Meet the New Flickr: Yahoo Unveils a Bigger Instagram-Like Design

Yahoo has just rolled out a major face-lift for Flickr, its photo sharing service, making it much bigger and grandiose. This marks a historic 24-hour period for Yahoo which also just put the finishing touches on a deal to buy the popular social networking platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion! And in the Flickr and Tumblr tradition of dropping the final vowel or ‘e’, comes new features labeled as biggr, spectaculr, wherevr and doublr. Currently, Flickr has 89 million users who have uploaded more than 8 billion photographs!
 

Biggr: A free terabyte of space

Flickr now allows users to upload images in full resolution (and videos) for free, with up to 1 terabyte of space. How large is 1 terabyte actually? Well according to Flickr, “you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.” At the press event to announce the new features, Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer also said, “You can take all the pictures ever taken and upload them to Flickr… and there would [still be room].” She also mentioned, “Flickr was once awesome, and it languished… now we want it to be awesome again.”
 

Spectaculr: A new and beautiful experience for your photos

Flickr has revealed a brand new design that looks to put photos at the heart of your Flickr experience. Your new homepage is a portal into everything you care about including all the photos Flickr has to offer. The new activity Feed shows your friends’ recent uploads, as well as activity on your photos, combined into one Instagram-like design.

Activity Feed

Your Photostream

The new grid-like Photostream displays your photos via a seamless layout giving you room to express yourself with a customizable cover photo and high-res profile picture.

Your Photo Sets

Flickr provides you powerful tools to organize your favorite photos into Sets. The new photo experience displays images in full resolution, showing as many pixels as possible, while providing you all the context to engage conversation around each picture. Flickr has also released a new ‘slideshow mode’ that will showcase photos automatically, without you even having to click through.
 

Flickr Video

Flickr also wanted to give everyone room for longer videos, whether that be a beautiful time-lapse or just catching a friend off guard at a party. You can now upload as many videos as you like (within 1 terabyte) supporting up to a full 3 minutes per video at 1080p HD quality.
 

Wherevr: Flickr photos anywhere

Flickr has also unveiled a new streamlined Android app to go along with its iPhone app released last December.
 

Doublr

Flickr is also introducing a way to remove on site advertisements for $50, and for the serious photography professional, a $499.99 ‘Doublr’ package to essentially double your storage space to two terabytes per year, or roughly 400,000 photos.

Flickr said this about the new release:

None of this would have been possible without you, the Flickr community. Much of what you see here started as ideas we’ve heard from you over the years. We are all truly excited to deliver the home your photos deserve, whether you’re sharing them with your friends, your family, or the world.

In my opinion it’s nice to see them give the free users more space, but their doublr package might be a hefty charge to incur compared to other photo sharing communities like 500px or SmugMug. Besides given most users are used to the freemium model of uploading unlimited pics to Facebook or Instagram already, will this be enough to make Flickr cool again? Or are they relying to heavily on ad revenue to sustain itself at the expense of some users’ happiness?

Either way, you can visit the Flickr forum to chime in with your ideas and feedback. Also, be sure to check out some funny reactions to Yahoo’s other major announcement, the purchase of Tumblr!

So what do you think about the new Flickr?