Fast Flickr Search Tool

The search possibilities on Flickr are not optimal in my opinion. The search is rather slow, displays only a few results and does not make good use of the screen space at all. That’s something that the fast Flickr search tool over at compfight does much better. As soon as you have entered your search term and hit the search button it begins to fill the screen with related thumbnails that it found on the Flickr website.

My screen was filled with more than 60 thumbnails and an option to load additional ones by either clicking on a link or simply scrolling to the end of the page. Hovering the mouse over a thumbnail displays the resolution of the original images and a click loads the image’s page at Flickr in a new tab. The results are somewhat filtered and reduced to 16 pages that contain roughly 1000 thumbnails of images. That’s a limitation but not a severe one I think.

Four options are available on the main search page. By default the script searches all images at Flickr, tries to find the original images and has safe search turned on. It is possible to search only for tags, only for Creative Commons images, to turn safe search and the search for original images off.

I like the website because it displays a lot of images at once on the screen which speeds up the process of browsing Flickr for interesting images.