Bigger Better Flickr

For over six years, you’ve made Flickr the place to be for photos. Billions of photos of the places you’ve been, the things you’ve seen, and the people in your lives. It’s an amazing photographic record that continues to amaze us. So as part of our Ongoing Quest to Make Flickr More WonderfulTM, we’d like to introduce… a new photo page!

via blog.flickr.net

I've been beta testing the new Flickr for the past couple weeks and I'm delighted that they have finally unveiled it to the public (I've been counting the days to when I could say something about it). It's a truly wonderful redo of the photo pages, adding a nice simpler layout with larger photos, easy mapping, and a cool quick zooming lightbox option.

What really makes it shine is that keystrokes (the arrow keys) work both on the photo page and within the lightbox. On my home fiber connection, this makes going through large photo sets pretty close to browsing iPhoto at full screen (in both cases, each new photo takes about a second to load). And while I used to curse having to muck through 70 or 80 photos someone took of an event, now I can just fly through them in large resolution using my keyboard.

The slightly larger photo size is great too, as are the easier to find sharing, favoriting, and other previously hidden controls.

Another thought I had after using it a week or so was that with the larger photos, lightbox, comments, and favorites, the whole photo page comes off feeling a bit more "bloggy" in a way that made me wonder if I should continue to keep a blog of my favorite photos around somewhere else, and instead just keep it as a set at Flickr itself.