Photos from dirk huijssoon, francescadistefano, pixelsrzen, Stephen Oachs, The Family Dog, gsgeorge, and dennisbehm.

The community you build is what makes Flickr truly unique. And Flickr Groups are the pulse of the community on Flickr. So we’re very excited to share three Group announcements with you.

Justified View

Since the Justified View appeared on Photos from your Contacts and on your Favorites page you have been asking us to bring the same experience to groups. So starting today, you can browse the 1.2 billion photos in Flickr groups in our new Justified View.

But there’s more: not only are Group pools available in Justified View, we’ve also created a sidebar that makes the entire Groups experience more interactive and simpler to navigate. As you scroll through the photos in a Group Pool, the new sidebar persistently gives you context on what the group is about. It also surfaces the most recent discussions happening in the group and highlights the top tags as well as the top contributors for members who want to dig a little deeper.

For your viewing pleasure, we’ve picked out some amazing Groups that we thought you might want to check out (and join!). Take a look at Less Is More, panoramas, and U.S. National Parks.

Submit photos to groups from within Uploadr

Lots of you have asked us to make it easier to get your photos into a group and we’ve just added the ability to upload photos directly to your groups within the new Flickr Uploadr.  Just click on "Add to Group" in the editing panel to access your existing groups and presto! Your photos will be sent to the group at the same time that they’re published on your photostream.

New Groups API methods, new possibilities

We are also very excited to release several new API methods that enable our members to interact with group discussions such as reading topics and replies, and posting to group discussions. The release also includes methods to join and leave a group (that may be of special interest to you mobile developers out there). You can find more information regarding these new methods on our API documentation page. Or you can head over to the code.flickr blog to read Jamal’s post on the new API methods.

We continue to work hard on the new Flickr. Stay tuned! We created a new thread for bugs and feedback for justified group pools and the new sidebar; head over to the existing thread if you encounter issues with the new Add to Groups option in Uploadr.

In February 2012 the National Maritime Museum in London embarked on its second co-curated exhibition since the July 2011 opening of their new Sammy Ofer Wing and the Compass Lounge.

Being an active contributor to The Commons on Flickr, the new space has allowed the Museum’s team to take this participation much further. So in March, it invited members of their active Flickr community to curate a display of historical photographs that are significant to them from the National Maritime Museum’s collection .

Since then 17 Flickr members have gone behind the scenes with Bronwen Colquhoun, a PhD student from Newcastle University, and the Museum’s Digital Participation Officer, Jane Findlay, to explore the Museum’s Commons sets, delve into the historic photograph collection, and meet with Museum staff about developing exhibitions.

Starting from a huge amount of photographs the group worked together to select the final eight images which will soon be exhibited in the Compass Lounge and form a new set on the National Maritime Museum’s Commons account on Flickr. A further hundred digital images will be shown alongside the prints which reflect more closely individual participants’ personal routes of exploration through the collection – these images will also be accompanied by tag clouds to capture the individual responses to the images.

"We’re keen for other Flickr users and visitors to get involved and get inspired by photography by discussing the choices and adding their own tags online. Those interested are invited to follow the Curate the Collection group on Flickr and share their thoughts." says Emma McLean from the National Maritime Museum.

This is just one of Bronwen’s active research projects around how Flickr Commons supports community engagement and making sense of the photographic collections. She’ll be taking this project forward through working with the Washington Library of Congress and Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums to explore their Flickr Commons collections.

Photos from National Maritime Museum and aka Razz. For updates and personal insights into the project, you can follow the participants’ Curate The Collection Blog and the National Maritime Museums’ Collections Blog.

All photos uploaded Tuesday from blank array, nilliske, briyen, hvhe1, and suzettine.

Stereo the Snowman‘s illustrations are wonderful and varied. You can see a few examples above but we invite you to explore more of her work in her photostream…

There are so many amazing photos of yesterdays annular eclipse it was hard to choose. Make sure you browse through the rest (over 16,000 uploaded so far!) on Flickr.

Photos from Paul_ (shin.ogata), flopper, unripegreenbanana, Michael Kyraha, and jimnista

These portraits caught our eye, as they are a good example of how baby powder and a little bit of toning can create a truly magical atmosphere.

Photos from brookeshaden, and jason laucker.

Heads up! There are quite a few meetups happening this weekend. If you are near any of these places head on over to shoot some photos and meet other Flickr members IRL (In Real Life).

* New York, NY
* Atlanta, GA
* Los Angeles, CA
* Oakland, CA
* St. Louis, MO
* Aberdeen, United Kingdom
* Perth, Australia

If you don’t see one near you, start one! You can see all the meetups or start your own on the Flickr Meetup page. Have fun!

Photos from mississaugapictures, Hamed Saber, citron bleu, and a nameless yeast.

Two weeks ago we brought you the new hi-res images in the lightbox and today we’re releasing those amazing hi-res images directly on the main photo page. Hi-res images on the photo page let you share all the detail side by side with the context of your photos. Location, time, camera, title, description, tags and more are all there to tell the full story around your photos.

And it’s not only that you see larger images – we’re releasing this with a new “liquid” layout.

Flickr’s “liquid” design adjusts the photo page and image size based on the size of your browser window. With that your photos will look great on a laptop screen, and look even more stunning on larger screens.  With the new design:

• The biggest photo size is shown depending on your browser window
• There is absolutely no “upscaling”, and we try to avoid downsampling as much as possible.
• The title and the sidebar are visible without scrolling on landscape oriented photos. (which are the vast majority of photos on Flickr.)

With the introduction of the new liquid layout, we are also introducing the new photo sizes to our API and in the “All Sizes” menu.

If you are interested how the new photo page magic works behind the scenes, then you can read the blog post on code.flickr.com. As always please let us know in the help forum if you find any bugs or have feedback to share with us.

Photo from Thomas Hawk

While nowadays, redscale film can be bought premade, it is based on a simple technique: In essence, photographic film is reversed and wound upside-down into an empty film canister. When used, it is exposed from the wrong side creating beautifully tinted images with colors ranging from maroon, to red, to organge, to yellow.

You can find more beautiful shots in our Redscale groups, or in a tag search for redscale+film.

Photos from Trapac, ozgecan, celia gómez de villavedón, cherryrae., slimmer_jimmer, raquel fialho, and 25ThC.