Amusingly, in the Yahoo/Tumblr acquisition thread, I complained about how little Yahoo has improved on Flickr...but otherwise, I was a happy paying customer.
Currently, I pay $25 for a year's worth of unlimited photo storage and being ad-free. With this new plan, I have to pay twice as much for what I have now...because even as a 3+ year (almost 4 now) member, I haven't uploaded enough to fill a terabyte. Kind of a bummer, though allowing more than 200 photos (which was the Free offering until now) is absolutely critical for Flickr to be a success.
edit: one of the things I complained about was how the horizontal-masonry that was implemented months (if not a year) ago had been limited to just parts of the site...and how the default logged in userpage was dull and photoless...with the new redesign, both of these complaints are wiped out. Nicely done Yahoo, I will complain more on HN in the future.
edit2: Unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't see a "let me see the old version for now" button...Which I think underscores my opinion of how outdated the old site design was.
I am a pro user, but I don't have a recurring subscription, I just rebuy it every 2 years, now I'm going to have to pay double for no ads, seems like I got screwed most of all.
"But we are working on a plan to let non-recurring Pro member sign up for recurring Pro subscription. We will post more details when they become available."
I feel a betrayed, too. I really don't understand why the plan went up in price and has less features. I have the attitude that I want to store (indefinitely), search and link my photos without being visually distracted with ads or pagination limits. In 7 years of using Flickr, I've only uploaded about 30GB of photos mostly just for archival use. Only a small group of Flickr users curate more than 20k photos. Most of the high interestingness (and ostensibly talented) Flickr members store less than 5000 photos and in very small file weights so their photos aren't reproduced in print. So why did they go for storage instead of pumping the features with premium subscriptions. I can't see myself paying more for Flickr without some kind of incentive. Hopefully they don't kill off their fairly loyal subscriber base, but stranger things have happened.
> So why did they go for storage instead of pumping the features with premium subscriptions
1TB is a meaningless promise. No one will use a full terabyte for a long time to come. I have about 1,400 photos on Flickr today, almost all of which were shot with a DSLR. Even if you were to consider file size of my current camera in RAW, that would come out to about 31GB total; Jpeg will be a lot smaller.
So, they jettison features that are hard or costly, offer something that no one will actually use for a long time to come, and...profit, I suppose.
I think the time might have come for me to move entirely onto 500px, which kind of bums me out. I love 500px, but I've also been a Flickr user for over eight years.
Agreed on the issue of 1TB. It's curious to see how many people remain concerned they might inadvertently hit that ceiling.
Myself, I'll likely remain primarily on Flickr, simply for the community aspect - that's something which seems to remain imperceptible to the likes of Marissa Mayer, sad to say. I'm also on 500px, but there's no atmosphere there.
Offering a huge amount of storage is a great way to grab people's attention, but then most people won't actually use anywhere near that amount of space, so marketing wise it's a big win without actually requiring much technical change. Adding new features requires designing and implementing those features which is hard work.
So why did they go for storage instead of pumping the features with premium subscriptions.
It's more impressive. Storage is easy to add and increase. Just throw more harddisk at it. This not not the case with features (how do you reliably double your features?)
I'm a premium user, have been for the past 5 years, I don't see what being pro gives me any more and I'm paid up until may 2014! I feel like I'm being screwed over!
is there still a 200 photo limit on free accounts?
are they secretly pushing people back into free accounts so they can kill flickr more easily because there aren't so many poeple paying?
new design is good though, horay for FINALLY being able to middle click the nav now! can't wait till they fix the organizr!
Hell, I've made thousands of dollars from stats. You'd be surprised how many image thieves at big companies throw a link back to your stolen images, as if that makes everything all better.
You have it as long as you have a grandfathered Pro account. If you switch to one of the new plans (or you don't have autorenewal on your Pro account and it lapses) you lose it.
If ads are good I actually love looking at them. Occasionally I click too and if they actually catch my fancy, I buy. But this (the last part) is extremely rare.
(Also looks like there's a missing </ul> on that limits page, there.)
Edit: Looks like the page is being edited right this moment - the page used to list the 300MB/month limit but was also mentioning the new account types, at the same time. Guess they forgot to review all the text
So 1 TB is free, but an extra 1 TB is $500/yr?! I'm not sure I understand that.
On another note, I (surprisingly) like how the disemvoweling is becoming synonymous with the Yahoo brand (with Tumblr now as well). What seemed stale is starting to seem fresh again. Playful, almost, like a wink to Web 2.0 -- though I imagine it could be perceived as being out of touch too, if they don't play it right.
roughly, very roughly - 90%+ of the people on the 1 TB plan will likely use < 20 Gigabytes (at least over the next couple years), and probably 99% will use less than 100 gigabytes, whereas close to 100% of the people on the doublr plan will be using at least 1 Terabyte.
Completely agree. This is similar to shared host that offer unlimited space. For those using a lot of share/cpu, they'll get a friendly reminder to upgrade, then a notice that they can't continue supporting them as a client with their current plan.
The Flickr Pro account 24.95/yr for "unlimited storage" was an easy purchase. When you login with your Pro account you are suggested to downgrade to the new 1TB (ad) account.
For 49.99/yr I have to ask myself, do I really need this ? what are my other options.
As a current Pro user, $25 per year to continue unlimited storage, no ads (for me and for all viewing my photos) and photo statistics is still an easy sell.
However, if I were signing up for an account today, I would most likely not purchase a paid account - my main reason for paying for an account was to get past the "only your last 200 photos are visible" limitation. That said, if I actually used my flickr account for business purposes, I would not hesitate to pay $50 per year to remove ads from my photos. I suspect many professionals would agree.
best explanation of their pricing structure yet. What's stopping people from creating multiple accounts and use flickr as a cloud backup system for free?
Nothing will stop them - but, (and I'm just guessing here) - the type of people who host more than one terabyte of photos on flickr probably don't want to screw around with multiple accounts - tracking your detailed stats, alone, gets to be a hassle with multiple accounts. Obviously some people will - but I'm guessing those will be few enough not to matter.
The bulk of the people who want to host 2 Terabytes of Photos will be fine paying $500/year, those who aren't can create multiple accounts. (Those who just want Local+Cloud backups are probably better served by just buying a 2 TB Hard Drive for $90, and backing up with backblaze for $50/year
I agree anyone seriously wanting to host that many photos will not want to split accounts, but FWIW statistics (current Pro feature) don't seem to be offered at all any more.
Agreed that this is why Yahoo is pricing it this way -- but I imagine it won't stop the pricing feeling "wrong" to many people. "Why should I pay $500 a year for just a little bit more than I what I was getting for free?"
I would imagine, at that price point, it would drive people to use multiple accounts despite the irritation -- and that ultimately, because of that irritation, they might leave the service. Not a good situation for anyone.
