Yahoo unveils revamped Flickr photo service with 1TB of free storage space

 

 

Capping off its earlier announcement that it would purchase photo blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, Yahoo also unveiled a complete redesign for its Flickr photo sharing service, including offering 1-terabyte of free storage space for users. Yahoo's announcement came at a press event in New York City tonight, where the company showed off screen shots of the new Flickr, which looks radically different from the service's previous incarnation with bigger photos and much less surrounding white space.

Flickr's main photo stream now features full-resolution images and a cleaner home page with less clutter and words. We've just learned about the changes to Flickr and have been playing around with the site and have come away impressed with the new look, which features edge-to-edge "full bleed" photos with very little text. You also get modern-looking slideshows with an option to add background music and easy ways to share your images with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and, of course, Yahoo's newly purchased Tumblr service.

"The look and feel here is about photos and being unbounded," CEO Marissa Mayer said. "Photos make the world go round. We want to make Flickr awesome again."

 

 

(There are some who may still like how Flickr looked previously but we're not among them, finding the excessive use of white space, questionable font choices, and uneasy navigation tools to be dated and unintuitive.)

"Flickr had become about words, little images, blue links. It was not about the photo anymore," Adam Cahan, Yahoo's senior vice president said at the press event, while noting that every user will now get 1TB of free storage space. "We want all of your images."

There are also two upgrade paths including an ad-free version of Flickr for $50 a year, and a "Doublr" account, which gives you 2TB of storage for a not-exactly-cheap $500 per year price. Yahoo is reportedly also doing away with the older Flickr Pro account option though current Pro users are, reportedly, "grandfathered" in to some of the new upgraded features.

We've answered some of our readers' frequently asked questions about what's changed (and what's stayed the same) with the new Flickr in this story.