Flickroom – The Way Flickr Should Be

As an image sharing service Flickr does what it should do well – everything’s in place for a good experience using the website. The idea of sets and selective viewing of images is successful and useful. The ‘explore’ function works brilliantly as an outlet for upmost creativity on the net, and is a feature that I regularly use for inspiration.

Flickr has in the past always lacked something for me, and by the extensive use of Big Huge Lab’s ‘View on Black’ many feel the same – viewing your, and other people’s photos on a bland website background is not the way that it should be. Whilst white backgrounds can be a positive quality with some photographs, a website that has a clutter of useful but distracting features does not provide the best viewing experience. Now don’t get me wrong, I love all the features that Flickr offers its users, but a clutter-free viewing experience is a necessity in a creative environment.

On the other hand, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom presents its users the optimum environment for viewing and editing photographs. This is nearer to the experience that Flickr should offer its users. Isn’t it?

Enter Flickroom, a recently released Adobe Air application that combines the essential features (let’s call it operating system) of the Flickr website with the highly desirable user environment of Adobe Lightroom.

On the first load of Flickroom you arrive at the screen to both authorise, and create, a Flickr account.

Flickroom and Flickr integration screen

For the sake of speed, this is all done through a lightweight internal browser. This surprised me as a feature but only because it worked really rather well. Once connected, you enter the Flickroom interface proper. This takes you to your Flickr profile page and unfortunately this is not a changeable feature – one for the future I hope.

Flickroom's interpretation of the profile page. Unchangeable for the moment

For anyone familliar with the Lightroom interface, navigation of the applications will come naturally. The ‘profile’ ‘photostream’ ‘sets’ ‘contacts’ and ‘explore’ tags replace the usual Lightroom navigation panel in the top right hand corner. Above this menu however, is the application navigation and setup menu -  a line of icons correspond to individual commands, something that takes a while to learn.

Flickroom's command centre - speedy navigation takes practice

The actual browsing window is practically identical to that of Lightroom 2.0. On both sides are tabs which open and close when certain features are wanted. The left hand panel deals mainly with the editing of descriptions and titles on users photos. It also allows photographs to be assigned to sets but unfortunately the creation of sets is not possible with Flickroom itself yet. I have also had a problem adding tags and descriptions to my photographs within the application. For some reason an error comes up every time – I don’t know if this is a user-wide problem.

On their website the creators of Flickroom boast about how easy it is for users to upload photographs using Flickrooms ‘drag and drop’ functionality. However, due to the tagging and description problems that I have had with the application I remain dubious.

The LH panel allows for detail and metadata viewing and editing

The right hand panel on the other hand, deals with the more social and user-experience based features of Flickroom. This is where the search and recent comment/ upload windows are located and frankly, it is a very slow, laggy panel to use. One new and unexpected feature of Flickroom is the chatroom. This too is located in the right hand panel and allows users to chat with other Flickroom users (not Flickr only users though) within the Flickroom interface. Although this is most certainly a feature to watch in the future, the lack of users of the application makes it utterly pointless right now.

So I suppose that’s it. Flickroom is an application with a promising future, but currently I would only ever use it to browse; at the moment the other features are a bit redundant.

This will be enhanced by the slightly temperemental and laggy nature of Flickroom that marr the overall user experience. On the other hand, a strong user base and regular user fed updates could bring great success for the programme. Who knows. If you have Flickr and care about viewing images I would recommend giving Flickroom a try.