Rumored Flickr redesign will make images more prominent, remove text, kill Yahoo bar
posted Monday, March 17, 2014 at 1:43 PM EDT
When Flickr completely overhauled its design last May, the results were contentious, and it was then tweaked even further last October. Now, according to Kara Swisher of ReCode, yet another redesign is in the works, and it's one that'll put an even deeper emphasis on images over everything else.
Swisher reports that she's seen images of the new layout, and it is set to hit both app and website versions of Flickr, "within the next few weeks." As she describes it:
...it is yet another effort to slickify the offering, put sharing front and center and remove the dreaded Yahoo tool bar above the service.
It also more tightly coordinates the Web and mobile version, with what looks like a seamless photo stream and no white space.
There are scant words and buttons on the main page, just an indication of who your followers are and a few more pieces of info in a floating text.
It sounds like images will be flush against one another, with no white gutters between photographs, and all but no text to be seen. Hopefully any missing text is moved rather than removed, because while seeing things like EXIF data can be something of a clutter, they're also extremely useful and interesting. But we're willing to bet that no one will miss the large, purple Yahoo tool bar that seems so totally out of place on Flickr right now.
And while Flickr may have faced plenty of push-back over its original redesign a year ago, the change seems to have worked for it. According to a report from February, site usage is up considerably.