The software program itself has not changed a lot though. The software developer has improved the algorithms in the background but not the user interface. The program displays the three buttons Search, User and Group to the user upon startup. All can be used to download photos from specific Flickr sections.

The first option (Search) performs a Flickr search for either a keyword or tag, the second (user) will display photos uploaded by a specific Flickr user while the third (group) will do the same for a Flickr group.

The photo preview page will display thumbnails of the photos that have been found in the Flickr search. Only five thumbnails will be displayed by default. This figure can be increased to a maximum of 500 thumbnails per page. Copyrighted images are displayed with a huge copyright watermark. These photos will not be downloaded by the program. A Creative Commons checkbox is available to only display photos that have been tagged with it.

Flickr Downloadr will then download all photos (even if the count exceed 100K) that are not copyright protected. The software program works fine and seems to be more reliable in this version.

The Flickr Search results now display a small bar above the actual photos that have been found that can be used to change the view of the photos from the default small view to medium, detail or slideshow. Sorting can also be changed from relevant to either recent or interesting.

Small and medium photo search results display a small i icon in the lower right corner when hovering the mouse over them. A click on the icon will open a detailed view of the photo in the foreground. Another click on the photo will close that foreground image.

A right sidebar on the search results page is now showing groups, photographers, tags and locations that are closely related to the search term. Those items can be used to explore related photos, photographers, groups and locations.

Some searches do now include information on top based on the search parameters of the user. It is for example displaying if the search was only performed in the Creative Commons section and dates if a date filter has been set.

[source Flickr Blog]

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.