I would imagine the people that need more than 1TB would be professional photographers who use flickr as a portfolio / advertising.
If you are such a heaver user that you need more than 1TB of space, you are unlikely to want to split your account into two and your would probably be unlikely to balk at spending $500 per year on what would be for you a business service.
A while back I was getting nervous about what Yahoo was going to do with Flickr, so I signed up for a $60/ year SmugMug account.
On the technical side of things, transferring the data out of Flickr wasn't a problem at all. If I remember correctly, importing ~9000 (~42 Gb) of photos from Flickr took less than an hour, and preserved almost all of the meta-data I had in Flickr (sets, collections, tags, etc.). It was so fast I almost didn't believe it. Of course 1 Tb would take a while even at that speed.
The bigger problem is getting people to use the new site. My Mom, for example, still goes to my Flickr page.
$50/year is for the ad-free. They are talking about the two terabyte plan. The (understandable from the perspective of the consumer) cognitive dissonance is, 999 Megabytes is free, but 1001 Megabytes is $500/year. How can two things, so close to each other, be priced so differently?
It's a very, very small number of people (though they certainly exist) that have photo libraries of > 1 Terabyte. And, and an almost insignificant number of people who have 1 Terabyte of curated pictures. (I.E. Eliminating Dupes, Poor Composition, Focus/exposure issues, etc...)
Flickr as backup doesn't make sense - backblaze, at $50/year, makes a lot more sense. Perhaps this is Flickr's way of encouraging people to start using them as a curated upload site, and not as a backup of their entire photo library.
That is a random comment in a forum from someone who doesn't represent Flickr.
The actual TOS make no mention of whether you can have a business account or not. In face the best practices page specifically provides guidelines for businesses.
"This guide is intended to help organizations—such as businesses, groups and non-profits—get the most out of Flickr."
I just feel safer using Dropbox or Glacier. Flickr seems more like a social network, specialising in photos, and I wouldn't feel comfortable about using a service like that as a backup. As a business, the TOS are just not clear enough about what I can and can't store.
Community manager at Trovebox here. To go along with the other Trovebox-related reply, we're planning to start work on an iPhoto plugin for Trovebox soon because we've gotten so many requests for it.
If you're specifically looking for Flickr, a little searching shows me this page, which mentions an (unofficial) iPhoto plugin: http://www.flickr.com/tools/
The google link was just for the calculator feature, noone here's been looking at cached pages.
When I looked at the limits page it was updated to list all the new plans, but it also mentioned a 300MB/month upload limit for free accounts (in two spots, I seem to recall, but at least one, and then it was gone.)
Even though they removed the limit from the terms today, it was still active when I tried to upload images to Flickr just now. They'll probably correct that soon, still not the most trustworthy way of making this kind of announcement.
I would if I used it a lot.. Extensive ads ruin a lot of webpages to the extend that I just stay away..
Yes, I know I could use adblock etc., which helps, but the design and layout is still much worse than it could be. It's worth paying a small amount to fix sites I use a lot.
Also, it's the principle of the thing. If they can't see that their site is totally f#¤ useless and ugly, I'm not going to bother with them.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that it's not just that you don't see ads; it's also that others don't see ads on your photos. The latter can be an important feature for those who use Flickr to create professional portfolios.
The original pro account removed ads while browsing the site, Not from your pages as viewed by others. Plus a lot of the time your Photos are submitted to groups, would adds be removed every time one of your pictures turned up on the page?
Pretty sure it is not a business feature to show a clean page but a viewer option for distraction free viewing.
Anecdotally, I think it is the case that if you're a Pro user, and someone else is viewing your photostream, then they won't see ads next to your photo. This probably doesn't apply to your photos in other groups, etc. So we both may be right.
But surely they don't make $49 per user per year on ads? It looks like they're over-charging on the paid accounts to cover the costs of the free accounts. Especially the 1TB is free, 2TB is $500 deal.
And it seems that after proving people will happily pay for premium features, they've now sent an email to all their customers which essentially says unless you have over 1TB of photos with us (which is pretty-much no-one), you may as well cancel and use the free account instead.
It seems like a very bizarre structure to me and I can't see people subscribing to it which is a shame as IMHO they've just vastly improved what was already by far the best product in its market.
I'm curious to see how many people will hit that limit... the largest images I have, at about 6000 x 4000, with 48-bit floating-point pixels, using non-lossy compression, are only 80MB...
I think it's intended to distract you from the actual limit. If they came out and said "Unlimited storage" everyone's first reaction would be "What's the catch?"
Well, sort of. There's no mention of bandwidth on the new limits page, other than it was previously unlimited under Pro. They apparently haven't completely updated their FAQ page...
"Dear [name], as a Pro member continue to enjoy the benefits of unlimited space, an ad free experience and stats."
"Smile [username]. Flickr gives you one free terabyte of space. Share your photos in full resolution. See what's new
Pro members, your subscription remains the same."
The pro badge is no more, and pro accounts exist only as grandfathered in plans. You can renew an existing pro account, but those who aren't currently can't subscribe to it.
It's worth pointing out that you can't renew existing pro accounts manually, only accounts that are set up with recurring transactions will renew automatically. For some reason this doesn't include my account, as far as I can tell. I'm a little annoyed about this.
As I understand it, accounts that were originally a gift, like mine, don't get the recurring transaction treatment. This makes sense, but only up to a point, that point being where the owner of the account renews it with a different credit card and it becomes truly "theirs".
I am not sure that flickr gave this scenario due consideration, there must be a lot of people who received pro as a gift but have since paid to renew it will be unable to benefit from the reduced "grandfathered" price of $25.
I saw that - but I haven't been able to find out what price we can renew at. If it's still at $25 - every pro user in the universe will renew. If it's even $50 - for unlimited storage (versus $500/year for 2 terabytes) - still sounds like a no brainer.
I wonder if Yahoo/Flickr are really going to take that good a care of their existing pro users?
Humour me, but are you on the Flickr team? I'm seeing that page change before my very eyes, clearly as a "oh shit!" response when the discrepancies were noticed, and the cache excuse is as old as time.
It was developer humour rather than an accusation. Many of us have been in the situation where we overlooked changing something, and when it's noticed we quickly change it and attribute the original mistake to some mysterious caching issue.
The page specifically listed the new account types (free, adfree, doublr) but also mentioned that the free account was limited to 300mb/month. Maybe they forgot to change a paragraph when they published it earlier.
It is not. Some id^H^H guy saw the old limit posted before the page was updated, and tons followed to comment without pausing to think that such a limit does not make sense with the new announcement.
The page was using all the new account type names, and seemed like it was otherwise all up to date. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered posting about it. Seemed like a plausible "catch" to the generous storage limit.
