Flickr is no longer beta… it’s gamma! Flickr has been in beta for so long that perhaps, with much humour, the good Flickr folks decided rather to keep us laughing and go into gamma instead.

Well, beta, gamma or whatever, I’m much impressed with the new features. I’ve been using Flickr a lot since we came home to upload the honeymoon and wedding photos, to add tags, sort into sub folders, add notes and titles and commentary, and of course to send stuff to the blog.

Using Flickr is even easier than it used to be, and it’s always been easy – so that is a huge thing to say.

Here is the shot of the new Organizr:

Along the bottom are displayed your photos – you can zoom to a date (taken or uploaded), then drag into the main "workpad" area. This is much better than the previous version where all photos were displayed in a pad. The load time is much improved.

After you have created a batch to edit, you can do way more with it. Aside from adding tags (shown above), you can even change the CC license now en masse (something new). Then, you can add it to a new or existing set. I like that there are different "tabs" to the Organizr and that you can switch between them for different things, and that your batch does not disappear from your editing workpad until you close it. So much better. So much faster.

Ok, so aside from being absolutely in love with the new Organizr, Flickr has added great new features all over the place:

• New navigation bar: you, organize, contacts, groups, explore. I love the "you" menu, because you can quickly jump to recent comments
• Improved search – faster way to do most common things, different sorts
• Person menu, to access different things from a buddy icon
• Improved interface
• Can edit titles and descriptions of photos from your main photos page (no need to go to the exact photo page)

Love it. The things I would change in later Flickr iterations:

• Only say there are *new* comments if they have not been viewed. Rather than base the concept of "new" on recency of comment, base it on whether we have seen it or not
• More than 2 GB upload limit. Yeah, it’s just us because we went crazy on the honeymoon and also have wedding photos, but it’s annoying not to be able to upload them all right now.
• A pull down menu for “All sizes” on a photo so you can get the sized page you want first, instead of clicking to the page then the size.

And that’s it. If you don’t have a Flickr account now, you should!

Tags: Flickr, Flickr gamma, gamma, photos, technology, photoblogging