Flickr Addict Review

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By jakerome | Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:07 pm EDT |

Please welcome jakerome, a hero in our forums, as our latest reviewer! - Dieter

Being a huge Pre fan and a bit of an anti-legend on Flickr, I was excited when I saw FlickrAddict had been introduced into the App Catalog. Not knowing what to expect, I was happy to discover that this app was the most stellar wallpaper app on webOS. Fun, serendipitous, easy to use, customizable and being constantly improved by Shane O'Sullivan, the Irish developer that's always seem ready to answer questions & respond to user feedback.

Read on for the full review!

OK, first thing is there are two apps: Flickr Addict and Flickr Addict Lite. I've been using Flickr Addict since day one, so I never touched the Lite version. Even though it's a bargain at only $1.99, the Lite version can be used to get a sense of Flickr Addict if you're not sure.

Over in the Palm Pre group on Flickr, we noticed this app right away and started a discussion about it. After a little sleuthing, Shane found his way over from the Flickr Addict page on Flickr & quickly began answering our questions and taking requests for improvements. Pretty awesome, and it's only gotten better as a result of adopting my suggestions! But it's about time I got on with the actual review, right?

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Flickr Addict is simply an application that rotates your wallpaper through various photos on Flickr. You can choose photos from the following sources:

Flickr's most interesting photos.
The Palm Pre & iPhoto Wallpaper groups
Any other group
From a specific user
From a specific photo set from any user
Based on a tag search from any photo on Flickr
Geolocation based

Pretty good, right? Even better, you can choose whether you want to use the most recent photos or a random selection. And the photos are changed at an interval of your choice, ranging from 5 minutes to daily with plenty of options in between.

Each day, 1-100 photos are downloaded and placed in the gallery. From the gallery, you can view any photo full screen and change the wallpaper manually if you like. You can choose to hide a specific photo or photos from individual users. Also, in what seems to be a new feature, there's an ability to view those photos in a slideshow. Sweet serendipity!

Photos of any orientation are downloaded. Portrait photos are cropped and displayed full screen, while there is an option to view landscape photos with black bars on top & bottom, or to have them automatically rotated so that they fill the screen.

After opening Flickr Addict, you can leave Flickr Addict open or throw the card away. My only mild complaint is that if Flickr Addict is not an open card and a "too many cards" error occurs, the wallpaper will no longer change. It's easily resolved by relaunching Flickr Addict when more memory is available. Probably not an issue for anyone with a Pre Plus!

Really, it's a simple little app that works really well and is getting better all the time. And it should scale up well, the perfect app to run on your smartphone today, and it would be perfect for a digital photo frame, too. You can keep up with changes by following Flickr Addict and Shane on Twitter. I'll close the review by urging everyone to download this app, and with a quote from another Flickr Addict fan: "For me, Flickr Addict injects a little serendipity; it’s a lot of fun to see a photo that I’d forgotten about just pop up onto my screen."