I think this a well-thought idea to -- get more social.
Also with this move, it might push Google users to consider syncing and sharing their photos to Flickr now. Google gives 5GB for high-resolution, i.e original quality photos, Yahoo is giving 1TB, but think yahoo ads.
Any such kind of service is a lock-in ( platform level, so more control) and maybe they integrate tumblr strongly with photos? ( again a deeper lock-in to yahoo only core-products).
All this means -- they are back into Internet business.
From the past 2 days, there were enormous analysis around Yahoo, its principles were questioned, so did this all reach the board and the top management? :)
"So we’re also giving our Flickr users one terabyte of space — for free."
This is incredible. I remember being blown away with the 1 GB of storage I got with my gmail account back in 2005. I couldn't even fathom needing a terabyte back then. What a fun time to be alive.
This is pretty interesting to me as I've been spending the last month preparing my soon-to-be startup; (hopefully) a competitor to Flickr/500px: https://photographer.io
Obviously I can't compete with that free space which they're giving out. Instead I'm going to stick to a lesser free plan and a sensible subscription price, and hope that people realise that I actually aim to make a profitable business out of it and stick around for a good long while.
If anyone's interested I'd be grateful for any/all feedback, or any questions about what Photographer.io can offer over Flickr. Obviously it's still in beta, but I figure I should probably let people know that it exists.
EDIT: If you tried to sign up, I apologise if it was broken. I pushed a fix for something else a few hours ago and managed to break the sign up form (clearly it needs better testing). The patch is going up now, and you should be able to sign up again shortly.
I'm 2 years into a photo service and disk space has never been the determining cost factor. Space is only used to get users to upgrade to a paying account. I don't downplay the importance of that though, it's critical to figure out how you're going to make money today and not once you have a few million users.
In Yahoo!'s case it's about getting more engagement and users.
I'm hoping to offer a bunch of features other than unlimited photo uploads to entice users into subscriptions. More features, such as being able to share private collections (albums/sets) with others, or increased control over what they see on the site.
I'm looking to launch it proper in the next couple of weeks once I have the TOS finalised and the company set up. And I'm always open to any suggestions users have for features they'd like to see :)
Please, have a plugin for the major photo packages (Lightroom, Aperture, iPhoto, etc). Making it easy to get the images into your site lowers the barrier dramatically.
I stick with flickr because I use Aperture. It can export directly to my flickr account and means I have one less headache.
These are definitely on the horizon. This is one of the things that has been on my to-do list from the start. I did look into how the integrations work, IIRC Lightroom was pretty straightforward, but I assume Aperture can't be that much more tricky :)
Photo import is something I want to offer, but I need to make sure it doesn't break the terms of service of the other sites before I add it :)
I'm working out the subscription cost at the moment; I'm currently thinking around £25 per year. Does that sound reasonable? I'll very likely offer a discount to any beta users who upgrade within the first month or so too, as I'm really grateful for any and all feedback.
Doh, I feel like a pillock now - didn't realise Dean was talking about openphoto.
I've not seen it before; it's a great idea. I haven't got an API yet (but it will be coming soon after beta) and I'm all about freedom of data and information, so if you fancied supporting Photographer.io as another data source in the future I'd be more than happy to help.
I've worked a bit with Flickr's API in the past and found it very reasonable, so hopefully adding support for importing from there shouldn't be too tricky.
The reason I would want to sign up a photo sharing service is to be able to display them online and also have them backed up at the same time. I am notorious at the backing up part. Guarantee me these 2 things and I'll be your paying customer.
Edit: Right now I don't find the Ad Free account attractive, just saying. If anyone can have the same storage, what is flickr selling?
Backups are interesting, and something I had considered as a primary feature of the site. However this site is (currently) just me, and I don't feel that I could wholeheartedly say that a backup system relying on a single person is a good idea :) (unless that person is cperciva, in which case it's a-ok!)
Obviously I'm not expecting photos uploaded to the site to disappear at any moment (they're all on S3 anyway), but I'm not confident enough in the system yet to be able to offer anything like that, unfortunately.
It seems like not many services want to be the full RAW backup service that also does easy photo sharing. As in press a button and get a zip file of the gallery type of photo sharing that you get with G+. You do
You have 3 tiers:
1. RAW backups
2. Full JPEG renders downloadable in a zip file
3. Smaller JPEGs for online slideshows and viewing.
Artistic images need space, especially images that aren't meant to be place together. Otherwise their color would collide with each other and ruin the visual experience for them.
If flickr wants to become a social network that features family photos maybe that's the right layout, but I think most of the pro users weren't paying $25 a year for that purpose.
Flickr is no longer a valid place to share pictures for photographers who care about their visual quality. That made me really sad today.
I have to agree with you. I only post my "Art" photography on flickr and all the people I follow do the same. Seeing this huge mashup of all the varying styles and works together is really terrible. It's just not a nice way of presenting photography.
Completely agree, another example is the UI layered on top of a photo. UI and content should not be mixed, especially if that content is the key asset on the page and of the service.
I agree that the flickr redesign is horrible, but I don't think 500px is that much better. Photos are still too close together and have text and UI elements overlayed. It looks messy to me.
As a viewer, not an artist, I considered Flickr the biggest usability failure among the part of web that is actually used by people. I mean it. It was my worst photo-browsing experience ever (even lists of images on Wikimedia Commons are nicer).
I never understood why people posted photos to this website or how it became popular. Could you, or anyone, share some thoughts of that? I am genuinely interested in how people who were more target-audience felt about Flickr.
I think the 300 MB upload limit from before was removed. I can only find that in references to Free vs. Pro documentation.
Also, it looks like Pro accounts will still be available to existing Pro subscribers... for the time being, at least.
From the FAQ:
> I’ve heard that Flickr Pro is no longer being offered. How does that affect me?
> Starting on 5/20/2013, we will no longer be offering new Flickr Pro subscriptions.
After that point, the following things will happen:
> Recurring Pro users currently have the ability to renew.
> Eligible Pro members have the option to switch to a Free account until 8/20/2013.
> The “Gift of Pro” will no longer be available for purchase.
> Pro users will no longer appear with a “Pro” badge beside their name or buddy icon.
So what happens after 8/20/2013?
Anyway, then there's this:
> What happens if my Pro Account expires?
> If your Pro account expires, don't panic! None of your photos or videos have been deleted!
> This means instead of enjoying the super-duper capacity of your Pro account, you're now subject to the limits of a free account. If you upgrade again, all of your photos will be waiting for you.
> Any of your sets that disappeared will magically reappear when you renew or upgrade.
OK, so it sounds like they'll give existing Pro subscribers the opportunity to renew.
