Are you one of those people who love Flickr? The ease-of-use, best-in-class community, and (for pro users) unlimited storage space? Well I actually am one of those people. I love my Flickr. And the iPhone plays really nice with Flickr in part because of Flickr’s ability to upload pictures through E-mail. Take a picture. E-mail to Flickr. And it’s posted.

But for jailbroken iPhones there is another method that is in ways much more integrated. This Week's Native App-a-Week will take a look at this program, iFlickr. iFlickr is a native app that is dedicated for Flickr uploads. Meaning you take pictures for the pure purpose of posting it to your Flickr account. How does it work? Is it more effective than the current iPhone Camera->E-mail->Flickr set up?

Read on for the rest of the review!

How To Install

iFlickr is available through the AppTapp Official Source and is listed under Multimedia. A quick search in Installer.app for iFlickr should yield desired results.

Design/Interface

Launching iFlickr opens up a Camera-like interface. At first glance, one wouldn’t notice much visual difference from the iPhone’s Camera but upon closer inspection, little details like the top status bar still being visible and the hue for the camera button is different.

The interface is simple and easy to use. Simply set-up your Flickr account, which is a cinch, and start snapping away. You have a choice of whether to save photos to your photo roll or just simply upload to Flickr. After you snap the picture, you are prompted with basic options: Send to Flickr, Add Details…, Email Photo, and Cancel—all of which are self explanatory.

Usability

iFlickr is as easy to use as the Camera application on your iPhone. Snap a picture and if you don't want to add any details, simply click Send to Flickr and you’re done. I was somewhat disappointed that iFlickr didn’t offer the ‘whoosh’ I enjoy so much and instead chose to replace it with a ‘Processing…’ sign. The overall speed in uploading with iFlickr is noticeably faster. You can easily save 5-10 seconds (depending on your network) using iFlickr as opposed to the E-mail process.

The benefits of using iFlickr as opposed to using the iPhone’s E-mail photo process is that iFlickr allows the original sized images to be uploaded to Flickr. Whereas the iPhone’s E-mail interface limits you to 640x480 sized photos, photos uploaded using iFlickr can retain its original size (1600x1200). Adding titles, descriptions, and tags are made possible through the ‘Add Details…’ button. Sadly, there isn’t a way to add your photos to a set.

Criticism

However, iFlickr isn’t without its faults. Every picture that isn’t properly Titled, Described, and Tagged would have the iFlickr branding on it. This is so because iFlickr auto-fills these areas with their own stock titles and description (title: iFlickr, description: Taken with my iPhone - uploaded with iFlickr). This is highly annoying because pictures become a walking advertisement for iFlickr. I would prefer if iFlickr left the fields blank for me to edit later instead of automatically reverting my fields to iFlickr-oriented labels.

Also, the ‘geolocation’ feature in iFlickr is a downright lie. I live in Los Angeles. Every picture I have taken using iFlickr has been automatically mapped to Lebanon, Kansas. I’ve never even heard of Lebanon, Kansas! I also couldn’t turn off the geolocation feature in the settings, so I guess I have to deal with being from Lebanon, Kansas.

Final Thoughts

Other than posting your pictures to Flickr, iFlickr doesn’t do much else. Its E-mail photo option is essentially useless because it severely limits the size of the picture being sent, much more so than the iPhone’s own E-mail function. For non-Flickr users, this native app will have absolutely no use to them.

The program is limited in the sense that it only sets out to do one thing—Upload full size images to Flickr. And it does it well—the whole process is much quicker and efficient than the iPhone's E-mail interface. With that said, iFlickr can still improve by stopping the autofill of descriptions and fixing the Lebanon, Kansas geotagging issue. If those issues were resolved, I would absolutely use it more frequently because of its ability to upload full resolution pictures. But in the mean time, the negatives have proven to be much too annoying for me. I'll stick with the iPhone's E-mail interface for the time being.