Fluidr: The Quest to Improve Flickr :: PYKtures Spotlights

Here's the link to Fluidr right away. Flickr users log in on the upper right!
And here's the link to my Fluidr. teehee ^^
And here's the link to Marie's Fluidr. She's the one that showed me that awesome way to make my Flickr look hotter!

I love Flickr. It stores and protects all my original jpg shots very well and the pro account gives me unlimited uploads for a mere 40$CAN per year. But that solid website can't afford to evolve at the speed of Facebook.


When viewing pictures, Facebook uses the AJAX programming philosophy to specifically load the next shot without reloading the whole page or just load the specific content you want to see or use. With Flickr, you need to RELOAD THE WHOLE PAGE to look at the next picture or even post a comment. Very time consuming, it becomes a frustration in the long run.

While Flickr displays smaller sized shots by default (500 pixels), the pictures keep their original colors. The gap between Flickr photo quality and Facebook quality was once HUGE. Before, this reason alone motivated most of us to use Flickr pro account (or other photoblogging websites) as our main photo account. Believe it or not but my friend once made 4x6 prints of Facebook shots and they look pretty darn good. Now that Facebook is giving users the means to keep decent 720 pixels versions of their pictures, I believe people will lose interest in what Flickr has become: great image quality storage with an ass-shitty interface.

Being the number one photo hosting site out of Facebook, Flickr should have gained the possibilities to evolve right?

It's not like they didn't try to make it better by:

• Releasing an simple yet horrible looking external photo uploader
• Improving their flash-based slideshow program, even making it embeddable to blogs and websites
• Flickr Organizr is a decent AJAX-powered way yet hyper buggy way to organise pictures.
• Improving their search engine with AJAX and making the results "slideshowable"

But those things simply didn't improve the way Flickr users navigate from picture to picture. This annoys me a lot and I'm sure I'm not the only one. One good thing Flickr did was to release an API module for the community to develop applications to improve the life of the Flickr user.

The current hot stuff around are:

• Decluttr: it's the new way to show Larger version of the 500 pixels shots. It's better and much simpler than Big Huge Labs's offering. All you need to do is to put www.decluttr.com/(Flickr picture ID). Here's an examplr of a shot I put in Decluttr. Your flickr picture ID is found in your usual Flickr URL: "www.flickr.com/photos/your_username/YOUR_PICTURE_ID"
  
• Flickriver: it's the new way to browse from picture to picture. Pictures stream continuously as you scroll down the page. To use Flickriver, just add "iver" next to Flickr and see. Look at my Flickriver.
  
• TheGOOD Uploadr: an Adobe Air and better way to upload pictures to Flickr as it offers a lot more options than the normal uploader.
• Big Huge Labs: a nice set of stuff to play around with Flickr pictures.

Now what if Decluttr and Flickriver became one? Would that make Flickr picture to picture navigation a bit more fluid? HERE COMES FLUIDR! Seriously, the dark interface is hot, slick and a lot more dynamic than Flickr. It has the scroll down features of Flickriver and the enlargement features of Decluttr.

Here are some comparisons

Photostream

Sets

View Larger

Normal image view

I just wish now that Flickr actually makes a radical change of look just like Facebook does. Come on!

Here's the link to Fluidr again. Flickr users log in on the upper right!