Jim Barraud

I’m a big flickr fan. It’s a great service for sharing and discovering interesting photos. But I’ve always felt browsing around flickr to discover new photos could get a little tiring. You have your standard single page with a photo, previous & next buttons, or a page of paginated photos. Presented in a very basic way that’s similar to the majority of photo-sharing services out there. I usually prefer to view photos in flickr’s slideshow mode because of it’s darker background and larger photos, but this isn’t a great method for discovering new photos or browsing around.

I’ve just stumbled upon a nifty little app called DestroyFlickr (via). DestroyFlickr provides alternative methods to viewing, downloading and uploading photos on flickr. Photos are presented on a dark gray background in a casual format. The app divides itself into several workspaces. You can load various content into each workspace and easily switch between them. For example, you could have you’re photos displayed in one workspace and various contacts photos in the others. The app is built with on the Adobe Air platform, so it will run on either windows or mac provided you have Adobe Air installed.

DestroyFlickr succeeds in making it seem as though browsing flickr is like browsing photos on your own hard-drive. A desktop native feel is given to content that exists entirely online. At times it feels as though I’m using a kind of “Lightroom Light” app for browsing photos on my computer. It’s the first Air based app that I’ve used that doesn’t feel much like an Air app (and that’s a good thing).

DestroyFlickr is still in the beta stage of development and the developer has stated that there are plenty of other features he wants to add, but currently can’t until June 30th because of its submission to the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. It’ll be interesting to watch this app as it develops because there’s a tremendous amount of potential here.