Flickr Launches New iPhone Optimized Site

By Charlie Sorrel

Flickr has launched a new iPhone-optimized version of its site, and it looks fantastic. As you can see in the screenshots, the most used options run along the top of the page and, although there doesn't appear to be any AJAX-y cacheing going on, the individual pages load at a fair clip.

You can do anything of the viewing you can do on the normal Flickr, although the bite-sized version doesn't offer any editing of pictures -- the Organizr, for instance, isn't there.

But then, it shouldn't be. It would have meant a complete rewrite of the Flash based interface for little gain -- who wants to edit on the tiny iPhone screen anyway? What Flickr has done is take the essential search and viewing tools and made them small, slimline and fast. I'm testing the site out in an internet cafe (thanks for blowing up my home connection, Telefónica), and – apart from a problem loading photographs in my sets – the site has almost no delay.

Fans of slideshows will be disappointed, though. There aren't any. For that you'll need a standalone iPhone application Like Fraser Speirs' Exposure. Sadly, Yahoo's experimental AJAX-based Flickr site for the iPhone, which offered slideshows, seems to have been taken down.

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