Flickr Is Getting a Major Makeover

Markus Spiering has, as they say, a good eye. Most of his resume was in mobile before he became a senior product manager for Flickr. In March 2011, he slipped into the head product role, lording over Flickr’s 45 or so employees. “”I have the pleasure to run product management for one of the most exciting web sites in the world: Flickr,” he says on his website. He’s in town for the Photo Hack Day hackathon this weekend, the first small sign of what could be the company’s reinvigorated interest in its audience.

Mr. Spiering is very happy to be making extensive changes to the Flickr interface, the first of which will roll out next week, as he explained in a meeting with Betabeat, Yahoo’s Jason Khoury, and Flickr.com, looking pretty on Mr. Spiering’s Macbook Air.

Mr. Spiering moused over the current photo view. “This is very typical of Flickr,” he said. ”Lots of white space, small photos, lots of information around.”

He then opened a new tab to show the spread, completely revamped. Suddenly the photos look more than four times their current size and lie neatly justified on the page, somehow jigsawing together without cropping or changing the order in which they appear.

The new photo view will hit on Feb. 28, Mr. Spiering said, and with it comes a new upload interface. Flickr’s uploading page now looks more like an app than a website. Goodbye, retro blue links. Hello, swoopy drag-and-drop.

Flickr will continue to make major changes in waves in 2012, Mr. Spiering said, but there will be no New Flickr campaign. “It is not as if we close the curtain and all of a sudden say, ‘ta da, it’s different!’” he said. It does seem as if Flickr has had an attitude readjustment, at the least.


 http://www.betabeat.com/2012/02/21/flickr-is-getting-a-major-makeover/