Flickr Photo Sessions - Great!

Yesterday Flickr finally launched their Android app. This two years after launching their iPhone app. Yay! I have been looking for this app for ages and it is actually a really nice app. It allows you to do all of the standard stuff, I.e. upload photos and look at yours and your contacts photos. It also has access to filters to allow you to add different filter settings to your photo before upload. This is not a real selling point for me but for Instagram fans it might work. The filters don't have quite as many options as are available within Instagram, but if they are used, I could see future versions adding to the selection of effects you can add to your photo prior to upload.

I actually think the viewing of your contacts photos feature is far better in the android app than that which is available in the iPhone app. On Android you can see a selection of photos that each of your contacts has uploaded on a single screen. In the iPhone app you can only see photos that have been uploaded recently and you cannot see the relevant contact who uploaded the image until you click through. Might not sound like a big issue? When you are on a mobile network and it takes a good while to actually download an image to find out who the contact is it becomes one ;-)

So aside for the fact that finally having an Android app for Flickr is great, Flickr also announced the Flickr Photo Session product. More about this product here. This is really a fantastic Flickr feature and allows the user to share a Flickr set in real time with their friends. There is a chat window to allow your friends to comment on your photos, but best of all there are drawing tools that allow you to draw on the photos you are sharing. This can be seen on the title image of this blog.


Starting a photo session is simple. Open one of your sets and from the sharing menu select start session. Then you can share the link specified in the session settings with your friends so they can access the content. the photo below shows this.




Seriously I really love collaboration tool. I cannot wait to try it out in anger. Combining this feature with voice will be killer! OK for now you would have to do this with a Skype session on the side, but who knows with two product launches in a day, maybe there might be life in the old Flickr yet! I certainly hope so!

Well done Flickr folks. this is the beginning of a great innovation. I hope you continue to push updates to this and many other features!

Thanks

cheers

m

ADDITION: Honestly I cannot help myself. Give me the tools to add a smile and some hair and I cannot but help abuse the power! :-)