Get started with Flickr’s Camera Roll

Flickr has recently opened up the beta version of a new editing tool called Camera Roll.

Camera Roll is designed to make the editing and organising process much simpler than the existing Organizer tool.

Regular Flickr users may have already experimented with the beta in the past few months, but if you haven’t visited the photo-sharing site in a while, give it a go.

To get started, head to flickr.com/cameraroll and sign in to your account.

Flickr has said that it is progressively rolling out the update to all users, so if you cannot access the Camera Roll, check back in a few days.

The first thing you will notice from the Camera Roll is a timeline to the left of the photo pane. Click on a year to expand the view and browse through by month. Photos will appear on the right, divided by the date they were taken.

Click the Show Info toggle for an overlay on photos that shows how many views each has received. To go to an individual photo page, hover over the image and click the arrows to open the page in a new tab.

The Camera Roll is also much faster to load than the traditional Organizer tool. However, some functionality is still missing in the Camera Roll, such as the ability to search your own photos by tags.

Batch editing

Editing a bunch of images at a time using Flickr’s current Organizer interface can be a pain. Camera Roll makes it much easier. To select photos for batch editing, you can either click on them individually, or click and drag to highlight a selection.

The pop-up from the bottom of the screen lets you choose privacy options, or click the Edit button for more options. Tags, titles and dates can be changed for all the images you have selected in that batch. There’s also the option to change usage rights and tag people in photos.

As the tool is still in beta, if you find any bugs or want to make functionality requests, leave a comment on this thread.

Remember if the Camera Roll doesn’t do it for you, the Organize tool is still available.