The long awaited official Flickr app is finally here and ready for free download from the iTunes App Store, from the people at Yahoo. The app lets you do all of the most common tasks including search for photos or videos by keyword, write comments, share photos, geo-tag pics, add your photos to sets and even upload photos you’ve take on your iPhone to your Flickr account.

When you load the app for the first time it grabs your location. Then it starts to do a slideshow of random images in the fading and sliding flavor of the Mac screensaver, which is quite pleasing by itself.

There are 3 main tabs: Recent, shows activity in your account, You shows your photos and sets, and Contacts a list of all your Flickr buddies iPhone style.

The Flickr app also now lets you view your friends, their photos and mark as favorites. The Flickr iPhone app now basically puts its entire photo library in your hands at all times, giving you an endless stream of viewing pleasure and exploration. Since there is some mildly adult content on this app, it is rated 12+ by the App Store.

So what’s missing in the first release of the Flickr app you ask?
- You can’t download photos from the app to your iPhone. Think of all the cool iPhone wallpapers you could easily create if this was an option.
- Although geo-tagging is done, it could be a bit more accurate, by using the actual time a photo was taken in the tag.
- For now you can’t explore the “interesting” photos in the Flickr app, we miss this one a lot.
- No Photo editing feature yet, as expected
- Can’t delete photos after uploading them
- Can’t edit the properties of your photos form the iPhone app yet.
- Although you can upload photos, you can’t upload them in batches, for now.
- Can’t zoom in on any photo as you might expect by pinch/pan action
- Max of only 45 sets are displayed
- Push notifications: would be great to get messages when contacts upload photos etc.
- Local search, although the app uses your location, it doesn’t make a point to show you local photos currently

Overall, we like the initial effort form Flickr and the fact that its free. Version 1.01 is done, but that app is not complete yet, and will more that likely go through its share of feature upgrades in the coming months.

As a side note: Flickr has also had a Mobile Safari optimized portal for iPhone users which is still available by going to http://m.flickr.com from Safari on your iPhone or iPod touch.

This 3rd Party App is available at the Apple iTunes AppStore. Browse the full list of all AppStore apps filed under the AppStore category.