Flickr Ventures Into Instagram’s Territory With Mobile Redesign

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Screen Shot 2014-04-17 at 6.43.21 PM

Flickr’s redesigned mobile apps, which are out today, look very much Instagram. And I think it’s safe to say that the design decision was intentional. The question now is whether Flickr can set itself apart with its pro-friendly features and more free cloud storage than most know what to do with.

In the new Flickr iOS app, the dual-column view has been replaced with an easily scrollable timeline that features one image at a time. You can fave, comment, or share an image you come across in the timeline as you go. Feed, camera, and profile buttons are at the bottom of the app.

The in-app camera lets you apply 14 live filters and tweak things like color balance. In today’s update, the ability to shoot up to 30 seconds of video and share it has been added. That’s twice as long as Instagram, and it looks like Flickr doesn’t compress video as badly.

So yes, the app’s general layout and camera features are very much like Instagram, but Flickr has some good stuff that distinguishes it from Facebook’s photo juggernaut.

Metadata is a big deal on Flickr because the service is designed to host images from expensive DLSRs down to phone cameras. Each photo’s metadata shows where it was taken, which camera and lens were used, tags, and more. It’s all laid out very nicely too.

A new Auto Sync feature works like Dropbox in that it can automatically upload everything from your iPhone’s Camera Roll to Flickr in full resolution.

And last but not least: 1TB of storage. Flickr gives an insane amount of free storage to its free users that can be used for hi-res photos and videos. That’s hard to beat no matter what you think of Flickr has a social network. And with this latest update, Flickr proves that it cares just as much about being a place to share as a place to store photos.

Flickr 3.0 is available now in the App Store.

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