Mayer is a pro. She understands user experience. And Yahoo has a solid pile of cash, so they can clearly afford to spend some of it wooing users and repairing their image. Whether Yahoo can ultimately be rehabilitated remains to be seen regardless.
The stock price is up, I'll give you that, but in terms of actual user/profit/revenue growth what are the numbers to suggest that she is turning the company around?
Flashy product acquisitions and page redesigns a turnaround o not make. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just interested in seeing the hard numbers.
What’s the difference between a Free, Ad Free, and Doublr account?
There are three kinds of accounts to choose from at Flickr, and all of them are awesome in their own way.
Free:
1 Terabyte of photo and video storage
Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo
Upload 1080p HD videos of up to 1GB each
Video playback of up to 3 minutes each
Upload and download in full original quality
Ad Free:
$49.99 per year
All the benefits of a free account
No ads in your browsing experience
Doublr:
$499.99 per year
2 Terabytes of photo and video space
All the benefits of a free account
I'm down right angry. I loved the old flickr interface. It was simple and usable. Now it looks like a less functional google+. Flickr's job is NOT to be a fancy photo viewer, it's supposed to be a photo organizer.
Looks like yahoo just screwed up the last good thing they had. This will be my last year with this service (I've been a member since 2004 and have had a pro account for several years now).
Give it time. That is the archetypical reaction of a user being confronted by change (angry is else hard to explain).
Flickr's job isn't that easy to be defined. It serves many purposes: Being able to upload and store images there, to organize them, but also to view them of course. Having a new UI putting the images first seems quite reasonable given that definition of flickr.
Besides, the old interface was neither simple nor useable if one wasn't used to it. No one outside of Flickr had time yet to find out whether the new Interface works.
More general remark: We had a good impression what it was likde for the Flickr-Team inside Yahoo. No ressources, no ability to change or improve the service, blocked by bureaucracy and unwilling management. That they are able now to deliver such an upgrade is downright impressive. 1 TB alone is massive and would never have been possible with the old situation, given the description. There really is change in that place.
First it looks good, but only because the old one. When you try out the new look, it is immediate that it lacks any consistency in its design or style whatsoever... (maybe because it is not rolled out fully yet. I guess riding the tumblr hype is more important now.)
On the ux side bringing the pictures to the front is pretty reasonable. Unfortunately it stops with a masonry (which is questionable in itself) and a profile header. Everywhere else it is just too noisy, smells like marketing and distractions that stop you every minute from enjoying the pictures. Just look at the home page with the "sign up" popup.
Yahoo needs designers and style as badly as acquiring the next thing every year...
Flickr was in need of a facelift, but not a complete overhaul. This just seems to me like a rehash of Delicious (the difference being that Flickr is still a part of Yahoo): redesign the whole thing to make it more "social" and "hip" and lose what made it a great service in the process. Delicious is still awful compared to what it was even under Yahoo's governance and I don't think Flickr is going to recover from this either.
And what's this about dropping their Pro accounts in favor of some 1TB free space nonsense? Yeah, that's going to work...
Wasn't the big advantage of the Pro account unlimited storage? Do the ones with the account really store more than 1 or 2 TB? I understand that the price of the new paid account feels strange, but i don't think it is such a big failure.
I don't know if Flickr really neded just a facelift. The overhaul signals more strongly that Flickr no longer stagnates. It could be that it was indeed a needed one, given the age of the old interface. It could be that they needed that overhaul to get tumblr, to show them thay aint the old Yahoo no more. Who knows.
I agree that it gives the impression of wanting to be more hip and social, but I think that's good if the userbase was in decline before. I think that the lack of a beta and the possibility to give feedback before makes this so hard for existing users.
Delicious was something else, I think. I was under the impression that after their changes, some of the old use-cases weren't supported anymore? What is the new Flickr missing exactly, apart from tiny images as default, strange workflow to get the real image or at least bigger sizes, and ugly menus?
I know that the old Flickr wasn't a place I enjoyed. I used it mainly to get images for a program of mine. Don't think I will be a heavy user of the new one, but for my use case, it sure looks better now (iff the extended search for CC-licenced images still works).
The problem is that now a Pro account (the way to get no ads) costs twice as much.
Maybe the old interface could have used some polish, but the new one goes overboard cramming photos together and hiding metadata/comments. It looks like it is giving photos more relevance, but actually it just creates noise.
Personally, I'd like Flickr to be both a photo viewer and organizer. I don't feel like the new interface is any worse for organizing photos, and I'm much more likely to point people to a flickr set with the new layout.
Your opinion seems very much in-line with the hugely negative reaction thread on flickr[1]. I'd be interested in the specific functionality you lost in the update that you miss.
Front page looks too busy at 1280 px wide. I can't quantify why - maybe it looks too appy rather than like a page. I used to rant a lot about Flickr showing me 500 px wide photos with oceans of whitespace on my large screens - now it looks like they've gone overboard in the other direction...
Photos in different styles don't look great mashed up right next to each other on my photostream. Old design had an option to show them big as one column, or smaller with more whitespace around them.
The default photo height on my photostream is also lower than on the old big one column setting, which makes particularly my vertical photos look worse when you're scrolling by.
I greatly miss the whitespace. When I visit my photostream now, I am presented with an entire screen full of things to process. It used to be about enjoying a single photo, but now the experience just feels like "look how many photos I have".
Sure, it's hard to please everyone, but it's hard for me to personally transition from the old layout.
That said, I'll keep my paid account around for awhile if things keep evolving for the better.
But not by default, and not the previous "big photos in one column" layout for first page of photostream. (There's even a leftover link to change the layout at the bottom one's own details=1 page that 404s...)
Getting Marissa Mayer is the best thing that happened to Yahoo. Regardless of some of the mistakes that may have been made (thinking of one acquisition in particular), she surely is putting the company back on the map. Personally I still rarely use Yahoo; I only visit Yahoo finance once in a while, but I'm liking what I see.
Naturally the 1 TB storage is a trick. I can't imagine more than a handful of hardcore users filling up that space, but the feeling of not having to worry about deleting old files significantly contributes to a great user experience.
"As a Pro Member, your subscription remains the same. You'll enjoy unlimited space for your photos and videos, detailed stats and an ad-free experience. However, you can switch to a Free account before August 20, 2013."
I can't understand what this is supposed to mean. But it sounds like the pro account, which provided unlimited storage for $25/yr, is going away. I wonder what they do about pro members who already have more than 1 or 2 TB of usage now?
Pro accounts appear to be grandfathered in - you keep the unlimited space, you can continue to renew at $25/yr, but with the 'Free' account, you can upload larger individual files - 200mb photos in 'Free' vs 50mb photos in 'Pro', 1gb videos in 'Free' vs 500mb in 'Pro' - there are more details at http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/
I wonder if the 200MB vs 50MB differentiation is intentional. As a Pro user, I was curious, so I tried uploading a 70MB file. The flickr uploader complained. I tried a 30MB file and it was happy. So, it appears that, at least as of now, the 50MB limit may still be in place for Pro users.
