Flickr Mobile

  Flickr Mobile  This isn’t new but I just discovered it. Flickr has a mobile site! It’s a beta and pretty basic but fun if you have a Flickr account or know someone who does.

There’s no need to login to use most of the features of the site. You can see the latest public photos posted to Flickr – which amounts to a constantly changing random assortment of images – most of them unfortunately not very interesting. If you have someone’s Flickr user id you can view their public photos, in order from newest to oldest. Of course, you can do this with your own photos as well. The photos appear as 100px wide images, clicking on a photo expands it to 240px. There doesn’t seem to be any browser detection, all browsers get the same size images.

You can login to Flickr Mobile but – and this is a big but – only if you have an old Flicker.com account. You have a Flicker.com account if you joined Flickr before Aug. 15, 2005 and you haven’t switched from using your Flickr login to your Yahoo login. Flickr calls switching to the the Yahoo login “upgrading” although it doesn’t actually give you any added features or benefits and removes the ability to login to Flickr Mobile – so don’t do it! Flickr promises to fix this soon.

If you are logged in you can upload pictures directly from your phone’s memory to Flickr. For this to work your phone must support the type='file' attribute of the <input> tag. Not many phones support this attribute yet but recent Nokia Series 40 and Series 60 devices do as well as possibly some phones with version 6.2 or later of the Openwave browser. You can also upload photos to Flickr via email.  Flickr Mobile  

My take on Flickr mobile is that it’s somewhat half-baked. Where is the option to search or view Flickr photos by tag? That’s the single best feature of Flickr and it’s missing from the mobile edition. Another much needed enhancement is the ability to view your photos by album – currently all you albums are combined into a single long photo stream. Hopefully, Flickr – which is now owned by Yahoo – the most mobile aware of the big web portals – can develop the mobile version into something really powerful and compelling

Even in it’s current state, Flickr Mobile is useful. I can see using it myself to show off my photos to friends and co-workers. As long as you have an unlimited data plan, Flickr mobile is a handy way to have an album of hundreds of photos in your phone without tying up scarce phone memory.

Flickr Mobile: xhtml-mp
Content: *** Usability: ***

5 thoughts on “Flickr Mobile

  1. Thanks for the tip, Martin.

    Scott, your are definitely onto something the “physical world connection” concept. Using phones to read 2-D codes to go to a website, load a v-card, etc. is soon going to be huge.

    Dennis

  2. The first step is to upload photos to Flickr, the next application is use that same database as a form of a hyperlink.

    That picture of the Eiffel Tower, or Coke logo can be clicked on (read in the Flickr database) and get more information.

    Here’s how Yahoo and Flickr create a mobile marketing powerhouse

  3. I am one of those with a Yahoo login account and thus as you describe logging in on the mobile site is not possible. But there’s a workaround: First go to http://www.flickr.com (without the /mob) and log into the “standard” flickr site. Make sure you hit the “rembember this computer” or “stay loged in” before you hit the log in button. Once done go to http://www.flickr.com/mob and you are in :-) As the login is persistent it still works when you start the browser again.

    I like the picture quality of the scaled down images, good enough for viewing on the mobile!

    Martin

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