Alpha… Beta… Gamma!

We’ve just released the big round of changes I mentioned last week: New Navigation, New Search, New and Improved Organizr, and the Person Menu. All of these improvements have been designed to help you navigate the site with less effort and organize your photos more efficiently.

Instead of explaining everything in minute detail, I’d much rather just step back and let you get started exploring the new Gamma site. But! Before you do, here are a few pointers:

Navigation
Look for new navigation menus in the top navigation bar: You, Organize, Contacts, Groups, Explore.

Search
When you search from the main navigation bar, you’ll be looking through the titles, tags & descriptions of all the photos on Flickr. You’ll see that you can zero in on your photos or photos from one of your contacts too, and sort the results in a few different ways on the search results page.

Screengrab of the new person menu

Person Menu
You can access the new Person Menu by moving your mouse over someone’s Buddy Icon.

Organizr
Double Click and Drag & Drop are your friends when you’re using Organizr. We’ve also added a new section to the FAQ called "The Organizr" where you’ll see that each area of the Organizr has been highlighted and explained, so that’s a good place to start to orient yourself with the new workspace.

By the way, we’ve snipped "Your Groups" out of the Organizr temporarily. It will return!

Trouble? Bugs?
Some people say that change is as good as a holiday, and even though things have certainly changed, we’re hoping it’s very much for the better. Even so, as you surf around you may find the odd hiccup or two. If you do find something that doesn’t work, we’d love to know about it. We’ve created two official bug-collecting threads in FlickrBugs: one for the Organizr, and one for new website. If you have feedback or are having trouble with something, please head over to the FlickrHelp topic if you need a hand.

What are you waiting for? Go have a look!