For the photography enthusiasts in the hobby, there was some significant news with Yahoo! announcing upgrades to its photo storage and sharing site Flickr that included 1 terabyte of storage. Flickr may not have been the first but they were one of the best photo sharing websites setting a standard for others coming on the scene later. But since the acquisition by Yahoo! in 2005, not much has changed with the service until yesterday. Coming in with a total redesign, Flickr has some interesting changes most notably the vast amount of storage you’ll get.
The reef hobby also seems to inspire tangential hobbies and interests with one of the biggest being photography. Any time you go to a reef show, club tank tour or public aquarium tour there are always at least a handful of photographers toting around a digital SLR camera snapping off shots of corals, fish, aquariums and equipment. The intricate and colorful corals, exotic fish and unique aquariums make for the perfect photography fodder. Besides, we all know how hard it is to not tinker with our aquariums and having another creative outlet gives our systems a much-needed break.
This news is significant for the average user looking for ginormous amount of storage. Prior to the changes, you were limited on uploads and file sizes and the new Flickr gives you the ability to upload photos as large at 200MB (up from 10MB before), create collections, post to up 60 group pools and limit the maximum image size available to others.
If you happen to have a Flickr Pro account, there are a few issues you’ll want to explore before making the switch. While you were able to have unlimited storage, you are now faced with limits on file sizes. However, Flickr Pro users also get to view view counts and referrer statistics for their images — handy for professionals looking to see what images resonate with viewers and which are shared on the web the most.
Flickr also now gives you the ability to view the site ad free for $49.99 a year and if you find that 1TB of data isn’t enough, you can double your storage to 2TB for $499.99 a year.
Our overall impressions of Flickr were favorable and feel the site still needs some minor tweaks to make it better and the increased storage is a huge plus. We do feel Flickr Pro users will have to spend a bit of time on the site and weigh the pros and cons before deciding to jump ship for the new free service. As with any significant change, there is backlash from users wanting Flickr to go back to the way it was but overall change is progress and we’re looking forward to a continual stream of added features to make Flickr relevant again.
What are your thoughts about the new design? If you aren’t going to use Flickr, what is your favorite photo hosting service?
