Yahoo announces redesigned Flickr with 1 Tb storage for users
22 May 2013
Yahoo has announced a major recast of photography website Flickr. According to Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, the redesign would include a new interface based around high-resolution photographs as also a terabyte of storage for each user, equating to 537,731 photos at 6.5 megapixels each.
According to Mayer, users could take all the pictures ever taken and upload them to Flickr... and there would still be room.
Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005 with the site's increasing popularity, however, it failed to keep up with rivals such as Facebook and Pinterest.
Flickr's tagline ''almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world'', failed to live up to its claim for years as sharing photos online had come to be dominated by social networking, while cloud storage led to a decrease in the need to store photographs, thanks to cloud storage services.
Further, Flickr also failed to capitalise on the mobile market as its basic app for iPhones lagged behind the likes of Instagram.
Admitting Flikr's earlier shortcoming at the launch of the redesign in New York yesterday, Mayer said the site ''languished'', adding however, that Flikr would be ''awesome again''.
New and existing users are now being plied with mammoth extra space in a push to allow the site to regain its former glory. The site which has been extensively revamped shows users an "activity feed" on sign-in and a grid displaying their most recent photos.
Users would also be able to add cover photos to their profiles and comment more easily on friends' photos, bringing the service in line with Facebook and Google+.
The 1TB space was aimed at encouraging users to upload photos in "full resolution", and according to Yahoo users could take photos every hour for 40 years without filling up the space. According to CEO Marissa Mayer, the combined storage on offer to Flickr's 80 million-plus users was over 10 times the space needed to host every photo posted online to date.
Yahoo said at Flickr, it believed users needed to share all their images in full resolution, so life's moments could be relived in their original quality," said Yahoo.
"No limited pixels, no cramped formats, no memories that fall flat," Yahoo added.
Google's photo system offered 15GB of storage, and that was pooled across Gmail and Google Drive as well.
