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November 20, 2013 02:00 am GMT

Yahoo's Flickr Resurgence Continues With Handsome Photo Books, But Reliance On Sets Could Stumble

Flickr Photo Books1Today, Flickr is announcing the ability to order photo books directly from inside the photo sharing site. This continues a series of announcements and acquisitions which started late last year, and mark continued investment by Yahoo in rebuilding the once-dominant platform. As one of the first sites to make photo uploading and sharing extremely easy, Flickr enjoyed an incredibly fruitful early period. But a lack of attention and resources led to stagnation as other sites and services swept in and began fighting to be the one true repository of users online photos. Those competitors include products from a variety of spaces including Facebook, Google+ and Dropbox. Since the revamp of its iPhone app late last year Flicker has seen a series of updates including a complete redesign of its web presence, the launch of an Android app and the gift of 1 terabyte of free storage space to every user. Its also acquired several companies in the space including Ghostbird, IQ Engines and LookFlow. Whatever commentary one has on new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, it seems clear that shes renewed investment in Flickr as platform. And thats essentially what these new photo books are about. Flickr has previously allowed external sites to provide Flickr enabled book creation, but todays announcement is of an in-house tool. Were working hard to make Flickr great again, Flickr Vice President Tom Hughes tells me. This included working on easy to make photo books easy to use, with a quick clean experience. Usability lab testing was relied upon to make sure that the end result was smooth and simple. To that end, the photo book process is extremely simple. You simply hover over a Flickr set and click create to generate a photo book. The layout is centered on full bleed images as, Flickr Director of Product Management Rajiv Vaidyanathan tells me, they felt that Flickr is all about photos and full-page images were the best way to show them off. If youve ever built a photo book then youll know one of the biggest irritants is the gutter or portion of the book that goes down into the binding. It often obscures points of focus or faces in the images. To prevent this, Vaidyanathan says, Flickr is using focus and entropy algorithms, along with face detection, to figure out what the important bits of the images are, and cropping accordingly. This should ensure that

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