Flickr's redesign makes it much easier to find the photo you're looking for

Yahoo is giving Flickr a big IQ boost.

The company announced on Thursday it is refreshing its apps to take advantage of Flickr's image recognition abilities. The move is part of a greater effort to improve search, organizational features and streamline the uploading process, which will make it easier to move photos off your devices.

The iOS and Android apps have been reworked so the experience feels the same on both apps as well as on the web.

A revamped version of Camera Roll will let you view all the photos and videos you've ever uploaded to your Flickr account; you can sort your photo catalog by date or use a new "magic view" feature that automatically sorts your photos into categories, such as black and white, landscapes, screenshots and animals using image recognition. The feature will sort images into more than 60 categories so you can easily view similar photos at once.

Flickr's new "magic view" which uses image recognition to automatically sort your photos.

In addition, the service is leveraging its image recognition abilities to dramatically improve its search. Flickr is now better able to detect what type of photo you're looking for and weed out irrelevant results.

"Look for photos of the London Eye to find the giant Ferris wheel, and you'll no longer find countless photos of eyes taken in London," Flickr's head of engineering, Tim Miller, wrote in a Tumblrpost. "Instead, our new advanced search algorithms understand your intent and bring you higher quality results time after time."

Flickr's new and improved web search

These search tools also apply to searching your own photos; you can look for images based on subject, such as specific holidays, locations or dates.

Finally, the update adds new uploading tools for Windows and Mac, permitting uploads up to 500,000 photos to one account as once. This is a good way to take advantage of that 1,000 GB of free storage Flickr offers.

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Airbnb launches photo-centric app for iPads and Android tablets

 

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Airbnb's app is getting a little more travel-friendly.

The company will roll out a new version of the app for iPad and Android tablet users Wednesday night, the first time Airbnb has had a dedicated app for larger mobile displays.

Feature-wise, the tablet app isn't much different than the existing smartphone apps. Users can browse and book listings, contact hosts, get directions or check for last-minute rentals. It also has a dedicated host experience, so hosts can manage their listings and respond to messages.

Alex Schleifer, Airbnb's design chief, said the look of the image-focused tablet app is meant to be reminiscent of a magazine spread or coffee table book with big glossy photos.

"We wanted to focus on photography ... it's a tremendously large catalog that we have," Schleifer told Mashable. "We know that people explore cities through the photos of our homes so we wanted the tablet to really make this front and center. "

IMAGE: AIRBNB

This is evident throughout the app. The home screen, for example, features high-resolution photos of popular destinations while search results emphasize photos first. Similarly, swiping left from the map view of search results displays photos of listings in a grid of images.

Mobile is an increasingly important area for Airbnb: The company says two-thirds of all bookings have "some sort of mobile component," a number that jumps to 80% for last-minute bookings.

The tablet app is iPad and Android only for now, though Schleifer didn't entirely discount the possibility of a Windows version in the future. He also said an app for the Apple Watch or Android Wear smartwatches is possible.

"What we will never do is just launching something for the sake of it and it's really hard to see the benefits that we can add to it until something is out in market," he said. "We're definitely looking at the Apple Watch, as we should. How can this bring value to our hosts and our guests, that's the way we look at it first."

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