Search and download from Flickr using zFlick

The ever so popular Adobe Air platform has given us a lot of useful apps, but few as tastefully done and as handy as this one. zFlick is an application which enables you to search for photos on Flickr, view them, and astonishingly enough, download them via drag and drop.

Note: zFlick has not been updated since 2009. The program appears to have been abandoned by its developer, and it is likely that it won't work anymore as Flickr made several changes to its service in the past couple of years. We suggest you give Bulk Image Downloader a try instead which supports Flickr.

Once you install the app, you'll see a stylish search bar, just enter your term and press enter. A really cool loading animation can be seen as the 50 pics pop into place, and when done, you can go through them by clicking any image to show in a bigger view.

Downloading is done by simply drag and dropping a large image, and is instantaneous, since by the time you see the image it is cached, or downloaded to a temporary file anyway.

zFlick

This is a beautiful application to help you browse for images/inspiration, I mean just the app itself is inspirational. However, there are some things that could make the app even better.

There are basically two things I could use, the most needed is the ability to see the image's license if any. This would enable me to quickly use the image for a blog post or a web page, without this I need to check on site. The other option that would be nice is to enable drag and drop from the icon view.

Sometimes when I'm looking for images I just drop things into a "bin" without checking, if it looks right it's in, I'll sort it out later. A sort of mass download option would also be nice, where you click on the 10 images you need and download them. Another feature which would make navigation easier is the ability to list by name/tag, or even better, to narrow down results using tags. A great application otherwise, it's things that look like this that give me inspiration personally.

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