Yahoo has introduced a new cleaner style of photo embeds today. Just about everyone has used content from Flickr in various ways at some point, especially from its great store of Creative Commons licensed images. Now, Flickr can capitalize on the network effect of people seeing all of those images off of its site with a new cleaner style.
The realization that embeds help spread influence and drive traffic back to a site or service has struck every major service over the past few years. Twitter announced embeds, so did Instagram and Facebook. Vine introduced embeds a couple of months after launch and most new mobile apps and services ship with them nowadays. Embedding bits of a site’s stream in places other than the site itself is just smart.
The Flickr embeds only work on publicly shared photos, not private ones, which is how it should work. Each photo is also displayed with a full title and Flickr user name, which is a great nod to attribution for photographers. Many photogs post images online without any hope or expectation of compensation, but I have yet to find a single one that loves their images to be used without proper attribution. Sometimes saying ‘hey, this is the person that took this cool photo I used’ is the only way to ‘pay’ a creator who isn’t charging. So good work there.
I’m of mixed feelings about the big ‘Flickr’ logo in the corner of the image. I get what Flickr chose to do here: it made the ‘frame’ around an embed part of the image itself, rather than placing it ‘outside’ as with many other services that offer embeds. It’s cleaner and focuses more on the image.
But perhaps a logo with more transparency would be nice, or one that faded away with navigation controls, appearing on interaction or mouse-over. It’s a fairly minor complaint for me, though some photogs might have an issue with it. Update: Flickr has now changed the behavior of embeds, causing the logo to fade with navigation controls.
If you embed a photo from a set, you’ll be able to navigate through that whole collection, and they can always be displayed full-screen in uncompressed fashion. Here is a picture of a bunny:
Top image credit: Thomas Quine
Article corrected to reflect the fact that this is an update of Flickr’s embeds, not a new product.