by Brian Solis

Flickr continues to earn my business. Its community is vibrant and that, to date, has been the driving factor for convincing me to have the company host my pictures.

Over the last week or two, the online photo sharing network also rolled out two important features that completely change, for the better, how I manage my pictures.

First, for Pro account holders, Flickr has embedded statistics into the service to give you a better idea of traffic, popular photos, and top referrers. Very interesting indeed.

From the “Your Photos” dashboard, once you’ve activitated it of course, you’ll see “popular” next to “favorites” and “profile.”

I had to search the flickr blog for the post on how to turn it on. But to save you the step, just click here.

As you can see, Leah Culver is a popular person. The few random pictures I’ve taken of her at various events have skyrocketed to the top.

Flickr also introduced live, basic photo editing capabilities from within the image view page. The new service is powered by Picnik.

I normally don’t have time to run my pictures through Photoshop. 99.9% of the time, I simply upload everything as is, even if the framing or lighting is a little off.

Now with embedded online editing, I can fix or enhance my pictures as I’m browsing through the album. Editing includes, auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen and red-eye correction.
The picture of iJustine (Justine Ezarik) below was my first test subject. In the original photo, I had too much extra wall space to her left. Now, I can just hit crop, frame it the way I want, and then click save. In this case, I saved over the original, but saving a new file is also an option.

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