Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo owned Flickr continues to attract a vast community of more than 85 million devotees and photo enthusiasts each month around the world. The popular photo-sharing site Flickr on Wednesday has rolled out a dramatic makeover to the layout of its site’s photo display page, by transforming the default picture size larger, revamping the navigation scheme and consolidating capabilities and information under fewer menus and sections.
The new page, true to Flickr’s legacy, displays photos gorgeously. Both photo pages and the site’s home page have been stretched out to accommodate users with wider screens, as well as to put more of an emphasis on what users have uploaded, including the inclusion of photo locations, and adding a “low light” setting.
Photos are now displayed in a bigger 640 pixel width, instead of the previous 500, which makes the photo page around 30 percent wider. The Yahoo-owned site also moved a few things around on the page – putting the photo title closer to the description, and adding more information about the picture, including its owner, when it was taken, what camera they used, and the photo location.
Location information is prominently displayed on the right hand side of the new Flickr page, specifying precisely where the photo was taken.
“We have been eager to create a better showcase for your photos for some time,” Flickr said in a statement. “Your photos — everyday captures and extraordinary sightings, local scenes and exotic moments — are central to our DNA because they reflect your individual stories. With the new photo experience, you can discover, share and organize your visual stories in a new and improved way.”
Among the other changes, Yahoo has also enhanced the navigation controls and rewritten the underlying JavaScript, so pages load faster and users can click through images like they are flipping pages in their family album.
“We always had location information and we always considered it to be important, but we are just now getting around to making that more prominent,” said Matthew Rothenberg, head of products at Flickr.
Photo titles have been moved closer to the description. “Photos represent a lot of information about the moment of capture — what, who, when, how and where. We have shifted the photo title closer to the description to surface the ‘what’ better,” says Flickr’s Josh Nguyen. “The photo owner, dates taken, camera, and location of the photo are all within easy reach to the right of the image. The clustering of story elements has sparked many serendipitous discoveries around FlickrHQ — we hope you’ll find them a useful way to dig deeper into photos too.”
Rothenberg stated the aim was not necessarily to position Flickr as an alternative to other check-in services like Foursquare, but to “narrate the entire story” of the photo, and help Flickr integrate better with other location-based and real-time services.
The all-encompassing goal of the changes is to enhance the photo-sharing experience and approximate it as much as possible to the real-life situation of showing friends or family one’s freshest pictures in person, said Tara Kirchner, head of marketing at Flickr.
“We are creating a bigger, faster and more lifelike experience for people to share and view photos on Flickr,” she said.
Flickr asserts that these are just some minor changes it has made, and the latest appearance of these photo pages will be rolled out to all users over the coming weeks. However, signed-in members can preview the new page starting today. After this beta concludes, the company will be pushing out the design to all users, with no way of going back. For a more in-depth look at the new features, be sure to check out the slideshow below.
Flickr’s new look (Screenshots)