There is a component of that, but it's also dangerous to dismiss any negative feedback that way too.
Pro user since ~2005 here. I don't mind change in general, but I think the change they made here is definitely for the worse. Art needs space to breathe, and what they've done here is the equivalent of a photographic gallery plastering all the exhibited images in a wall-to-wall collage.
That sort of in-your-face layout may work for something like Facebook or Instagram, but not for something that is (was) meant to be for more serious photography.
In my experience, a certain percentage of users will always complain about user interface changes, no matter how good they are. I have always believed in a policy of waiting ~2 weeks to let the changes "soak in", and gauge whether the complaints are just a knee jerk reaction by a small percentage, or is indeed indicative of a larger problem. This is also one of many reasons you find larger companies doing a "roll out" of a new UI change. It's a good way of gauging user reaction while only affecting a small random sample of your user base.
Well I'm a power user (8,000+ photos) and I love it. I guess it helps that my most recent photos are ones that I actually edited...on other days, I might do a photo dump of something dull, which would make for an ugly looking homepage.
Me too (4,000 photos). I had recently let my Pro account expire in favor of just posting to G+, but now I'll probably start uploading again. (Of course, G+ also just changed their photo support last week.)
I've been a Flickr Pro user since 2007. Flickr has been a huge part of my photography hobby. I don't know if I'm a "power user", but I can tell you all about different prime lenses, aperture, Lightroom and Photoshop.
I initially liked the new photostream layout, but after using the site for a little while, I think I prefer the old layout.
The new site definitely looks more modern and glossy, but there's a reason museums don't display photos in a huge mosaic -- it makes it very hard to focus on and consider one image at a time. Now to browse someone's photos I need to go into the "one image at a time" viewer, which takes longer and leaves a long browser history.
I'm not quite sure how I got to it, but go to user's stream and then tack on a ?details=1 to the end of the URL. I have no idea if that's an intentionally preserved view or not, but it's more like you're looking for.
The details=1 query string is added when you click "Edit" in your own photostream's header.
Funnily enough, at the moment the details=1 layout even preserves the old "Did you know you can change the layout of this page?" link at the bottom, linking to a 404.
I'm not sure I would consider them power users but it's somehow expected because everyone knows how people can be adverse to change... (It's still fresh in my mind when everyone complained about the new Gmail UI or even G+...).
Pro since 2007, so deeply relieved at this update. Many people will complain about any change since it requires them to learn something new, even if the new way is an improvement.
You can add myself to the list of angry users. I'm not only angry because it's just a terrible interface change, but it's an entire service change. Like if twitter decided it was pinterest, only you've been paying for your tweets.
Ok, great. The iPad experience has gone from mediocre to terrible. Hit targets are too small, figuring out how to click through to detail pages is non obvious, and it just feels slow as molasses on my 3rd gen iPad.
Interesting design choices - the photos are highlighted front and center but all the social aspects of Flickr have been shoved downward into have-to-scroll territory. Contrast this to Facebook and Instagram, which both use a right sidebar layout for profile and comments, which ensures everything's easily visible above the fold.
If you've been using Flickr as a social tool, making and getting lots of comments, I could see you being a bit upset with the decreased emphasis on social features in the new layout. I wonder what effect these changes will have on the level of social interaction on the site. I also wonder if it was a planned deemphasis, or just an inadvertent consequence of expanding the space given over to the picture.
Good insights - I agree with you. As a past social flickr user, I checked out my old account. It took me quite a while to find old comments and new activity, which is much different than the past of it being up front.
I remember a lot of people noting that facebook's UI evolution toward a focus on images rather than text is theoretically nice. That is, it's presented very well whenever the images are nice, but on facebook that's rarely the case--a quick look through my homefeed, it's either blurry party shots/selfies or obnoxiously filtered Instagram pictures. Flickr seems to have made the same evolution, and in that respect its UI changes are hardly original ideas. Yet it's almost a perfect fit -- where else on the Internet will you find more professionally-taken pictures?
> where else on the Internet will you find more professionally-taken pictures?
The main venue which comes to mind is 500px. However, with its leanings toward a more professional level comes a lack of the fun, informal atmosphere of Flickr. I maintain a presence on both, for now, and thoroughly enjoy Flickr - but, I'll have to keep an eye on what happens there hereon. As they say, the headlines giveth, the fine print taketh away. =:/
I used to be a flickr pro user, and then I left over a year ago. I do like the storage and overall design change, but there are other reasons I'm not really interested in going back.
#1 being
Don’t use Flickr to sell.
If we find you engaging in commercial activity, we will warn you or delete your account. Some examples include selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream or in a group, using your account solely as a product catalog, or linking to commercial sites in your photostream. If you engage in commercial activity elsewhere on the internets or in the real world, you’re still welcome on Flickr—in fact, we’ve even set up some best practices especially for you.
...which definitely takes some steam out of the previous "pro" account.
I've been pursuing photography as a serious hobby for just over 7 years. I'm not expecting to make tons of money in on-line sales; I just hate displaying most of my things with those handcuffs on.
I used to upload all over the place and just crave the attention of the favorites and likes, etc. Now I am more selective of what photos I publish and where. I'm much more interested in a gallery type offering. Most of my casual photos that I would think about posting back to flickr are already on Facebook or G+ where my friends and family can see them.
How can they give away 1TB of space for free? Because the cheapest 1TB drive I saw was $67.
Unless.. they assume that only a very small percentage of people will use it. So if on average, everyone still only uses about 1GB of space, then a 500gb you can get for $45. $45/500 = .09 so about 10 cents per person. With 25 million users that is about a $2.5 million investment.
If the average user uses 10GB then that is $1.00 per person though. With 25 million users that is about a $25 million investment.
It's exactly the same as when GMail gave away a gigabyte of space for free. Some people said it was financially ruinous, but of course few people used anywhere close to that much, and storage prices continued to drop.
On really large scale there's little point: disks will fail anyway all the time. It's mostly whether your maintenance plan can keep up with replacement rate.
I, as a regular consumer, just got a 2TB hard drive for $90. That means the space was $45/GB compared to your $67/GB. When you buy enough hard drives to fill a data center I am sure you get better prices too! As other commenters have said, I doubt most people will use a fraction of this space.
"When you buy enough hard drives to fill a data center I am sure you get better prices too!"
I wonder how significant that'd be?
I've got nothing except "gut feel" to back this up, but I can't help but think there's very little margin available in hard drives for even semitrailers sized orders to get significant volume discounting.
