Flickery : a flickr desktop client for Mac OS X - Review

Flickery : a flickr desktop client for Mac OS X - Review
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Flickery - A Desktop Flickr Client

Flickr is the leading social photo sharing site for photography enthusiasts (if you’re just into sharing party pics with friends, Facebook is the way to go). Although Flickr has been improving itself, introducing more features and making its interface more usable, it still hasn’t reached the comfort level that users expect out of it. Enter Flickery, an applicatiom for the Mac that promises to make your Flickr experience much more enjoyable.Think of Flickery as kind of the what Mailplane is to Gmail. Using the Flickr API the Flickery app brings the goodness of Flickr to the desktop. Though Flickr has made several interfaces to the site like the mobile version and even an iPhone app to bring better interface features, the desktop experience has been unchanged, until now.

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Features & Interface: (4 out of 5)

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Flickery brings almost the complete functionality of the Flickr site to the desktop app. You can upload & download images, delete files on your flickr page, organize images into sets, add tags etc. The app has a very good navigation menu, clicking on Favorites, or the photo set name loads up all the containing images in the viewing pane as thumbnails. I found this mode very helpful in quickly locating an image in my Flickr library by visual identification. Using a drill down menu you can also get into the numerous sets of images that you might have, or to the hundreds of groups that you may have joined. Occasionally i also noticed the drill down menus being not so responsive which could be a bit in the way if one has too many sets and groups. Clicking an image loads up a bigger version of the image (or as I found the spacebar could be very helpful here). Hitting the fullscreen button takes the app into full screen mode which also provides the ability to call up a slideshow of the images, which is very handy. The arrow control at the bottom of the app can also be used to progress from image to image, though it gets very monotonous very soon. Again the direction or arrow keys are much more helpful here.

The search functionality is well implemented with the search button and ability to search by user, tags, license etc. Also all searches are

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saved by default, sort of like the smart folders feature of the Mac OS and I believe these searches would be updated as and when new matches are found. When viewing the images of a particular user a drop down menu appears at the top ( which again should have been more prominent since its easily missed) which allows you to switch to the various sets the user might have. I noticed that video content on Flickr had some hiccups while playing via the app. It would also be a good idea to load a limited number of thumbnails in the application since the app slows down considerably when trying to crunch down the dense pixel jungle that is flickr.

Verdict

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Flickery is an application that shows a lot of potential and a great idea. The application in its present form is very much usable and would be definitely a worthy purchase for a regular flickr user. Bonus points are also due for the inclusion of handy share feature that allows easy sharing of images via. email and twitter. That said Flickery is not yet ready to completely replace the flickr web interface, though with additional features like adding contacts from the flickrstream that you’re browsing, smooth and full resolution video playback, ability to lookup EXIF data of images would make the app an essential tool for every flickr fan. The developer of the application is quick to answer queries and am sure he would be implementing further features to make Flickery the numero uno flickr client of choice. Available from Eternalstorm Software Flickery is a $19 download only application, which you can download and try for 15 days before buying the application.