Las Vegas — In an interesting turn of events here at CES, online photo sharing site Flickr has announced that Yahoo is rolling out a native Flickr app for Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 later this month that adopts Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, which promises better navigation, gallery browsing and support to share photos over social networks .
While Flickr already supports an iOS app for Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, as well as Android 2.2 Froyo OS based devices already have the mobile browser-based photos upload feature, but the new Windows 7 apps lends itself beautifully to Microsoft’s mobile OS and look considerably slicker and offer a much better interface than what is available on the iOS app.
However, the new application would not be available until the end of January, but once it is released, you would not have to depend on any other third party applications or services to upload your photo to Flickr, you can check out the video below for a teaser.
Furthermore, the app takes things a step further on the tablet, offering an innovative browsing mode for viewing or discovering groups of photos. The photo service takes full advantage of Windows 7’s side-scrolling interface, offering a smooth transition that takes you from recent content to tagged photos to a screen that lets you explore the larger Flickr library.
Moreover, clicking on any image displays a pop-up screen that offers the full array of features: you can read and add comments, as well as view location info if available. Photos with GPS tags can also be viewed on a map that will show others Flickr user pics nearby. There is also a cool faded-out copy of each photo as the background for each individual pic page.
Besides, the new Flickr for Windows 7 apps utilizes Windows Azure, Microsoft’s penetration into cloud-based software, behind the scenes. It is an interesting choice of platform considering Flickr is already, well, in the cloud.
Marcus Spiering, Flickr’s mobile product manager at Yahoo, said in a statement that “Azure empowered us to build an app quickly and do it with quality.”
Flickr always offered an option to share and put up photos on Flickr using the send-via-email functionality. The app links Flickr data with Windows Azure via an API. Adopting Windows Azure, Yahoo is now competent to optimize the images for the Windows 7 environments and on the Windows Phone 7 devices.
For instance, let us consider that a person is running a Flickr app on a Windows 7 tablet device and decides to view one of their albums. The app then connects with Windows Azure, which calculates the context for the way the image should be viewed on the device.
Similar to most photo apps, Flickr also has an built-in app uploader for easy image uploads on the go. The mobile apps make it faster to upload and share the photos from the phone directly. For Windows 7 based tablets and Windows Phone 7 phones, the Flickr App promises rich navigation features and will let users browse their photos on the devices. The app will also allow users to share the images via email, Twitter or Facebook and upload it there from the device itself.
“You can view your Flickr photos in stunning high-resolution display, browse through photostreams, sets and more with rich navigational features, share directly via email, Twitter, Facebook and upload directly from your device. You can also seamlessly transition from your Windows Phone 7 to Windows 7 tablet and back again without ever losing your place,” Flickr wrote in a blog post.
“Flickr is synonymous with the cloud,” said Spiering. “We store the image data, which is massive. What we do not have is a synchronized, connected device experience.”
The native Flickr app, developed by Yahoo on .Net technology, clearly exhibits how multiple cloud platforms can be combined to provide experiences for the user across multiple devices. Whatever the case, Flickr for Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 is a slick looking app and users are anticipating to see the iOS version get a similar makeover. Curiously, there is still no official Flickr app for Android.
Flickr for Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 is free and will be available to users at the end of this month.
As an interesting side note, in conjunction with the announcement, Flickr is also giving away nine Dell Inspiron Duo tablets equipped with Windows 7:
The Flickr application will be available to the general public on January 31st, 2011, but to celebrate this announcement, we will be giving away 9 Dell Inspiron Duo Tablets. * Check out our microsite to enter the giveaway and to be notified when the Flickr Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 applications go live!
Contest is open to U.S residents only. 18 years of age and older. No purchase necessary. See the Official Rules for complete details. Contest ends at midnight on 1/31/2011.
Really, the words do not justify this application, which is why Flickr has also released this demo video.