Anyone got any numbers for where the volume breaks are and what sort of discounts are available for very large hard drive orders? (I'm sort of expecting something no better than 10 or 15% in volumes up in the 10,000s...)
You might get the drives cheaper, but you also need to pay for the servers to house them, and rent the space, and hire the people to replace the drives that fail, and so on. The fully loaded cost is far higher than the purchase price of the drive.
I don't know about iPhone, but they pushed an update to their android app simultaneously with the website launch. I don't do video, but the app added the "video" permission, so my guess is it will be back soon.
This is great news for people like me that continue to use Flickr after a very long time... Unfortunately the new UI reminds me a lot 500px which I think offers, at the moment, a much better community and user experience if one is really a photography enthusiast.
Anyhow hats off to Yahoo for trying to make things right after several years of stagnation. I'm aware the Flickr team have lost some valuable members and that probably affected future plans but that's a different story.
Go Long on Yahoo. I betting the general consensus is optimistic about Yahoo....like I said in a different post, Yahoo is making great headlines, or what was the term at Google when Mayer was there (buzz,JK).
As for what I believe, I REALLY hope Yahoo keeps it up, but I like rooting for the underdog...ditch the contract with bing searches, and redesign the homepage already. Keep up the good PR...now back it with the good products
This is great for the so-called "photo-enthusiasts." I'll probably sign up on that basis. But I'm not sure I understand the mobile play. Most of my mobile photos are horrid quality and when I take a photo with my phone 100% of the time it is with the intent to share with others, either via SMS or Facebook or Twitter. I would be happy to share on Flickr. There's only one problem. That of course is that none of my friends use Flickr.
I think they are putting the cart before the horse in thinking that upping the storage and redesigning the interface is going to increase their user base. That said, kudos for trying something. I think that Yahoo! continues to struggle with a singular product strategy and that is ultimately causing them to hemorrhage billions of dollars chasing ill-conceived product acquisition.
While I do welcome it... Design wasn't Flickr's problem, it's the piss poor search engine and it's people uploading millions of their blurry family photos and clogging up the search results with garbage. Flickr needs to decide what it wants to be, an image hosting site or a photography community. One will kill the other so stop trying to be both.
I routinely hunt for creative commons / copyrighted images for ads and commercial use on flickr (yes, that means contacting each and every photographer to purchase rights). I've spent a minimum of over one hundred hours tediously going through the search results. Flickr has one of the worst search engine algorithms I've ever seen. It's dumb beyond all reason. I'll search for "Mountain View Lake" and get a page full of "Asian Children". I mean it's really random.
These changes really speak for themselves and if you've ever tried Instagram, you're basically getting the better quality photos: clear, crisp, tons of space, and very balanced filters. I love my iPhone and these guys deliver awesome app without being overpowering. As some of the other comments noted, "above and beyond" Instagram.
The new design is great: modern and a little bit more flat for a modern look. I was actually kinda bummed because like....they got rid of the Pro badges....oh well. My photo gallery stands out and looks pretty sharp. Well done, Flickr.
Anyway to sum it up, these changes are nice. And with a free 'old Pro' features, they're definitely a no brainer. I think any photographer can enjoy these changes as much as any casual photo sharer. Yahoo does it again!
The default privacy permissions are a bit loose for my taste, but I'm not big into sharing photos except with my direct family.
Can anybody compare them with facebook's or picasa / google+'s default privacy settings ?
Edit: I've made a bunch of comments as replies to this one. My conclusion is that New Flickr's privacy-friendliness is just barely above Facebook's.
However, they haven't yet demonstrated _continuing_ willingness (as Facebook has) to default to lower-privacy options as they iterate.
If they notice that I've locked down most of my privacy / sharing settings and then take an educated guess at what I want the default to be when they launch a new feature with a privacy slider ("we've set this to 'only family' for you based off your choices for settings X, Y, and Z."), that would be sweet.
Also, lots of the settings are inconsistent: the more-conservative setting is variously "yes" or "no". I think it's widely-known that structuring your questionnaire this way leads to confusion.
One of the settings (geo preferences / "who can see where your photos were taken?") had a weird state to begin with, "no preference set". This is the only one that I saw that had no default. What would have the geo privacy been for photos that I uploaded without setting this?
I was concerned for a moment just now because it looked like one particular setting wasn't sticking: "Hide me from site-wide searches on flickr.com and on 3rd party sites that use the API?"
I checked the box and hit "save", but when I went back and looked, it wasn't checked. I tried again and it worked.
I wonder if they're using one or more caching layers and not being careful about fetching important bits from the authoritative layer.
It looks like the android app uses a custom browser to render the third-party login pages, putting them in a position to trivially grab your password.
I can't think of a reason to have done this. Sure, I would have liked for the "log in with Google" button to pop up the system account chooser, but at the very least, just fire off an intent and let the user's browser of choice take care of it.
That's a rough flow though. Assuming the external browser finishes itself when the auth page calls window.close you still have a bunch of ugly activity launches in between; you probably see the last thing you were browsing for a few hundred milliseconds, etc. Not very polished.
I thought Flickr never charged for disk space... the whole premise was you could store an unlimited number of photos, they'd just make you upgrade to a "pro" account if you wanted to upload new photos beyond a limit or get photos out. How is "1TB free space" a benefit now?
Without pro, you could only access your last 200 photos. So unless your photos were of the 100MB+ quality, you would not be able to access most of your previous photos in Flickr.
I don't even need 1 GB for my photos. What I do need, and what flickr still doesn't have from what I can see [if I missed it, I'd be glad to be corrected], is a way to update an existing photo (upload the tweaked file, but keep the tags and URL etc.). Maybe this is to prevent abuse (make photo of cute kitten, wait until a lot of people favourited it, swap image with something gross), but still... carving digital images generated from RAW files into stone like that just rubs me the wrong way.
That said, I still love the fact that something is happening to the site. Just like 500px, I think such sites are great to get feedback and exposure, just a little awkward when it comes to really calling them home.
I'm a Pro subscriber and I applaud them for starting to improve Flickr.
However, $49.99 a year just for the privilege of getting no ads? Compared to the $25 people pay for Pro accounts, that's way overblown.
And yes, compared to cloud storage, given 1 TB of storage, this is rather cheap. However, considering that this storage can only be used for photos and videos and that most of these photos and videos are meant to be public, at least within your circle of friends, which drives more traffic to Flickr, well I consider $50 per year to be way too much.
While I am able to keep my subscription for now, I always thought that Flickr is sustainable because they value their Pro users and this move makes me think they don't.
I don't think the price is unreasonable. This is the going rate that other sites like SmugMug offer. While most offer unlimited storage, they lack the community aspect of Flickr. I look at it as supporting a site you love to use while opting out of ads and possibly ad tracking as well.
How much would it cost to store 2TB in Amazon s3 ?
