Once the darling photo service of the digerati, Flickr has languished under Yahoo!’s ownership…until now. When Marissa Mayer took over as Yahoo! CEO, one of her first goals was to make Flickr relevant again. She has done that with 1TB of storage, a new UI that emphasizes photos, and a lovely new Android app. Here’s a snippet from the official announcement:
Today, we’re thrilled to take Flickr even further with a beautiful, completely re-imagined experience that puts photos front and center. When it comes to photography, technology and its limits shouldn’t hinder the experience. So we’re also giving our Flickr users one terabyte of space — for free. That’s enough for a lifetime of photos — more than 500,000 original, full-resolution, pixel-perfect, brilliant photos. Flickr users will never have to worry about running out of space.
Most people will focus on the storage limit, which is a remarkable thing and reminds me of how Google (Mayer’s former company) used to trounce the competition in terms of storage space (remember when Gmail was first announced?). The new UI is a notable improvement. For too long, it was too easy to get lost in Flickr’s text, which is something you don’t want a photo-sharing service to do. While I’m still getting used to the new UI, I’m really enjoying it so far. Between the new storage limit and improved UI, I’m certain that I’ll be using Flickr more in 2013 than I have in the last few years combined.
Have you gotten a chance to check out the new Flickr yet? I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Fire away in the comments section (please!).
