Having made headlines with its $1.1bn acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo has also revamped its Flickr photo-sharing service, boosting its free storage to 1TB for every user and revamping its website and Android app.
"We hope you'll agree that we have made huge strides to make Flickr awesome again," wrote chief executive Marissa Mayer in a post on Yahoo's new corporate Tumblr blog, in a reference to a popular internet petition in July 2012 asking the former Googler to "please make Flickr awesome again" following her appointment.
The big change is the storage increase, which is intended to ensure that the vast majority of Flickr's users never have to worry about running out of space.
A prominent slider bar on Flickr's site breaks the figure down, explaining that one terabyte equals 537,731 photos shot with 6.5-megapixel cameras, and 218,453 for 16-megapixel shots.
"The team has ramped up extraordinarily in the last few months. It's exciting that we're investing in it. We wanted to create something that is not only beautiful, but bigger and better than anything else," says Jennifer Davies, head of social and community properties, EMEA product marketing for Yahoo, in an interview with The Guardian.
"Other people are talking about gigabytes of storage, but here we are talking about terabytes. 'Limitless' is very difficult to say from a legal perspective, but we hope people using Flickr will never have to worry about storage."
The redesigned Flickr website is certainly a departure from the previous version, with its endlessly vertically-scrolling feed of photos from contacts, all on a black background. The sidebar, meanwhile, includes an ad, access to Flickr's Groups and Explore features, the latest post from its blog, and suggestions for "People you may know".
Source: The Guardian
