Under CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo! is doing a lot of things it has never done before. For one thing, it’s revamping everything; from its e-mail to trying its hand with micro-blogging by buying Tumblr, to completely revamping its popular photo-sharing site Flickr.
Mayer, 38, is a former Google executive and spokesperson, and is currently the top earning executive in new media. Last month at a press event in New York City, the Yahoo! CEO announced the brand new Flickr experience.
In three words, Flickr is now spectaculr, wherevr and biggr.
So what does it really mean for Flickr users now that it has been revamped?
To say that Flickr has been given a very modern makeover would not be wrong. With the new look, the pricing and a new Android app, Yahoo! has tackled Flickr with flair and done it with considerable ease.
The new look: spectaculr
Gone is the old, white layout with reams of metadata, so synonymous with Flickr. In its place, Flickr has a new grid layout with full resolution images – even the thumbnails are bigger! The photos are all full-screen by default and the metadata is neatly tucked below the images. You know by looking at the new redesign that it is the photos and photo-sharing abilities that are front runners here.
When you log on to Flickr, the usual screen is replaced by a montage of photos from your subscribed list and contacts with separate photostreams for each contact. Think the classic Flickr Explore page as your home page!
The new experience: wherevr
Flickr users can now “upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, and any follower”, says the website. The app is fairly easy to navigate through and its minimum clutter look is quite slick.
With its brand new mobile app, Flickr is now available on Android as well as Apple phones (the iOS app isn’t available in the Pakistan store). This is a move which has no doubt been made to try to get into the Instagram market.
The new storage: biggr
This is perhaps the most welcoming and the most controversial step taken by Yahoo! with the new Flickr experience – a terabyte of storage space for each user.
With an expanded storage, Flickr lets you upload a terabyte of images. How many is that you ask? Well that’s a whopping 537,731 photos for every user. Yes, you read that right, the terabyte of storage is for every user, free for a lifetime! Additionally, Flickr now supports 1080p, three-minute video clips as well. The limit for individual photos and videos is 200MB and 1GB respectively for free accounts.
In the words of Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer,
"You can take all the pictures ever taken and upload them to Flickr... and there would [still be room]."
Controversies and Ire From Classic Flickr Users
For new users, Flickr is definitely a good option, but not everyone is happy and they are letting their voices heard. While the move towards showcasing and focusing on photo sharing is logical in the times of Instagram and Tumblr, not everyone is happy. Worst hit by this sudden over-night change are Flickr Pro account users. Their major gripe seems to be the new design and the new pricing structures for Pro accounts.
A lot of Classic Flickr users complained about how the new design is similar to Tumblr’s archive look – the site which Yahoo! just purchased. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. To a lot of them, the redesign wasn’t just a redesign, it was as if “Yahoo! had lost its mind” and completely made a new site for brand new users with a change in philosophy, focusing on new and different users rather than the loyal followers of Flickr.
“If Classic Flickr was an art gallery, where the focus is on individual works, their creators, and the community around them, new Flickr is a wall-to-wall comic strip, but without context or even a punchline,” writes Michael Stutz.
And let’s face it, the new Flickr is a very different experience for old users, Pro and otherwise. Classic Flickr users could access and display their photos with minimal fuss – with the details present on the page, such as metadata and information about the image in just the right places – now, all those years of careful organisation are gone.
The new Flickr also comes with a huge monetary cost to Pro customers, who previously paid an annual subscription fee of $24.95 for unlimited storage and ad-free browsing. For the same experience of a Flickr Pro account as before, now you have to pay double, the new price is $49.99 – the new price will give you ad-free browsing with no additional space. So what happened to the unlimited storage of yesteryears? Since unlimited storage is no longer an option, if you want to double the storage then you need to pay a cool $499.99 per year! A move which is definitely not going down well with Pro users!
However, Pro users are not completely out of luck, and their existing accounts are renewable. Flickr is also giving them a chance to swap their Pro accounts for a free account, but that choice is only available until August.
"Flickr was once awesome, and it languished... now we want it to be awesome again,”
said Marissa Mayer, adding that the new Flickr experience is, “Not about small pictures [anymore].” While the new Flickr experience is a timely move, the ire of a lot of Pro users who are now setting up shop elsewhere, is palpable and understandable. On the other hand, offering 1TB of free video and photo space is likely to bring a whole lot of new users to the site. However, for Flickr Pros, who frankly made Flickr what it is and stuck to its side, it sadly seems like it’s the end of the road.