We're not exactly clear on why there's a panda on Flickr puking a rainbow of photos, but there it is, an unusual way to see the best images on the photo-sharing site. Click on a photo quick before it disappears to see its Flickr page. [via Waxy]

Photo sharing site Flickr just activated an iPhone-scaled version of the site for anyone visiting the site with a mobile Safari browser. The menus are optimised to put the most-accessed activities—photo stream browsing, "Explore" mode, and recent comment activity—right up front, and your upload-by-email address is placed in the "More" section. Best of all, Flickr's site pre-loads many of the iPhone-scaled thumbnails you're checking out, so flipping between pictures often doesn't require any kind of refresh. No slideshows for now, given the lack of Flash on the iPhone, but the site's a nice alternative to pinching and pulling gigantic photos on the standard site.

Large swathes of Flickr are filled with this week's uploads of last week's party, so it's great to see rarer public photo archives also becoming available on the service. The NSW State Library has launched its own Flickr stream featuring photos of historical firsts such as the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and early transport and technology developments. The initial 100 images will be supplemented with others in the future.

For their new "Purple Pedals" campaign, Yahoo has dispatched a handful of GPS-enabled bicycles equipped with cameraphones that automatically shoot and upload photos to Flickr to riders in cities all over the world, from San Francisco to New York and soon, to Singapore, Denmark and the U.K.. The bikes come with solar panels which power the camera, and special software that uses the phone's accelerometer to snap photos every 60 seconds automatically when the bike is in motion. I was one of the lucky folks to get my hands on one of these bikes, and I've been riding it all over San Diego for over a week now. Let's take a look at how the bike works, how it was made, and how you can turn your handlebars into a tripod and photo-map your neighbourhood in similar fashion.

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Windows only: Fleace is a Flickr-based desktop switcher for those who only want to switch their desktop wallpaper on startup, or who dislike having wallpaper rotators hang around in their system tray. The stand-alone app can be launched or given a shortcut, which allows the user to preview an image before applying it to the desktop and shutting Fleace down. Alternately, you can add Fleace as a run-once app to your startup process, so it will pull and place Flickr artwork based on tags you specify. Those seeking finer control should check out the excellent John's Background Switcher, but Fleace is a nice solution for low-memory systems or non-picky users. Fleace is a free download for Windows systems only.

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Flickr has launched a new and improved version of their slideshow tool. Most notably, the new slideshow seamlessly transitions between photos and video in the same set of slides. Thanks Sonny!

Lots of webapps—Flickr, Tumblr, and Remember the Milk, among them—let you upload items through custom email addresses. Those addresses, though, are usually very long, or extremely random, and hard to remember when you're trying to dash off something. The Digital Inspiration blog recommends putting the ever-clever disposable Gmail address trick to work, which also works with other email providers. Set up a filter to send mail addressed to YourName+Flickr@gmail.com to your custom Flickr address, and those camera pics just got a lot more convenient to post. Hit the link below for more detailed instructions, and share your other webapp email work-arounds in the comments.

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Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe AIR): Free Adobe AIR application Flump downloads all the photos from a user-specified Flickr account to your hard drive. It's a simple one-use application: You provide it with a Flickr ID or username, tell it where to save the photos, and click Start Flump. We've highlighted similar tools before, namely FlickrDown and Flickr AutoDownloadr, but Flump is the only cross-platform offering, and it's also the most no-nonsense app of the bunch—perfect for backing up all your Flickr pics on a new computer. Flump is free, works wherever Adobe AIR does.

Webapp Blow Up displays Flickr photos in a full-screen slideshow for closeup browsing. When you want to show off your vacation photos from this summer that you uploaded to Flickr, head over to Blow Up Your Flickr and enter your username. Blow Up will pull down your photos and display them full screen, with a hideaway thumbnail navigation. Web site owners, you can even download the Blow Up app and install it on your own site.

Need an image with dark blue and green undertones for desktop wallpaper or a design project? Multicolr Search Lab, a free search utility, digs through roughly 3 million images in Flickr's "Interesting" set for photos featuring the colours you select. You can make one colour more prominent by selecting it multiple times, and the results seem pretty genuine—my only complaint is that you have to find the colours with your eyes, and can't put in hexadecimal or RGB values grabbed from graphics programs. The colour search engine also has a front end for Alamy Stock Photography for those in need of definite royalty-free images.