Flickr makes some big changes
While the world focuses on Yahoo! acquiring Tumblr for a hot billion, another Yahoo! property unveiled a huge makeover today with some amazing new features, but there are some details tech analyst cheerleaders have missed, namely that Flickr is ending Pro accounts and taking a new approach.
What has people the most excited is that Flickr will now offer users one terabyte of free space (aka 1,000 GB), enough space for 265,000 photos uploaded at 13 megapixels each. Very few users will ever reach this amount of stored photos and videos, but Flickr has the bragging rights to assert itself as relevant.
The company said on their blog, “At Flickr, we believe you should share all your images in full resolution, so life’s moments can be relived in their original quality. No limited pixels, no cramped formats, no memories that fall flat.”
Additionally, the entire site has had a makeover to bring it into modernity, riding the trend of minimalist UI and full screen images. Flickr is also reminding people that they are a social network and have jumped on the “cover photo” bandwagon as Facebook and Twitter have, allowing users to upload an image to their profile to represent themselves.
Yahoo acquired Flickr eight years ago, now boasting 89 million users and over 8 billion photos. The company says that if all photos uploaded to the internet were uploaded to Flickr at once, there would still be room for more.
Photo tour of the sexy new Flickr
We’ll let this quick photo tour speak for itself:
Images above pulled from the famous photographer, ulovei’s Flickr profile.
Okay, wait, no more Flickr Pro?
What slipped through the cracks of coverage so far is that starting today, Flickr Pro subscriptions will no longer be offered, and users will no longer have a “PRO” badge on their accounts, once used to differentiate professionals from standard free users. Most of the Pro features will be folded into the free accounts.
According to Flickr, recurring Pro users have the ability to renew and eligible Pro members can switch to a free account until August 20th of this year, but the “Gift of Pro” will no longer be offered.
Now, there are three levels of Flickr accounts – Free, Ad Free, and Doublr:
Free accounts get 1 Terabyte of photo and video storage, users can upload photos of up to 200MB per photo (a common complaint already surfacing in light of the 1TB announcement), the ability to upload 1080p HD videos of up to 1GB each, video playback of up to 3 minutes each, and uploading and downloading in full original quality.
Ad Free is $49.99 per year and is everything mentioned in the free offering, only without ads.
Doublr accounts are $499.99 per year, offering 2 terabytes of video and photo space in addition to everything offered in the free account, likely to be used primarily by media companies, movie houses and the like.
