A few years ago Flickr completely re-wrote their user interface. Many long time users were furious. I loved it. I thought they improved the site in every way but one. The images used up all of the available screen real estate. Suddenly the main focus of the site was actually viewing images. The only thing wrong was that it was really, really slow. The speed improved dramatically over time. They updated the site a second time without making huge changes. They shuffled some of the screen elements around but kept the focus on the images. Again, I thought the changes were good while seemingly endless Flickr users were ready to burn down the entire United States in protest. I didn’t get it. I still don’t.

There is another new redesign now, and this time I’m less than thrilled. Basically they incorporated Apple’s attempt at redesigning their camera roll. It doesn’t look good for Apple. It also doesn’t look good for Flickr. Fortunately it is not the default view and it seems more of an attempt at organization than display. It’s okay in that sense, but I don’t think it’s necessarily better than the existing Organizr function. The photostream view is still there, and that’s what you see when you click on a user. That’s good.

If the camera roll view becomes the new “thing” I’m going to be pissed. It’s worse than the original Flickr from years ago. Everything is thumbnail sized. Fingers crossed that Flickr sees this as working in conjunction with photostream (which makes sense given the functionality we have now), not as the next generation.

The downside is that it’s the default view for your own user on the iOS app. Urgh.

The upside of the new roll out is what appears to be a standalone upload app and (praise be to the gods of the internets) A STAND ALONE DOWNLOAD APP! FINALLY FINALLY I can back things up using standard functionality instead of some dude’s Linux script! Oh happy day!

Having said that, let’s see how the download app works. It’s supposed to write your files into a zip. Hmmm… we’ll see.

I also did what I always do when Flickr rolls out changes. I went to the suggested user function and followed everyone there. I then reloaded and did it again. Three times. Anything to get people checking into Flickr. I still very much want it to be the biggest thing on the web instead of the after thought it’s become. And I’m not just saying that because I have more than 30,000 pictures on the site. I generally love it. Indeed I do.