• mashable, Wednesday, February 22, 2012 12:14 PM

Keeping users on their toes, Flickr a planning a number of new changes in the coming months, including a new photo stream design, dubbed “Justified View,” and a new uploading feature, named “Uploadr.” With the new tools, Flickr is mainly after increased user engagement, as Markus Spiering, head of product at the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site, tells Mashable.

Set to go live at the end of the month, Justified View trades Flickr’s current white space-filled layout “for something that looks a lot more like Pinterest (as has become the trend in Web design),” Mashable reports. “The new photo stream will first go live with your contacts (the people you follow),” and showcases bigger photos. Meanwhile, the new upload feature, Uploadr, is expected to go live in late March, and let users drag and drop photos from their computer onto the site. Spiering says Uploadr is more like an app than a Web site.

As such, photos are instantly viewed as thumbnail images, allowing users to add tags as you upload. More to the point, Spiering tells Mashable that this will likely increase engagement, as Flickr continues to build the Internet’s largest collection of geo-tagged photos -- currently numbering at about 270 million. Moving broadly, Spiering says Flickr stands behinds Yahoo’s “mobile first” strategy.

Read the whole story at mashable »