28th April, 2004

Update: We removed the Gallery on August 15, 2004.

Aloha,

Thanks for beta-testing Flickr! We're pleased to announce several new features, including Photostreams, which brings us into preview release 3 of our beta rollout. It's now easier than ever to share your photos with your social network.

See the changes on Flickr or read on!

Highlights:

  • Photostreams launched!
  • New mobile site and better upload-by-email
  • Pro accounts available (for free!)
  • Include photos from Flickr on your website
  • Get your own Flickr web address
  • Tweaks galore: timezones, new privacy settings, gallery changes, group events and more...

New Features

Photostreams

Photostreams are a new way to share your photos on Flickr, on simple webpages where you control who sees what. All the photos you upload are automatically go into your Photostream, but different viewers see different images, depending on their relationship to you.

How does it work?

  • As always, you can make photos public or private. You can also restrict the viewing to people who you have tagged with a specific relationship ("only show this to friends or better").
  • Public photos appear to everyone viewing your Photostream, but you can exclude any public photo if you'd like.
  • You can also see the collected streams of your friends' photos at http://flickr.com/photos/friends/, and the latest public photos on Flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/.

Here's an example of the two main ways of viewing photostreams: the log view and the 'surf' view.

TIP Grab a your own personal web address for your photostream on your account page.

Photostreams points to the future of Flickr: We're making the best way to store, search, sort and share your photos online. This is the first step - we're now on the road to version 1.0 and there's a lot of great stuff coming over the next few weeks. Watch out!

Better Moblogging

You could email photos into Flickr from the early days, but we've made a number of substantial improvements. First, there is a new lightweight version of the Flickr site designed for mobile phones.

You can:

  • See the latest photos from your friends, read and add comments.
  • Upload a photo, set the privacy level, add a title and description.
  • View the most recent comments on your own photos.

And when uploading by email, the subject line automatically becomes the title of your image and the body of the email becomes the description.

From your account page (http://flickr.com/account) you can now choose default privacy level for images you send in by email.

Flickr Pro Accounts

Since we've still got a ways to go before all the features are done for the pro accounts, we're not ready to start selling them yet. But many of you have reached your upload limits already and have been asking us how you can get a pro account. So, while we put the finishing touches on the Flickr pro system, we'll be giving away three month pro accounts to any Flickr member who successfully invites five people into Flickr.

For more information: http://www.flickr.com/upgrade/

Include Photos from Flickr on your Website

Choose the number, size, style and whether you want a random selection or the most recent: http://flickr.com/badge.gne

Grab the generated code, paste it in, and you're off!

Upload, Edit and Manage Your Photos from the Website

You no longer have to launch FlickrLive to add, edit or manage photos. Just head over to http://www.flickr.com/photos/upload and stock up!

Other changes and additions:

  • Group events: schedule them and request reminders by email before the events begin!
  • New templates and size options for posting photos from Flickr to your weblog: http://flickr.com/blogs.gne
  • You can now move photos between your Photostream, Gallery and Shoebox
  • We are now saving your sent mail in FlickrMail
  • We've streamlined the Start Page
  • Change your Time Zone on your profile page: http://flickr.com/profile_edit.gne
  • and many more!

Coming Up...

There are some great new features in the next release: annotating regions of photos (so you can tell stories and point out what's *in* your pictures), tagging photos for easily making and finding groups of related images, full access to your photostreams in the FlickrLive environment, uploader programs for both Mac and Windows and ... whew! ... more.

And we'll also be making some very major changes to the way the whole thing hangs together, simplifying, making things easier, faster and more useful. We really appreciate all the feedback - keep it up!

And once again, thank you so much for taking the time to test and help us make something great!

Be sure to follow along on the NEWS page:http://flickr.com/news/

Have fun!

The Flickrites