Yahoo's Flickr Makeover Come to Have Instagram
Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO [FREE Stock Trend Analysis]) definitely wants in on the popular - and potentially lucrative - photo sharing social media action. New changes the company just made to Flickr with version 3.0 for iOS and Android.
Online, April 23, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Were designed to do the trick.Changes include 14 different live photo filters, including the ability to apply the filters to up to 30 seconds of video. Also added, advanced editing capabilities, intelligent search algorithms and several new social media elements.
With a hefty one terabyte of storage, Flickr's AutoSync feature has plenty of room to back up photos instantly and in their original quality. The intelligent search feature allows for searching by month, year, place or even object.
Photos can be shared with Tumblr, Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) and Facebook (NASDAQ: FB).
The Flickr upgrade was all part of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's push to overhaul the entire Flickr lineup. The goal, of course, was to create an app that could directly and effectively compete with Facebook's Instagram.
In its new incarnation, Flickr combines the ease-of-use and sharing features of Instagram with hassle-free backup. The app's faster feed was also seen as a major improvement. The ability to tap a button on each photo to view metadata, including the camera the photo was taken with, was viewed as an important feature as well.
Bernardo Hernández, who took over Flickr in August of last year, said the company has continued to try to achieve the same goals it had when Flickr was first launched. Those goals include organizing photos, making them look good and helping users share them with a broad community.
Hernández said, "The essence is the same. But now, instead of a few hundred pictures a year, they take thousands of pictures a year. And instead of one camera, they have multiple devices."
Since 2004, 100 million people have uploaded more than 10 billion photos to Flickr. The company clearly has history and followers. Mayer, Hernandez and company hope the redesign will give those users - and many new ones to come - plenty of reason to stick around and use the product.
With the addition of filters and other Instagram-like features, some will likely cry "copycat," but Flickr's new unique search feature stands alone.
The ability to search by date or location is impressive enough, but "object search" which allow to hunt down photos containing a "car" or "tree" or some other item rises, according to Venturebeat, almost to the "creepy" level.