Just one day after Yahoo announced that former Googler Marissa Mayer would be taking the reigns as the new CEO, the internet rose up with its first request: Please make Flickr awesome again. Ever since Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing service back in 2005, users have dropped off and the quality of the experience has gone down – at least according to the general consensus. The common wisdom is that Yahoo kind of screwed up Flickr, and now they’re looking to rectify that damage.
At a press event in NYC, just hours after Mayer officially announced the company’s acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo unveiled a completely revamp Flickr – complete with a fresh UI redesign and a whole hell of a lot of storage.
The latter is probably the most significant news to come out of the announcement. Starting today, you now have a free terabyte of space. That’s huge. As Yahoo says, “you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.” That’s approximately 873,813 4.0 megapixel photos, 436,906 8mp photos, or 218,453 16mp photos. This upgraded storage also means that you can house longer videos on Flickr – 3 minutes at 1080p per video.
The interface has received a massive upgrade as well, as Flickr has done away with most of the white space on the site to give users a truly immersive photo experience.
“We want Flickr to be the most amazing community and place for you to share your photos. So, we’re also revealing a beautiful new design that puts photos at the heart of your Flickr experience, where they should always be. Whether it’s a sweeping landscape or a family portrait, we want every photo to be at its most spectacular,” says Flickr’s Markus Spiering. “Your homepage is now a gateway to everything you care about, and all the photos Flickr has to offer. Our new Activity Feed combines your friends’ recent uploads with activity on your own photos, and all in a beautiful design that lets you share and interact right on the page.”
The individual photo pages have been improved to highlight the image in high-res, pushing the photo information below the fold.
There are also some new paid options for the service – for $49.99 a year you can get rid of all the ads on the site, and for $499.99 you can snag 2TB of storage.
Flickr also unveiled a new Android app, which brings it up to speed with the iOS upgrade the service received a few months ago.
“The world is going mobile, and in December we took the first big step to send Flickr wherever you go with a new and beloved iPhone app. Our brand new Android app pushes the boundaries on beauty even further. We designed it with your needs in mind: how you interact, how you share, and how you view photos when you’re on the go.”
The new site is live, as is the new Android app. Check it out.