Flickorama
Taras Novak has created a Flash-based Flickr mashup he calls Flickorama that could be the basis for a lot of new, high-quality Flickr experiences. Flickorama has a number of things going for it:
- an expressive, coherent visual design;
- an appreciation for the fact that juxtaposition of photographs can lead to insight;
- a full-screen mode that turns the application into an interactive lightbox;
- several built-in ways to visually organize image sets.
You start with Flickorama by entering in a search term; here are results for Yosemite, a Flickrological favorite and a reliable source of beautiful images. Once you have results back, you can use the arrangement toolbar to organize the images on the canvas:
The carousel at the bottom of the display allows you to navigate to any image in the current batch or to a subsequent result set matching your query:
Try playing with Flickorama in full-screen mode. I found it to have an impressive degree of fit-and-finish, and I enjoyed slicing through pictures using the various organizational tools. My wishlist for the app would be:
- A more animated, interactive main canvas. Right now, the main canvas is duplicative of the function of the bottom carousel in too many ways. I’d like to see the main canvas animate and respond to mouse movements to incite more discovery of returned images.
- Better access to high-resolution images. On a big screen, I’d like to see this app be able to use every pixel when zooming on a picture — assuming that a high-rez image is available.
- Autodetection of screen-size. On a big monitor, the image set returned should be optimized to fill the screen.
- Ability to call up user or group photostreams or the interestingness stream.
- Ability to autoplay. For this to get a home on my TV-connected Mac mini, it would need to automatically present the images on the main canvas and scroll through the result set. If it could do that, it would exceed what, say, iPhoto does by a wide margin.
Congrats to Taras on the great app; he’s got several more on his blog, if you’re in the mood to explore.
