Browse Flickr With Cards In Flickr Deck
Flickr Deck for iPhone ($0.99) by Kellen Styler is an app that lets you look at Flickr in the form of "cards."
Flickr is always a great place to find some good photos from the community. Flickr even has an official iPhone app. However, that doesn't mean that this is the only way to look at Flickr. Thanks to Flickr Deck, you can now have your own set of "cards" of which to browse Flickr from.
When you load up Flickr Deck, you get what looks like the card view in mobile Safari. By default, the app includes cards for Recent, Interesting, Popular Tags, and three various searches. You can switch between these cards by swiping left and right.
Flickr Deck is usable even if you do not have an account. There is no way to login to your account from this app, but you can view pretty much anything.
Along the bottom there is a toolbar. This allows you to refresh all of the cards to fetch new images, switch between a list and photo view, and search Flickr. There is also a button to access the app settings, which will let you control how many results get displayed and whether image details are on or off.
There is one more button along this toolbar, and it's probably the most important. This button allows you to add a new card of your own. Simply give it a title, choose what type, and how many images.
For the types, there are the default Flickr Recent, Interesting, and Popular Tags. However, you can also add your own search by tag, text, or person. This is a great way to have access to your favorite searches on Flickr.
If you tap on a photo, you can view it along with some information about the photo, such as description, views, date taken, tags, and sets it's found in. The information view is great because it's a bit transparent, so you can still see the photo behind it.
You can navigate between all photos of a card by using the arrow buttons on the bottom toolbar. Tapping the image or using the button that represents expanding will allow you to view just the photo itself, and zoom in on the full image.
Going back to the previous screen, you can share an image by sending an email with a link to the photo, or save the photo to your Camera Roll in either medium or large size.
If you stumble upon a user, you can even view their profile and all of their photos. You also get information like whether the user is a Pro memeber, how many photos are on their account, and how long they've been a member of Flickr.
I found the app to be more responsive while navigating between photos rather than the cards itself. i felt that it seemed to lag a bit as I flicked between the cards, and if you bring up the settings for a card, the animation was a bit choppy. I had no issues when navigating between images though.
I like Flickr Deck, so I hope that the responsiveness is fixed in a future update. Another thing that is bugging me is the fact that the graphic at the top right corner that says "designerd kellen styler.com" is not optimized for the Retina Display, while everything else is. That needs to be fixed, because it looks weird when everything but one thing is optimized for Retina graphics.
Flickr Deck is a pretty app, but still needs some work. If you're the type to like browsing for photos from the community, then this could be worth checking out. At least the price isn't too high.
