iPhone is free, and it allows user to upload, tag, share photos and videos conveniently.
Visit http://sg.mobile.yahoo.com/flickr for download instructions to your iPhone.