Flickr 4.0: is Flickr’s identity crisis over?

Years of technological advances have yet failed to come up with a perfectly seamless way to upload photos. Over the years, we’ve had Flickr, Instagram, and lesser known photo sharing sites like PhotoBucket and Imgur. The problem with these sites is that they never took off as proper photo storage and sharing. Instagram and Imgur have established themselves more as social networks than photo sites. And that’s nothing on how Instagram is limited to square photos without much context or photographic traits. Photobucket and TinyPic have degraded into temporary photo sharing mediums, rather than for storage.

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Flickr remains to be the most viable photo storage site, but as of late, they’ve been trying to emulate the social capabilities of Instagram. Last year, Flickr 3.0 was released, which introduced a more social Flickr. Photo sharing was made more seamless. In fact, opening Flickr then would lead to your friends’ photo feeds. They’ve unmistakably set their sights on the social giant Instagram, which wasn’t very strategic as Flickr descended just a tiny bit more into obscurity.

But recently, Flickr 4.0 was released which will most likely save one of the oldest names in photo sharing. For this update, they’ve retained the free 1TB of online storage. That in itself is a major hook since most photos taken from a camera take up a significant amount of space on a hard drive when collected together. Having 1TB worth of storage space takes the sting off of photo-heavy lifestyles.

Another update is the inclusion of the Uploadr tool, which automatically looks for photos on your hard drive and uploads them to your Flickr account. For those with photos you’d rather be kept offline, Flickr uploads them privately so you can easily take them down in the future without the fear that you just shared intimate photos online.

Searching for photos is smarter and easier with new Flickr algorithms. Users can now search for the content within the photos. Flickr scans your photo and its algorithms can detect what the photo is about, including faces, things, nature, famous landmarks. Flickr can also filter images based on color, size, and orientation.

The sharing capabilities of Flickr 3.0 have been retained with the additional option of uploading photos by bulk to other social media accounts.

Flickr members can enjoy these updates by logging into their Yahoo accounts at Flickr.com and updating the app from the App Store or from the Play Store. The desktop Uploadr for Windows and Mac are also available for use today.