Flickr on the iPhone with iFlickr

Written by: Alex Curtis

Categories: Cool Stuff, Hints & Tips

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One of my previous posts pre-iPhone, I wrote about how there were ways to work around the iPhone’s limitations, and how you could use email to send your photos to Flickr. Well now, thanks to some hacker/tinkerers, we have a 3rd party native iPhone app that does the job splendidly!

The app is called iFlickr. It can be installed via the Installer.app hack which is really the only (read: easiest) way to install 3rd party apps on your phone. New and improved applications are finding their way to the iPhone every day—from an old-school NES game player to IM applications, a webserver, one-off iPhone-unique games like Lights Off and Tap Tap Revolution, all among many others. No, they’re not all perfect, some in alpha or beta in quality, but these apps are diverse in function and imaginative.

Back to the app at hand—iFlickr. Whereas before the only way to upload your photos directly from the iPhone was send them via email, now iFlickr lets you take a shot and as soon as its saved, it’s simultaneously uploaded to your flickr account, in 1024×768 resolution. Currently the upload doesn’t use the full capability of the 2MP iPhone, but it is better than the via email solution, which downsizes outbound images to 640×480.

Getting iFlickr to work your flickr account is a little complicated. I’d recommend reading the instructions on iFlickr’s website before trying to set things up. It requires “authorizing” the app via a flickr webpage and token serial number. Once this is added to the app’s preferences and the app is restarted, things are ready to go. Right now, I’m using version 0.0.3, which is the third version in the past two days, and the options are limited. First is to save photos to the iPhone before sending to flickr. Second is to take photos rapid-fire, as quickly as every 20sec.

Taking photos works pretty much like the native camera app on the iPhone, except it’s GUI is not as nice. The shutter button doesn’t really “depress” when you tap it, nor do you see those shutter animations, but functionally it’s the same.

If you want to see the photos you shot, you’ll find them in your iPhone’s photo album. You’ll also find them almost instantaneously in your flickr photo stream—really, it’s fast. All photos uploaded with iFlickr are titled “iflickr” until you change them.

Hopefully future updates will add some additional functionality. What I’d like to see is some ability to pre-tag and label your photos before their sent. Easier setup is definitely in order. Full resolution uploads would be cool. A nicer GUI would be, well, nice. And a direct link to the photo album, both on the web as well as on the iPhone would be helpful.

iFlickr is a great start to a very useful app for the iPhone. If you haven’t tried 3rd party apps on your iPhone, don’t be afraid and jump right in.

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  1. Dave from Temecula | Oct 01 2007 - 11:16

    Definitely an application with promise. I’d like to see the ability to rename images and tag them on the fly before uploading. You can add tags in the preference panel ahead of time.