New Apple TV Flickr App
Beautiful photos deserve beautiful displays and if you’ve ever shown off your photos on a TV, you know how stunning they look on a large high definition screen! For the first time with Apple TV, sign into Flickr and view all your photos, videos, Favorites, Albums, and Groups. In one click, make any album into a slideshow or screensaver ready to share with friends, or customize in real-time with over fifteen different slideshow and screensaver modes.
On the new AppleTV client, you can connect to your friends more easily, (you basically couldn’t do this at all previously), but again, the pictures are presented to you in cropped, heavily compressed versions that you have no control over at all. It also has new browse and search options, but once you find a picture, there is no way to go to the account of that person, or see other related pictures etc.
It’s nice to be able to view my non-public photos now. I’m not sure whether it’s the compression or a problem with the app, but my photos still don’t look very good on the TV. I get better quality with Apple TV video content or even a USB stick of the same photos via my Blu-ray player.
Update (2014-07-12): Flickr developer Phil Dokas:
In the Flickr AppleTV app you can long-select on any photo to go to the photographers profile.
And the photos aren’t compressed, they’re exactly the same as used on the site and apps.
Yep, since day 1! There is some cropping (e.g. square thumbnails) but only in lists, and that’s because of OS requirements.
I no longer have the photos USB stick handy, so I can’t do an A/B comparison right now. Perhaps it doesn’t look as good as I remember.
