Finally flickr

The recent update to flickr has been a long time coming

I’ve always wondered why photo sharing sites have dedicated so much screen space to things that are not photos.

Maybe they had no choice, I thought. Maybe to be a successful online venture they needed to have room for Likes and Comments and geo coding and an endless array of junk that wasn’t the photo itself.

And most of all why were the photos so damned small? SmugMug, flickr, and even the loved by pro photographers, 500px all suffered from the same thing. Photos were big but hardly filled the browser window and had to sit next to little drips and drops of meta data. Imagine an art gallery with a comment stream or a family photo album where guests could add stickers to the photos at will.

Even 500px has way too much stuff around my photos

Many times I looked at handcrafted photoblogs where the author had gone out of his way to show their work big and with minimal navigation chrome. I drooled over Big Picture and it’s clones. I even imagined myself writing the perfect photo blog template.

Of course I never did. And now, thanks to flickr, I never will.

The new flickr layout is what it should have been from the beginning. It’s. All. Photos.

My photostream is truly that. Big, beautiful photos that I can flip through with keyboard shortcuts or on my iPhone.

Bravo flickr. Bravo Yahoo. And thank you.