Review: new official Flickr app is both exciting and disappointing

So purdy...

Since the dawn of time (well, the dawn of the App Store at least), iPhone owners have been craving a Flickr app. We’ve reviewed what we consider to be the best of the third party offerings, and the Flickr Web App has gone some way toward filling that gaping hole where an official app should have been, but today – seemingly out of nowhere – Yahoo! have released an official Flickr app. But should the likes of Mobile Fotos be quaking in their boots?

It has to be said, the official Flickr app makes a great first impression. Upon launch (screenshot in the header), you’re presented with a simple, uncluttered and clean interface with the Flickr logo atop a very slick slideshow of public photos all sweeping effortlessly across your screen in gorgeous pan-and-zoom-o-vision, similar to the effect you get on your iPhoto screensaver on your Mac (and that was sadly missing from the built-in stock Photos app). This, you say to yourself, is gonna be good.

At the bottom of the screen are three simple buttons – ‘Recent’, ‘You’, and ‘Contacts’. Hitting any of these three the first time will momentarily take you out of the app and into Safari, where you will be required to login to your Flickr account and authorise the app to access your account. Once authorised, Safari automatically closes and the Flickr app opens back up.

Sets index

But here’s where the experience soon begins to change from “Ooooooh” to “Oh”. Going into ‘You’, you are greeted with your photostream, as you might expect. At the top of your Photostream there are links to Sets and Favourites. But once you select a photo to load, the photo displays re-sized to fit your iPhone screen and there are options to email the photo or make a comment, but that’s it. There is no pinch-to-zoom or double-tap to zoom, no ability to assign to a contact or download to your Photos app, no ability to download a larger version of the photo to pan around, no taking advantage of GPS to find photos that were taken near your current location even. These are all basic operations that we’ve come to expect from the iPhone and even the Flickr Web App can manage many of them, so their absence here is frankly inexcusable.

OK... Now what?

Furthermore, all those wonderful public images that were once gracefully sliding across the intro screen are replaced with random photos from any and all of your contacts. So, gone are the professional-grade macro-lens flowers and stunning landscapes, and in their place poorly lit snaps of your mate’s Uncle Derek passed out on the sofa last Christmas. To top it off… you can’t stop this from happening, which means that when you’re out of wifi coverage and using mobile broadband, your precious data allowance is whittling away before your very eyes on photos you’d probably rather not see.

The "Privacy" Screen that requires a pinch of salt

Now if there’s one particular area where this app really should stand head-and-shoulders above the competition, it’s with uploading photos, right? Well, again, prepare for disappointment. To test the app I snapped my laptop keyboard and marked it as ‘private’ so that it didn’t appear for any of my contacts. When the photo was done uploading, I went to Flickr on my laptop and opened up the image. Although I had chosen ‘Private’ and not ‘Friends and Family’, the photo showed as available to friends and family. I took a second shot and uploaded it to make sure I hadn’t hit the wrong option, but it did the same thing. That’s a pretty serious mistake – so if you like to take pictures of you and your loved one playing volleyball down at the local naturist camp – be warned and think twice before uploading via the Flickr app. Your parents may never be able to look you in the eye again!

And that’s not the end of it. You know that precious extra megapixel you paid for when you chose your iPhone 3GS? Well, Flickr doesn’t think much of your investment as it doesn’t even upload your photos in their original resolution. Full sized photos taken with an iPhone 3GS (portrait) are 2048 x 1536 – 3.14 megapixels. However, photos uploaded via the Flickr app end up 1152 x 1536 or just 1.77 megapixels. Not good enough.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this app – heaven knows, I really want to be! But there is so little in terms of features to be excited about and so much that is just unforgiveably wrong to be concerned about that I can barely muster a single all-positive paragraph! Let’s hope that future updates will address the issues and lack of any real features, but until then I would recommend sticking with the Flickr Web App or Mobile Fotos. Yes, that’s right I am actually recommending a paid-for third party offering over a free, official app. Are you listening out there, Yahoo!? No, probably not.