We all know how popular Flickr is. Hell, it’s turned into the Google of photos. Google’s own photo service, Picasa, is more like the Yahoo of photos. Ironically, Yahoo owns Flickr. It’s all very backwards.
If you’re a card-carrying member of the Flickr Pro army, it’s probably not too much of a stretch to believe that you’re willing to pay for a good desktop solution for managing your Flickr account. flickery — no, I didn’t forget to capitalize that — might be your best option. And even if you’re not signed up into the Pro army, it will work with a free account just fine.
Browsing Flickr on your Mac
It also gives you a lot of options for viewing. You can view your own photostream, your favorites, which you can add and remove, and also check out the latest photos from all your contacts (and their favourites) and groups. The two pane user interface is slick, and gives you access to most of your functions with minimal clicks. Yes, accessing the SA Flickr Desktop Pool was just two clicks away.
You can easily view photos in a beautiful full screen view, and pull up photo details; adding comments to photos as well. In addition, you can also easily download photos you’ve found, or directly add them to iPhoto from within the app. One other cool thing is the share button, which will bring up options to share via email, iChat and Twitter. Just enter your twitter credentials, and a sheet flows down along with the shorturl of that Flickr image ready for tweeting.
You can also run searches, defining them by text, user, type, safety level, and usage licenses. So if you needed WWDC photos taken by David Prager which have been marked as “Restricted”, but are available under a Creative Commons license, you could totally find those. You can then save the search so you always know when there are new shots you can get a hold of. These searches are all saved in flickery’s sidebar.
Uploading to Flickr
Flickery will handle all the basics for you. It’s got a well-designed uploader, which is much nicer than Flickr’s own uploader app. Aside from dragging photos in from the Finder, you can take an iSight photo or create a screenshot of your desktop. From there, you can click the “Edit Photo” button to bring up a window that will let you crop, rotate, and even add effects or adjust color balance and hue.
One thing missing in the upload tool is any iPhoto integration. One would have expected the app to feature the iLife Media browser, but I didn’t find that anywhere. You can find photos through the “Open” dialog box, but I prefer the media browser palette.
A Few Shortcomings
While there are lots of things flickery can do, it does have some UI problems. For instance, to delete searches, you have to right-click all the time; no delete shortcut. The button placement could use a little work too. For instance, the “Add Favourites” button is below the photo, while “Remove from Favourites” button is at the top left, totally out of view. I almost emailed the developer telling them they forgot to add a remove button!
I found that browsing photos was a little rigid. You can’t resize the thumbnails, and neither can you zoom/pan if you open up that photo. The only way to see the full quality image is to download it. Still, you can see that the app is so solid that you can see I’m raising some trivial issues.
The Verdict is Yes
Overall, I really like flickery. If you’re into Flickr enough to pay for it, you’re gonna find a lot of use in this. I found it easier to navigate all my photos and the groups I belong to within flickery than by using Flickr’s site alone. At version 1.1 it’s stable, feature rich, user friendly, and it’ll be even better in the future.
Priced at $20, it’ll run you almost as much as a year’s worth of that Flickr Pro goodness, but you’ll get a lot of control for your dollar. A 15 day full featured trial awaits.
Giving away 3 licenses
We liked the app so much, that we got Eternal Storms to offer 3 licenses for giveaway. We’re giving 1 license to a commenter, 1 license for a tweetback, and 1 license for uploading a desktop to our Flickr Desktop Pool. Standard giveaway rules apply.
Woohoo! Winners are FiZ, Alessandro Burato, and Timothy Griffin. Have fun Flickering.
