14 DAY TRIAL // I hope you agree with me when I say that Flickr is the YouTube for still images. With millions of users worldwide, you can imagine the amount of digital photos available. You can find anything in there, from funny images or landscape instances to fine digital art. It's a world for every taste.
And once they were bought by Yahoo! the format did not change at all and all Yahoo users could login with their Yahoo! account details. Easy to use, Flickr gives you the possibility of browsing through millions of images with no restriction at all.
But if you think that managing your images from the Flickr account is a tough job, then you have to appeal to more comfortable solutions, like Nostalgia. The application is a freeware designed to synchronize the images to your Flickr account.
Though it is still at the beginning, one aspect has been properly been taken care of, and that is the interface. It looks like a photo manager, but it resembles a web-based application more. The main options run down in the left hand side of the application window while the fast area in the middle is reserved to rendering the images.
I have to warn you from the beginning that if you plan to use this nifty looking tool you'd better have a broadband connection. Otherwise, you will most likely waste precious time waiting for the images to load. Second of all you must have a Flickr account. It is quite OK if you don't as your Yahoo! login details also work.
Nostalgia has been built to ease your image uploading needs and to preserve the options you were used to in Flickr. So you should expect the same functionality given by the creation of sets of pictures. Also, exploring the images available in Flickr is a cinch. In this sense, Nostalgia permits you to look at the stills added in the week. There are no details on the uploader, only the images. This way you can enjoy the visual experience undisturbed by other factors.
Creating a new set in Nostalgia can be done by using the New Set button located in the lower left hand corner of the application window. The new dialog lets you name the folder and make it a Flickr set. Our testing proved that Nostalgia falls short in managing the picture sets as the numbering is with a flaw: deleting one of the folders will cause the numbering of all the others to remain unchanged. This way if you keep creating sets and deleting the first one, you will never have number 1.
Each set of images can be viewed separately by simply selecting it. All the images contained will be displayed in thumbnail view. The great part is that you can change the location of each image with a simple click and drag. The operation is dynamic and will cause a movement of all the elements displayed in the window in view of the new arrangement.
If you want to take a look at all the sets of images at once, all you need to do is switch to All Photos view. To resize the thumbnails all you have to do is drag to the right the slider doming at the top of the window. Thumbs will be instantly resized. Hovering your mouse over the "flickr sync" button will show you the progress of both upload and download. This is how you can keep a tab on the synchronization of the images in the web account and Nostalgia.
Finding a particular picture in Flickr would be hell if it weren't for the search tool. The same is available in Nostalgia as well. The search tool will help you discover new images, as well as finding the one you want. Type your query and press Enter. Depending on the speed of your Internet connection, the results will take more or less to be displayed.
The user can also import into Nostalgia images from the computer. The Import function available in the top left corner of the image view window permits appending images to your Flickr account both from your computer as from the picture sets created in Nostalgia. However, I had a little trouble with uploading the files as Nostalgia became unstable and kept closing. Additionally, during our testing, uploading images to Flickr happened only once. Though the synchronization icon showed activity in progress, it never got to an end.
The Good
If you want good looks and a hell of a tool to browse through Flickr content, Nostalgia is the one to deploy. Multiple selection of items and dragging and dropping them into a different area of the application is more like a visual feast than a simple drag and drop operation.
The Bad
Nostalgia proved to be highly unstable as, during our testing the application, it surprised us with multiple crashes. The synchronization with Flickr is not flawless and in our case, it took a while to upload a bunch of files.
The application does not support single file importing. But if you really want to add only one picture, then copy it to an empty folder and import the entire directory.
The Truth
I had some great time exploring Flickr content. Nothing distracted me, and I can tell you that the visual experience is fantastic.
However, Nostalgia still has a lot to perfect in order to become a full-fledged reliable application.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
