Flickr used to be one of the most popular imaging websites, but then it began to falter a little bit. It hoped to make a bit of a resurgence when there was the big to-do (which was really much to do about nothing) about Instagram changing their privacy policies to match Facebook’s privacy policies. Flickr introduced their own Phone App complete with, you guessed it, filters.

Flickr had the advantage over Twitter in actually being an imaging website, but I think their foray into the filter world is actually worse.

The Flickr app does come with its own camera, which is decidedly worse than most default phone camera apps. So thankfully, it does give you the option of choosing between their camera or your default camera. However, part of the problem with the Flickr app is that its navigation is so painful. If you want to upload a photo to Flickr that already resides in your gallery, you can’t do that from the main screen. You have to navigate to their camera, and then select one of the options on the camera screen. This seems like a ridiculous way to do things.

The Flickr camera has next to zero control options.

You can change flash setting and change the aspect ratio of your picture from a rectangle to a square. That is really it. No zoom. No exposure controls at all.

Another drawback of the app is that their filter names don’t give you any kind of clue what it is that they are going to do to your image until you select them. They are inexplicably named after cities:

• Beijing
• Berlin
• Cairo
• Java
• Miami
• NYC
• Paris
• Rome
• Sydney
• Tokyo

 

I know this sticks with a theme of Flickr’s but it is still somewhat frustrating. Something that makes it even more frustrating is that it is extremely slow in applying the filter effects. My phone as one of the most robust processors on the market and it still takes several seconds to apply the filter. An eternity if I’m just trying to quickly capture an “artistic” phone rendering of a tenderloin in St. Olaf, Iowa.

One other drawback is that there are no other editing features besides filters. No cropping. No auto-“enhancing”, of images.

A look at the filters:

No Filter

Beijing

Berlin

Cairo

Java

Miami

NYC

Paris

Rome

Sydney

Tokyo

It isn’t all negative with this app though. Flickr does save the images at a decent size of 1632×1224. It will simultaneously upload your image to Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. It will also let you share your image via email. Which is a nice little addition.

Flickr also is pretty nifty at navigating around their website from inside the app. That is probably the app’s biggest strength is navigation and not in creation.