If you’re an active member of any Flickr group, you may notice a few changes as your admins take advantage of five new features that we’ve unleashed today: News Flash, Invite a Photo, Group Rules, Photo Moderation and Tiered Group Administration.

Here’s the full poop for all you admins:

News Flash!
Look for a grey box on your main group page that says ‘Admins: Click to add an announcement to all group members’. This news flash will stay on the group home page until replaced or deleted.

Invite a Photo
You’re surfing through the Flickrverse and you find a photo that would be perfect for your group. This new feature will allow an administrator to invite that particular photo to their group without membership requirement. You’ll see a new link under the comment box that says ‘Invite this photo to…’ To use this feature, start there!

Group Rules
You can now set up group rules that new members need to agree to before they join your group. Nothing will change for existing group members, but any new members will need to agree to your rules before they become a member. So now you can take those rules out of your group description, and call them out more clearly.

Photo Moderation
Ever wished you had a chance to review photos before they show up in your group pool? Well, now you can! For each group that you run, you can choose to set up an "approval queue". When someone adds a photo to your group, you’ll see a "there are pending photos for you" note. All you have to do is open up the queue and review submissions. From there, Administrators or Moderators can approve or deny photos, and publish the ones that fit. Yeah!

Introducing the Moderator
We’re sliding a new level of account membership between admins and members — the moderator. A moderator is a middle-ground role designed to help administrators run the group, but doesn’t have full administrative power. A moderator can use the new photo moderation queue, remove or ban members, and moderate group discussions with edit/delete power.

If you are a group founder, or the oldest administrator of a group, expect to see a message on your groups page that will give you more information on how to transition to this structure.

We’d like to thank all of our group admins for putting up with our somewhat limited group moderation tools for so long. Despite the limited functionality, you’ve created some wonderful environments and we hope that these improvements make your groups even more fabulous.

Photo from puja.