Imgur rolls out 'Topics' to help you find photos faster

Imgur has made some changes lately, with the most exciting being their move away from a tiered Pro offering to a completely ad-based experience, wherein all Pro services were offered up for free. The service is still a firehose, though, with popularity and tagging being your best bets for finding what you want. To better help you navigate Imgur, there is now a new feature called 'Topics', which could lead you to the pics you want to find quickly.

With tagging, Imgur users could suggest and upvote tags for pictures. That left it a crowdsourced feature, more or less, which didn't always work out so well. Gallery creation by tag was also possible, but also not widely adopted.

Topics take the opposite approach. Rather than relying on votes or gallery creation, users tag a picture with a tag (just one), and submit it to a gallery.

The aim is getting you to pics you want, quickly. If you're only going to Imgur for cute pics of animals, you'd probably want to check out the 'aww' section. Similarly, if you were looking for pics or memes on what's happening right now, 'Current Events' would be for you.

Topics aren't filtered, so users can tag photos as they see fit. In that sense, your idea of awesome might not be someone else's idea of awesome, so you still have to bear with a little bit of noise.

Imgur was always handy as a file dump for pics, but new tools like Topics or GIF creation are starting to make it an actual tool rather than a storage locker. Free to use is nice, too.

Source: Imgur