With $0.080 per GB per month it is 0.08204812 = $1966 per year
And that is just storage. Flickr provides lot more than just storage. So $500 per year does sound reasonable and 1TB free sounds like a crazy good offer.
> Don’t upload anything that isn't yours. This includes other people's photos, video, and/or stuff you've copied or collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be deleted at any time.
That UI is a mix of the old with new, and the website looks pretty ugly. I wont waste too much time criticism, to be honest, for a company that acquires companies for more than a billon this is a sad development and design.
Flickr's UI change is definitely polarizing, mainly due to the fact that is so sudden and all encompassing. Considering what Yahoo has to prove in the coming months and years, it's probably a good move on their part, mainly because after so much stagnation with this product, any movement is good movement. If the reaction to the UI is overwhelmingly negative, they can course correct. Right now though, they need to show movement of any kind, and they chose to do it in one of the most visual ways possible.
I look forward to seeing if this change proves to be more than skin deep.
Yeah, as far as I can tell they removed the 300 MB limit from the limits page less than an hour ago; I'm sure they're still cleaning up the old limits as we speak.
As much as I'm excited about the new Flickr, redesign is not complete. For example, the collections pages and batch editor remain the same. This causes some UI inconsistencies.
Edit: along with copy inconsistencies pointed out in other comments (concerning some important aspects such as new policies, esp. regarding paying customers), this makes me worry. From my experience, Flickr generally has been very consistent about their UX. I hope the redesign is just a minor screw-up.
That free 1 TB of storage is a big deal. 1 TB of storage on Google Drive is currently $49.99 a month! (DropBox is even more expensive). When Google lowers their prices too, we'll quickly arrive to the situation where we can have free/cheap unlimited storage for life. That's amazing.
http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
Given all the "look how they let flickr languish" responses to the tumblr acquisition, I can't help but feel this was artfully timed. Well played yahoo. Well played.
Did they Photoshop the image of the Android app[0]? I don't think a Galaxy S3/S4 would have those three on-screen buttons at the bottom. It looks like they took a screenshot from a Nexus device and then put it on top of the screen in a stock Galaxy S3/S4 image.
First impressions: awesome Looks beautiful at first glance.
Quick second impressions: I kinda miss lots of the information I used to have. I don't get why there are still pages after scrolling for a while. Some of the old interface still bleeds through a bit. Looks like it's being actively worked on (even after launch).
Space is impressive, I haven't even gotten close to hitting that much with my pro account let alone a free one.
I'm alone hate new design? Why? Too much dark colors (especially menu) and frustrated navigation, probably because I have habits about old design, now everything looks too much different.
Than next image button (when you'r not zoomed in) looks like it's ajax, but it's not.
I loved Flickr for easy to use light design, I don't care about 1TB, too much because I don't want to share so much on the Internet. So new Flick is lost me as a customer.
For a site that's been stagnant for years, the new UI is a dramatic change. No wonder people are reacting negatively.
I've had the Pro account since pre-acquisition days, and I have to admit there was something strangely comforting in a predicable UX that never changes...
FB gets away with major UX changes from time to time (people seem to always hate them at first), it will be interesting to see if Yahoo gets away with this too.
I'm not sure why they'd dump the prestige of the Pro badge? I imagine users would've liked having that displayed, like the red ring on a pro Canon lens being a visible differentiator in public?
"Ad Free" just sounds like a bland name.
Does the paid membership make your browsing experience ad free or prevent ads from showing on your profile on photos? I could see the latter allowing for much cleaner and professional galleries.
IMHO their UI further validates the Facebook commenting style unfortunately. I've always felt the tree based conversations design is a much easier way to follow various side conversations that spring up. But anyway, its blah, its bling, its boring. Can't help but to notice similarities to other sites in their design, but I guess thats the way the web works.
Why do tech companies not want to take my money these days?
The concept of 'free' on the Internet is changing. Users will now happily pay because they don't want another service dying because of no sustainable income.
Even if Yahoo can sustain themselves with their exabyte-era data-centers. I don't care. I just want a pro / premium option, and I want one soon.
I wonder if there's any company taking the "bandwidth of a station wagon" as a business model, by charging for uploading the contents of flash drives shipped to them.
I was talking about uploading a terabyte. Also on my connection, when one person is uploading, download speed falls from 25Mbps to a crawl. I think it's something to do with coax being half-duplex. My family wouldn't put up with slow internet for the 24.73 hours it would take to upload 10GB, let alone the two months it would take to push a terabyte.
If I had to move that kind of data, I would mail storage media.
Not being able to upload 10GB in months is a pretty slow residential cable connection. So presumably find somewhere with a faster one (like an internet cafe, library, etc). It shouldn't be hard to find a place with a free connection that'll let you send 0.5MB/sec, which means you can clear 10GB in about 5.5 hours (if my quick math is right) - not a terribly long time. Of course, in most urban areas, at least in the US, it's not hard to get a connection with more like 2-3MB/s, on which you could upload 10GB in about 1hr.
I have 25Mbps down, 1Mbps up (both numbers are best case scenario). So I'd be seeing 0.125MB/s, not 0.5. My internet connection is really quite good for everything I need, but Time Warner doesn't seem interested in catering to individuals who push upstream. The only way to do better is with business fiber for hundreds per month (and not available in residential districts).
America has wonderful roads (I know cause I've road-tripped to ALL mainland states, including several coast-to-coast trips NY-to-LA with Route 66 in for good measure), and most people have an obsession with their cars. Well, use them to your advantage.
Any friend/relative with a fiber? Some internet cafe with a mighty connection?
And since we're talking about HN people, and not just the average person, some lab/workplace they are familiar with the people and they'd let them do it?
I'm not sure if there are, but if not, there should be services with high speed connections that get a HD or USB stick from you in the mail, and let you manage to upload your stuff where you want. IIRC, Amazon does this for uploading stuff to S3.
Public places with internet access are pretty much always running it off DSL or cable. Some schools and commercial buildings have fiber, but it's shared among so many people that it's not really much faster.
Amazon does offer that service, but it's $80/device + $2.49/hour.
Well, send it to a friend with fiber somewhere in another state.
Seriously, this would be a good way for people with fiber connections to make a buck, set up a "mass upload" service.
At some point, it's obvious that the "how can I upload X volume from where I live" doesn't make much sense given one's location. I would not expect high speed access in Alaska, for example. Or in some remote New Mexico area.
The new UI is certainly prettier, but yet another example of Android done wrong. Weird action bar, forcing portrait on tablets, etc.
This was already mentioned with Facebook Home, but it'd be great if UI designers and developers would actually spend some time on their target platforms to learn the UI conventions instead of copying iOS as-is.
