Introducing ‘Flickroom ^[1]‘ (in beta at the time of writing), an Adobe AIR app that ports entire features of Flickr into an installable AIR app along with some new value added features that makes it easy to manage and organize your flickr. Flickroom provides the rich browsing experience Flickr users have long deserved.

The app makes aggressive use of Flickr API (in a nice way). You can comment on your photos, add notes to it, save photos to disk, tweet your photos without leaving Flickroom and much more. I was skeptical about the responsiveness of the app before trying it out because, heavy AIR apps usually are so unresponsive. But Flickroom is good and is responsive, even with all the Flickr features built into it. The interface is well crafted and is very intuitive that you will never get lost in there.

Here’s how it looks like when logged into a Flickr account:
(Click   on image for the enlarged version)

^[2]

How to Install Flickroom

Since it’s built on the AIR platform it requires Adobe AIR run-time to be installed on your computer. If you haven’t got that installed, get it here ^[3]at Adobe’s site. (If you’re using twitter clients like Twhirl and tweetdeck, you have AIR installed on your computer).

Go to the Flickroom site and install it from the download badge present there.

And now when Flickroom is installed and launched for the first time, you should authorize it to connect it to your Flickr profile. (Instructions to do this will be shown to you). Once you’re finished authorizing Flickroom with Flickr, you’re done. You’re all set to experience Flickr like never before!

Why Flickroom?

1. Infinitely better user experience with the black background
2. Pop-up notifications about activity on your photo stream ensuring you don’t have to constantly refresh your browser! – bringing real-time spirit to Flickr
3. Ability to easily check out latest   uploads from your contacts
4. Ability to comment, favourite, add notes straight from the app UI
5. Ability to view comments, tags, EXIF data and save photos on disk
6. Ability to tweet about your photographs on Twitter directly from the application (image URL is automatically in TinyURL format)
7. See which of your photos are in Flickr Explore
8. Search in photographs of current user or all Flickr users. This feature, coupled with ‘save to disk’ feature, makes this a great search tool.
9. And you can do drag-and-drop uploading!

Suggestions to the developers

Congrats on creating Flickroom, it’s really a great piece of work. Here are some suggestions to make it even more awesome.

• Improve typography used in the interface
• Smooth-ening the edges of modules will make it look nicer
• It would be great to have the “add to group” feature to be available for photos.
• Also check whether incorporating Flickr’s official tweeting mechanism is possible. Flic.kr URLs are snazzy!
• Provide options to search for images licensed under CreativeCommons

If you love Flickr and frequently spend your time there, Flickroom will make it all the more entertaining. (But remember, not everything must work perfect. It’s in Beta) (You may follow Flickroom ^[4] on twitter.)