FlickrStorm: better search for Flickr, including Creative Commons
Marshall Kirkpatrick
13 comments »
Flickr is an awesome site, a world changer that you’ve got to love, but it’s got some shortcomings. Many people have tried improving on the search function of the site and the newest effort is particularly nice. Gregor Hochmuth’s FlickrStorm is smooth to use and very handy for saving batches of photos you find via Flickr.
The biggest feature is that related search terms are suggested with your results to make up for the fact that photo uploaders don’t always tag their images with the same terms a searcher might hope for. It’s a good feature.
FlickrStorm also lets you set multiple photos from search results into a tray and save them all as a batch. That’s very cool and the ability to search just inside the Creative Commons section of Flickr makes then site even more useful. The CC section does not get enough love - those are the images you can legitimately reuse!
Now it’s easy to search for photos in Flickr by Creative Commons license, compile them in a batch and save them for later use. See the “advanced search” link on the site. Very nice.
Thus to respect the spirit of CC Commercial Attribution license, the photos used in the following screen cap came from users flickrelmo, fimoculous, David Sifry, TechCruncher Nik Cubrilovic, Sifry again, hyku, Sifry, Cubrilovic (X2),
This is a pretty nice app. I am not a big fan of the double scroll bars. Never really like inset scrolls too much. Functionality wise, very nice though.
One interesting thing is I created a Flickr app a while ago where people could do all sorts of searching, send the photos in an email, download pics, anything really.
Had it running for a bit over a month and the Yahoo! killed the project. They told me they don’t allow projects that are basically search utilities. They take up too much server bandwidth.
Good for this app that it is still going, just something to be aware of.
I think the current trend to allow 3rd parties to improve upon a website’s interface is great. It’s truly best to allow those who know how to do something really well (in this case, search Flickr) do that, while allowing the core content provider to focus on what they do best.
Magg (http://www.dappit.com/dapplications/Magg) does something similar for videos: offers an alternative search mechanism for the various popular video services (YouTube, Google, etc.)
It is nice to see more and more of these services emerging. Now more sites just need to provide APIs or we need to get more people using Dapper (http://www.dappit.com)
I mean no disrespect, but I’ve come to expect more from TechCrunch, in terms of quality of postings and listings. This post is most dissapointing. Very little insight. The post may as well have just contained a name and link.
I agree with Saul.. and truthfully this site mentioned does not offer anything unique or in my opinion anything very useful. Hell, even the ruby on rails video shows you how easy it is to implement a search utility with flickr’s API.
Lame post (again)!
I don’t know guys… flickrstorm is a cool as hell app, and although I heard of before on Lifehacker, I would rather see Mike post about this than AOL, or see Marshall’s error-prone posts. Flickstorm is an interesting tool and this post introduces it to the TC audience in the off-chance they don’t read lifehacker as well. Beyond that, look at the product - how much more of review could you give? It’s pretty straightforward, but it’s also cool and well-designed.
Intersting tool. I really like the way the active flickr community develops all these nice third party tools. I found many more here -
http://www.quickonlinetips.com.....ollection/
I much prefer Zooomr (http://www.zooomr.com)
You could try FlickrLilli (http://flickrlilli.org.uk/) as an alternative. Does Creative Commons searching but with a simpler interface and a “cut and paste” attribution text. Might not work with IE, mind (fine with Firefox). Plus I haven’t got round to the “favourites” feature I’ve been planning for months, intended to be similar to the Flickrstorm tray.
Sounds Cool!
The ability to quickly & easily Blog fantastic Visual Images from Flickr is something all Bloggers should know about! Nice having something nice to look at instead of just boring old Geeky text!!
;))
Jeff’s first comment was interesting - i’d like to see what he had done.
Yeah Flickr deserves to be commended for opening up their API’s & letting folks like flagrantdisregard & Steeev & philmccluskey & whoever did FlickrFox create some really really cool Apps that add tons of Funtionality & FUN to Flickr!
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