The number of people I've seen who have asked "how do I set up self hosting for photos now" after the Flickr announcement is kind of distressing for Yahoo!'s future product plans.
I'm slightly terrified Pro will go away; none of the new plans is at all appealing to me. I'd switch to 500px or self-host entirely, but that's a lot of work.
I am genuinely confused. I am currently a Pro user. I'm happy paying $25/year for what I get.
Now, to get all the same benefits that I was getting for $25/year, I can just degrade to a free account? I guess this assumes that there are a lot of mobile users now and installing ad-blockers on mobile is much more difficult.
If you continue to pay for the Pro account, you get no ads (the free tier is ad supported), unlimited storage space (no new plans get this, so this is a nice grandfathered bonus.. if you need more than 1TB that is) and photo stats.
But yes, the difference between free and Pro is no longer as large of a distinction as it used to be.
Hmm, I guess I will degrade my account and flickr will lose a paying customer.
Seems like most users either a) are resigned to seeing ads on every website or b) have installed an ad-blocker. I don't see how paying for ad removal can generate much money.
Keep in mind that the ad-free experience also means visitors don't see any ads when browsing your photos if you are a pro user. This may or may not be important to you, but is arguably worth the $25 per year for any use that approaches professional level.
The Android app STILL does not provide automatic upload. That is the only thing I want or need from the Android app - I backup images I take on my phone, and make public the few that I want to share. So now I use Google+. But I have years of photos on Flickr, so I'd still like to switch back.
A nice looking upgrade. That said, a few months ago I decided to use Dropbox for just about everything, and upped my storage plan. The new Dropbox photo album service and android download photos as soon as I am on wifi service is great. I still keep photos on Flickr and G+ photos, but I consider those to be backups.
Can someone please explain to me how on each they're able to do this? They're valuing each of their users at the cost of 1TB (plus bandwidth, electricity, etc.) Like in the hosting industry, "unlimited space" means "fuck you, don't host shit here other than files that serve your content."
Statistics, most likely. If the average Flickr user only uses 10GB, for example, then it doesn't matter what the upper bound is aside for the 1% of power users.
For some reason I'm following their progress for over a month already. Sneaky, their progress bar has gone backwards one time. As if nobody would notice!
I wish them all the best though.
The loss of photo statistics seems a big one. As far as I can see unless you have an existing pro account and continue to renew, there is no way to get photo statistics. I really think Yahoo should offer a 'spyr' account or something which gives access to the stats.
I commented the other day that I hadn't renewed my sub for the first time in 6 or so years.
I'm now VERY annoyed I didn't; I'd have had 2 more years of "pro", and with it the one feature I enjoyed looking at which is my stats page with referrer info etc.
Seeing every tech blog in the universe carrying this story in my Facebook feed this morning got me really excited. So I actually went over and tried to log into my old Flickr account.
And so encountered Yahoo's terrible login system for Australian users. No 1TB for me.
How long before someone starts creating a photo cloud backup solution using flickr?
Heck, we can create multiple accounts to extend the size to 4,5,6 TB and have a simple interface to treat the array of independent accounts as one storage unit.
Glad I'm not the only one who thought this way. I always wanted to do that with Dropbox or Drive, but the free 1TB is making this a lot more attractive of a prospect. Still, it might be a bit obvious one were abusing it.
I'd love to see the CPM they get that beats $24/yr from an infrequent user like me. I use it as a storage site and visit it extremely rarely. Maybe I'm an outlier.
Nope, you're like me, another happy paying user. However, I'll pay $25 if I'm grandfathered in. But with how much more engaging the design is, I'll be sure to visit more often
I think for the same reason we credited Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple to turn it over. New Flickr might be team work, but it's thanks to Mayer work to bring back Yahoo at the big players table.
Did anyone notice that the first link on ... "Since 2005, Flickr has become synonymous with inspiring imagery." ... was actually linking to flick.com, but not flickr.com?
Edit: In fact the second link also links to flick.com.
I imagine I am not alone here, but I actually can't find out how much space I am currently using 4,000+ photos. Looked on the stats page, but nothing there regarding the number of MB/GB used. Any ideas?
If you're a Pro user, and thus without any storage limit, it seems they don't show you any usage information. If you're on one of the new accounts, you apparently do see a usage meter of some kind.
1 TB free space is meaningless for me, unless they allow the upload of RAW files. As a hobbyist photographer, I avoid JPEG like a plague and store keep all my images in NEF (Nikon RAW) format.
I just spent 17 frustrating minutes trying to get it set up on my android phone. I had to remove flickr from facebook then the twitter page went white. .. I dont care enough really.
What is that huge "joined on" text? Am I blind? Do I want to see that? Is it something useful? Yahoo obviously needs to hire a designer. It looks like an intern designed it.
Really like the ability to buy my way out of ads. Would love to see other big ad driven properties (I'm looking at you Facebook) give me the option too.
I believe over that limit goes towards your 15gb limit (unless you pay for a plan).
Side note, if you are grand-parented into a google storage plan (which is great, $20 a year for 80gbs), the recent gmail/other storage merge does not apply to you, I believe.
I'm not sure it is a good idea to store backups in place where they can be deleted anytime due to violation of terms (data disguised as photos != photos).
What happened to their "only last 80 or 100 or so photos visible for free accounts" feature, is it gone for new free accounts?
People resist change but I really believe the old interface was more photographically inclined! The new interface looks like, how do I say it..., a little too much or just loud, trying to be hip or sth or web n.0. Whatever.
Someone needs to tell me the logic behind Ad-free and Doublr plans' pricing because I just failed to the point! Or it's a typing error, Yahoo might fix in a week or so?
The "only the last 200" photos visible "feature" is now gone, as is the 300MB/month limit. Yahoo has decided to pursue the gmail strategy - offer a huge amount of free storage as compared to the competition.
The ad-free plan is probably most attractive for professional users (pro photographers, business accounts, etc) as it means no ads for anybody when viewing photos of a paid account.
The doublr plan seems pretty clearly targeted at business accounts where $500/year is trivial. It definitely isn't a typo.
Currently, I pay $25 for a year's worth of unlimited photo storage and being ad-free. With this new plan, I have to pay twice as much for what I have now...because even as a 3+ year (almost 4 now) member, I haven't uploaded enough to fill a terabyte. Kind of a bummer, though allowing more than 200 photos (which was the Free offering until now) is absolutely critical for Flickr to be a success.
edit: one of the things I complained about was how the horizontal-masonry that was implemented months (if not a year) ago had been limited to just parts of the site...and how the default logged in userpage was dull and photoless...with the new redesign, both of these complaints are wiped out. Nicely done Yahoo, I will complain more on HN in the future.
edit2: Unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't see a "let me see the old version for now" button...Which I think underscores my opinion of how outdated the old site design was.