Flickr's New Look

Flickr will be rolling out a number of changes in the coming months, beginning with a new photo stream design, Justified View, and a new uploading feature, Uploadr.

Markus Spiering, Flickr head of product, discussed these changes with Mashable Tuesday. The company's main focus, he says: user engagement.

Justified View, which will go live Feb 28, trades Flickr's current white space-filled layout for something that looks a lot more like Pinterest (as has become the trend in web design). The new photo stream will first go live with your contacts (the people you follow). It showcases bigger photos and lacks text data. You can hover over photos to view tags and other information.

The new upload feature dubbed Uploadr, which will go live in late March, lets you drag and drop photos from your computer onto the site. Spiering calls Uploadr more like an app and less like a website. Photos are instantly viewed as thumbnail images, allowing you to add tags as you upload. Spiering thinks this will increase engagement, as Flickr continues to build the Internet's largest collection of geo-tagged photos (currently numbering at about 270 million).

SEE ALSO: 17 Most-Popular Photos From Flickr Commons

Moving forward, Spiering says Flickr stands behinds Yahoo's "mobile first" strategy, suggesting some future tricks the photo sharing service may have up its sleeves. The site's first mobile app, for Android, was released in September 2011.

Though you may not think of Flickr as a mobile photography center in the likes of Instagram or Hipstamatic, the iPhone is now the top camera on Flickr, losing ground only to the iPhone 4S.

What do you think of Flickr's changes? Where do you think the site fits into the mobile sharing space? Let us know what you use Flickr for in the comments.