Photographer looking for a place to store and display hundreds of high res images, which you can upload on the go? Flickr just became a serious contender. Yahoo! has given the photo sharing site a massive makeover, culling white space and all that boring text to make it all about the images. Oh, and it’s offering every user a terabyte of free storage for their images.
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The redesign was announced at an event in New York and via a blog post by new(ish) CEO Marissa Mayer, designed to highlight three points about the upgrade: it’s ‘biggr’ (more storage), ‘spectaculr’ (you can upload images in full resolution) and ‘wherevr’ (available on the go). In addition to its updated iPhone app, which it launched to general acclaim late last year, the company has also released a new Android offering which allows users to add filters, edit photos, share and upload high res photos.
It’s a stunning update: the site and apps now feature full screen grid-like photostreams, and with that terabyte of free storage, you can upload hundred of thousands of photos. How many? It depends on your device, but according to Yahoo!, you could store around 436 000 if you’re carrying around an 8MP camera (like on an iPhone 5 or Galaxy S III). Yahoo!’s also made exploring the site a much more immersive experience with slideshows, full screen search results and profile pages that continue the aesthetic. You can also easily share photos to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest.
Flickr even admits its a long overdue change, which Mayer hopes will “make Flickr awesome again”. The company has been accused of neglecting the photo site since it acquired it in 2005, but the updates at least show that that period is past. While the Tumblr acquisition is still recent news, it already has raised questions about how Yahoo! will integrate the blogging platform with Flickr in the future. It looks like we’ll have to wait and see, but the way Yahoo! included Flickr users’ photos in its beautiful new weather apps shows that it may just pull out something awesome as its Mayer period continues.
