It took a while and a few false starts, but Flickr has not only caught up with the leading photo storage and syncing providers; they’ve actually just steamed ahead and left others in the dust – for now – with the release of ambitious new photo organizing and syncing features, as well as an overhauled user interface for its website, apps and desktop software.

Flickr now fully syncs the user’s photos and videos across devices, auto-uploads them from smartphones, features a timeline browsing interface, automatically tags and categorizes photos by image content, and enables users to search for photos and retrieve them thanks to Flickr’s advanced image recognition technology.

Flickr 4.0 makes it easier to dig deeper into the 11billion strong image database
Flickr 4.0 makes it easier to dig deeper into the 11billion strong image database

That’s quite a bit. And all for free with one terabyte of cloud storage. So if I were Apple, Dropbox, Lyve, Mylio, or any other vendor in the photo syncing/storage space, I’d be concerned.

As we discussed last year at Mobile Photo Connect, deep learning-based image recognition technology is a promising approach to solving the consumer photo-organizing problem. All major photo storage and/or syncing vendors have either acquired image recognition startups or are working on building image recognition technology in-house. Few, notably Google+ Photos and Microsoft OneDrive, have already released image recognition features to their end users.

With auto upload, Flickr is striking right they heart of service like dropbox, G+ and Apple…with more free space
With auto upload, Flickr is striking right they heart of service like dropbox, G+ and Apple…with more free space

Flickr, leveraging the expertise brought in-house from several image recognition startup acquisitions, has now joined this exclusive club.

So, going forward what does this mean for Flickr? For eleven years Flickr has been a photo publishing and photo browsing platform focused on the advanced hobbyist. Now, in addition, it has a real chance of becoming a major “any device” consumer photo organizing and storage platform.

Just offering one terabyte of free storage two years ago apparently didn’t do the trick.

Consumers want to be able to find the photos that matter with close to zero effort.

Consumers want any-device access to their photos with close to zero effort.

Consumers want photo backup with close to zero effort.

Flickr is now offering all of that. Probably not all perfect yet, but they’re certainly focused on pushing the envelope.

And for those who don’t trust the cloud or feel they can’t rely on any one storage vendor to be around for decades to come? Flickr now enables users to bulk-download thousands of their photos in a single zip file – assuming they have a big enough hard drive to download them on!

Hear more about Flickr’s strategic objectives from Rajiv Vaidyanathan, Flickr Head of Products, at Mobile Photo Connect, September 29 in San Francisco.

Photo by bark

Author: Hans Hartman

Hans Hartman is president of Suite 48 Analytics, the leading research and analysis firm for the mobile photography market and organizer of Mobile Visual 1st, a yearly industry conference about mobile photography.

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