With 7B Photos, Flickr Debuts New Speedy, HTML5 Image Uploader; Drag And Drop Interface, And More

Yahoo’s photos sharing site, Flickr, has been steadily redesigning a number of components of its platform over the past few months, including editing (courtesy of Aviary), photo views and more. And today, Flickr, which says it is home to more than 7 billion photos, is debuting a new, speedier, HTML5 photo uploader for images.

With the HTML5 technology, Flickr’s uploader has a more robust experience, including drag and drop functionality. So instead of only being able to upload manually, you can add photos by dragging them into the browser. Yahoo will also show your thumbnail previews of photos, so you can manage and reorder photos before they hit your photostream. And you can zoom, rotate or sort your photos by title within the uploader itself, as opposed to within the photostream.

Flickr says it will also upload metadata from other photo experiences (i.e. iPhoto) during the upload process, pulling in titles, photos, and tags. When you upload a photo or drag it into the uploader, preview thumbnail will pop up, and you can start adding descriptions, titles and more. You can now also tag your friends in photos and change licensing, content type and other advanced options right from the uploader page before publishing to your photostream.

And files remain private until you choose to make them public. Flickr explains that with the previous upload experience, a pain point for users was that photos were made public when uploaded.

Other improvements to the uploader include a speedier experience. Upload speeds have been improved by 20-30% on average, and up to 50-60% faster for international users. Flickr increased the file size limits for pro users up to 50MB and for free users up to 30MB.