Yahoo Gives Flickr iOS App Hashtag Support, Starts Photo Challenge

Yahoo has updated its iOS app for the Flickr photo sharing service to include first-time hashtag support.

Once the update is installed, users will be able to add a hashtag to a photo's title or description and search for other photos by their respective hashtags.

Hashtags are a form of metadata tag in which a word or a phrase of words is strung together without spaces behind a pound sign. Twitter first made hashtags popular back in 2009, when the company began hyperlinking them to search results.

Since then, hashtags have become a widely used means of depicting and categorizing data. Hashtag support has been extended to sites such as Google + and Instagram. There is even talk that social network Facebook might be planning to add hashtag support.

To promote the new hashtag support, Flickr has started a new weekly photo challenge called #FlickrFriday. The photo challenge will feature a new theme every week. Participating users will tag their photos with the #FlickrFriday hashtag. Flickr will then feature a selection of the best submissions on its blog the following week.

The new version (2.11.820) is available now as a 20.5MB download. The app is free in Apple's App Store.