New Flickr Interface & Analytics
Flickr recently introduced a new Home page for their users before making a big announcement or even just forcing their members to accept it. It is a much better layout than from before with more info on one page about your own photo activity, those of your friend’s photostreams and helpfully exposes you to a random selection of photos to oggle. Aside from the cosmetic change, a nice new analytics reporting tool is available to track exactly how your photos are performing.
Here are what I see are the specific changes along with pretty pictures.
Homepage
Photos Displayed Left. Photos are now displayed to the left side. No preference from me but maybe a little more logical.
Recent Uploads / Recent Activity Toggle. A nifty AJAX link toggle switches between your own photos or recent comment activity. Cool as this was on a separate page previously.
More Contact Photos. Now ten photos from your contacts are displayed. I previously felt that I might miss an upload from one person if someone else has uploaded several in a row.
Random Explore Block. The last one is a random block dedicated to exposing you to a photo selection from everyone’s photos to things tagged interesting. Always nice to see new materials.
I presume that there is also group support but not having joined any groups, I wouldn’t know how this is affected in the re-skin.
Analytics
Analytics finally comes to Flickr! (Or it may have already come, and I only recently discovered it).
Graph. Nice nifty little graph showing you the daily aggregate views of your content. It would have been nice to change the graphs reporting data with a toggle switch.
Daily Aggregate Views. This is your daily views broken down by Photos, Photostream, Sets and Collections.
Content Statistics. Detailed breakdown for the popularity of your content per photo. This reports on views, favourited, and comments total. This is further divided by time – yesterday and all-time.
Referrers. This reports on where people are coming from to look at your photos. This is actually quite useful since my photos can appear on my blog, Facebook, and a handful of other places, including as I suspected, Flickr showing off some of my public photos.
Breakdown. Lastly, the analytics page gives you administrative info on your photos. How many are tagged (and are tagless), privacy overview, in groups and in sets, etc. Useful in providing you with an overview of what needs to be done in terms of housekeeping for your photo collection.
Ever since I switched from Facebook to Flickr as my mine photo repository1, I have fallen in love with it to such an extent that it is one of the few online services I actually pay for.
- I am nadimvdr on Flickr [↩]
