Flickr Gets an HTML5 Uploader with Drag and Drop

Flickr may not be the hottest thing around, but it's all that Yahoo's got at the moment. And, while the photo-sharing herds have moved on to greener pastures (maybe it's all the colored filters that make them seem so) like Instagram, there are still plenty of people using Flickr.

And if you're seriously interested in photography, it's still the best place around, though Google+ is becoming an interesting alternative.

In any case, Flickr is doing its best to, at least, hang on to the users it has, if not add new ones, and it has been introducing quite a few new features and improvements lately.

It's now debuting a brand new HTML5 uploader that's a significant improvement over the previous one. The photo uploader is one of the most important tools for a photo site, especially one that expects users to upload images in batches.

"We’re utilizing some advanced HTML 5 browser technology to bring you a completely new uploading experience on Flickr. You can now add photos by dragging them into the browser," Yahoo explained.

"We also show preview thumbnails, where supported, so you can use the intuitive drag and drop interface to manage and reorder photos before they hit your photostream. You can also easily zoom, rotate or sort your photos by title," it added.

The new uploader also makes it easier to add metadata to your photos, titles, descriptions and so on and also enables users to organize their uploads into sets.

The tool is also significantly faster, Yahoo says upload speeds should be 20 to 30 percent faster on average and even as high as 50 to 60 percent faster in some cases. International users should feel the improvement the most, indicating that Yahoo is making better use of its worldwide data centers.

Finally, free users can now upload photos as large as 30 MB, Pro users as large as 50 MB, which allows for some huge jpegs. The tool is rolling out to all users over the next couple of weeks, so you may not be able to use it just yet.