Flickr copies Instagram; brings new design, HD video and image search

New Delhi: Yahoo-owned Flickr has received its most dramatic makeover, by completely overhauling with a total redesign of the apps for iOS and Android that make it a more direct competitor to Instagram and other photo-sharing services. The revamped version takes the easy-capture and sharing features of Instagram and combines it with the backup of Dropbox and Google+. The result is a faster and fluid app with a new focus on interaction. Flickr now displays photos in an easy to navigate grid instead of the previous timeline-style design. The new layout allows users to browse through hundreds of images effortlessly. The app gently crops non-square photos in the feed, but tapping reveals them at their full dimensions. The updated app brings a flat design that encompasses borderless buttons, heavy use of transparencies, and layered graphical effects. For instance, the app's live filters, which can be previewed before and after taking a picture, now show up on floating cards to add to the UI's depth.The app brings quick sharing and browsing. Other features in Flickr 3.0 include Auto Sync feature, which allows users to upload original quality images from the smartphone directly to the Flickr account. The updated app also offers batch-editing, which lets users to organise Flickr images and videos into albums or edit privacy settings, along with delete option. In addition, Flickr 3.0 comes with new search feature which shows search results based on groups, people, time, date and location.Users can now record 30 seconds of HD video on iPhone and use the same live filters available with photos. Flickr has also introduced new editing tools such as levels, crop, colour balance, contrast, saturation and live filters (total of 14 live filters for iOS) for HD video editing to its iOS app.Last year Yahoo upgraded Flickr storage to 1TB for all the Flickr users permanently. The latest update finally brings Auto Sync feature that lets you upload all the images and video automatically to your account privately, so that you can share them easily.Flickr 3.0 now comes with People tags which lets users to tag friends in image titles and comments by using @ sign; new hashtag feature to trigger search results and new privacy indicator, which now shows an image marked as public or private by the user.“Flickr understands the geo-locations and time of your photos, can also detect the color, and often who's in them and what they are about,” the company noted in a blog. “And we do all this with lightning fast speed”.Though the iOS and Android versions are similar, they are not identical. On iOS, the navigation controls are on the bottom of the app, as they are on Instagram; on Android, they're at the top. Flickr debuted ten years ago and was the first major online community to store, organize, tag, and share digital photos.Earlier, Instagram announced it crossed 200 million users and also revealed that it has started testing integration with Facebook Places for location tagging (alongside Foursquare data which it already uses).