Since Yahoo acquired Flickr in 2005, the relationship between the two has been rather tumultuous. Layoffs and unexpected departures have plagued the website, leaving power users like Thomas Hawk wondering what the future holds.
On Tuesday he finally found out.
Flickr will be rolling out a new photo interface that organizes images in a seamless collage on Feb. 28. Judging from a screen shot of the new interface on BetaBeat, it looks like once a photo is selected, the name of the picture appears below in a transparent box.
“The new design looks much more interactive with a focus on larger photos, hover over pop out magnification, and a jigsaw sort of layout that allows the photos on the page to take the maximum space possible with very little white space,” wrote Hawk in a blog post. “It looks quite a bit more like what Google+’s photo pages look like actually and feels like a much more elegant design. Now how cool would it be if this new page also had infinite scrolling as well.”
Flickr’s photo-upload tool will also receive a face-lift, replacing the traditional blue links with a “swoopy drag-and-drop” function, reported BetaBeat.
These new upgrades come on the heels of a series of layoffs on Jan. 30 in Flickr’s customer service department, which left former employee Nolan Caudill wondering why Yahoo doesn’t sell off the company.
“Flickr-the-site will be fine but Flickr-the-culture took a huge hit today and those suits in Sunnyvale balancing some column or doing their thousandth ‘re-org’ are completely to blame,” Caudill wrote on his blog. “I bet they don’t even know what they’ve done and that’s probably the worst part of the whole thing.”
For now it seems like Yahoo is invested in seeing Flickr thrive.
Screenshot from BetaBeat