Everybody and their brother were requesting nested albums from Flickr development team for as long as I’ve been using the service. Indeed, when switching from conventional photo gallery applications, it looked a bit surprising that one couldn’t create albums within albums (say album “Russia” within album “Travels”).
With time, I forgot about this feature and got used to one level sets (Flickr lingo for albums). There are so many other ways to search, organize and navigate photos – tags, intuitive search, RSS feeds, contacts, groups, etc – that nested albums weren’t anywhere critical.
Those people who just can’t live without nested albums, can relax now. The feature was added with the most recent update of Flickr and is available with Pro accounts now (Pro account will cost about $25 USD per year, but it’s worth every cent).
I went back and scrolled through the list of my sets, trying to locate those that would fit collections (new term for nested sets) easily. It turned out that I could only create three collections – Cyprus Rally, Limassol Grand Carnival and KSP (most of you won’t be interested in this one). There is also some potential for a split in my Trip to Russia set, but I can’t be bothered with that now.
Flickr collections can be nested themselves. The maximum depth is limited to 5 levels for now. That is you can include a set in the collection, in the collection, in the collection… isn’t that already more than enough? Probably. But that’s not the best part yet. The best part is that sets and collections can belong to as many other collections as you want. That’s similar how photos are organized into sets. Excellent!
This post in Flickr blog has all the details. Also, about that other feature – of a customized layout of the front page with your photos. Now you can choose to use larger image sizes and use latest collections instead of sets, or disable them altogether.