MobiFlik is a photo browser for the popular photo hosting service Flickr. Although Flickr is pretty good at storing your photos, some people do find the galleries a llittle tricky to navigate on a mobile device. MobiFlik tries to be a simple way of searching and browsing Flickr's vast library of public photos which is optimised for a mobile screen. Find out how we got on with it n our MobiFlik review...
Loading up the app we get a nice, clean user interface that is reminiscent of teh 'white room' that is the Flickr site. You have the option of checking out the latest batch of photos to be posted to Flickr, your own favourites (bookmarked using the MobiFlik app) or of performing a search. Search is teh primary purpose of the app, so lets jump in.
Say you wanted to see some photos of cats. You go to the search screen and type 'cats' in the box. You can select 'content type' - either Photos, Screenshots or 'Other' - in practice, we found 'All' was a perfectly fine way to proceed. You can also turn Safe Search on or off to toggle risqué images from the search engine's gaze. Flickr isn't crammed full of porn compared to, say, Google Image Search but there are more than a few 'artistic' pics around so it is a useful filter if you are in company.
You final option is how to sort the result - by date (newest or oldest first). by relevance or by interest. Regardless of what you choose, your search results are limited to 42 pictures. That's either a 6x7 grid or a list of pics with their titles. We don't think we are sticking our necks out too far by saying that there are probably more that 42 cat photos on Flickr. 42 bazillion is probably closer to the truth. Regardless, 42 is the most you are going to get as there is no 'next page' icon or anything similar.
The grid is by far the best way to display the pictures, incidentally - not least because we found several picture titles would display weirdly, overwriting text with more text. This didn't seem to be dependant on the length of the title, either - very odd, and quite annoying.
Once you have found some pictures, viewing them is very simple - just select a picture to see a reasonably sized thumbnail and skip forward and back using a tappable or clickable button. Alongside each picture is a list of tags added by the owner (e.g. cats, cute, kittens, fluffy, evil, etc.) detail about the user who posted the image, viewer comments and image details such as resolution and timestamp. You can also skip to the image's actual Flickr page to see the fully detailed picture.
This is all very well presented and easy to use - but there is one rather glaring problem. All the extra metadata - image details, comments, author details and tags - is just text. You can't click on the author to see more pictures by him or her, nor can you tap on a tag and see other pictures that have been tagged with it. You can't even add comments. Its maddening, it honestly is.
So the, this is a useful and easy to use app that does indeed make viewing Flickr images a bit easier. Sadly though it is let down by a lack of imagination and some missing functionality that would have made this an essential download.
Details
Size: 0.125 MB
Price: Free
Check out our MobiFlik Review image gallery:
2/5
