Flickr’s big revamp boosts search and adds image recognition

Yahoo-owned photo-sharing service Flickr has completely revamped its offering with a focus on making the service easier and more efficient to use.

Seeking to become relevant again, within the Facebook and Instagram saturated social scene, the pioneering photography aid has issued new versions of its website and mobile apps, while revealing new tools for automatically uploading photos.

Perhaps the most exciting innovation is Flickr’s new image recognition technology, which will scan photos and auto-tag them depending on what’s within the frame. This will dramatically improve the ability to organise and search within your own photos and those posted by the wider community.

The new search engine will also benefit from new contextualised queries, allowing users to enter millions of phrases and word combinations and receive smarter results.

So, for example, Flickr’s Andrew Stadlen explains: “Search for “London Eye” and you’ll no longer get photos of eyes in England, but find the giant Ferris wheel. Our new advanced search algorithms understand your intent and bring you higher quality results time after time.”

Beyond search, the company has also announced a new cloud-based Camera Roll that shows your snaps in reverse chronological order.  Camera Roll will also organise your photos into a possible 60 categories, featuring the likes of animals, architecture, food, landscape, people and plants, again using the brand new image recognition and auto-tagging technology.

The company writes: “With Camera Roll, we’ve made it easy to access and view your entire catalog of images, then organize your photos with seamless, fluid gestures using your mouse or touch screen. You can view your entire history of photos by when they were taken or when they were uploaded, then edit them in a flash, thanks to new bulk editing features.  Select the ones you want and quickly add titles, descriptions, tags and other metadata.”

Within Camera Roll there’s also a new Magic View tab, which automatically arranges photos “across landscapes, people, black and white, abstract, symmetrical and more.”

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The firm is also debuting a brand new Uploadr app, which will automatically upload all of your photos to the cloud for safe keeping, regardless of whether they’re taken on your smartphone or whether you’re plugging a DSLR’s memory card into your computer.

Uploadr is also available across platforms and, given that Flickr offers 1TB of free storage for all users, there’s no real reason not to take advantage of this epic revamp. Can Flickr’s overhaul bring the company back to prominence? Share your thoughts below.