What Makes Flickr Tick—A Q&A With Product Head Markus Spiering

Flickr, long held back by Yahoo’s numerous identity and leadership crises, suddenly has a strong purple tailwind. The bustling photo sharing hub, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Caterina Fake in 2004 and absorbed into the big Y! in 2005, has weathered more than a few Yahoo ice ages. Now, with mover/shaker Marissa Mayer steering the good ship Yahoo, Flickr is getting the love its dedicated users knew it deserved all along. And they’ve certainly been patient.

I sat down with Flickr’s head of product, Markus Spiering to talk about the new Flickr—the one that just woke up from a long slumber, that is. Spiering doesn’t just lead Flickr’s design evolution from his lofty post atop the product—he’s actually a Nikon-toting photographer and a longtime Flickr superfan. (He even wrote a book about Flickr in 2006, but since it’s in German, we’ll have to take his word that it’s good.)

See also: Flickr Gets A Makeover—It’s Been Supersized And Instagrammed

Under Spiering’s leadership, Flickr exploded onto mobile, blew the top off its data upload ceiling (each user gets a free terabyte) and invaded Yahoo’s other products, from visually powering the Yahoo Weather app’s local forecasts to livening up Yahoo Mail with Flickr-generated themes.

There are a lot of different ways to use Flickr. Stuff photos into it, and it’s a functional image shoebox. Curate your photos into sets and collections, and it becomes a gallery. Join communities and suddenly it’s a photography classroom—and a good one, at that.