Flickr Blog: “A better, brighter Flickr”

Biggr. A free terabyte of space

At Flickr, we believe you should share all your images in full resolution, so life’s moments can be relived in their original quality. No limited pixels, no cramped formats, no memories that fall flat. We’re giving your photos room to breathe, and you the space to upload a dizzying number of photos and videos, for free. Just how big is a terabyte? Well, you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.

Markus Spiering

This feels like back in 2004 when webmail providers offered merely a couple of megabytes and Gmail launched with 1GB of free storage space.

Despite all the complaints, the new design is pretty nice – even though a little too similar to Facebook and Instagram – and emphasizes photos better than before. I like how the sets pages combine your unique cover photo with the set thumbnail as if to create a new profile page. There are still many little kinks to iron out (the new pricing plans are confusing to say the least, but I’m sure I’ll figure this out until my Pro subscription expires; many places still have the old look, from the share dialog to maps and editing page; and setting a cover photo shows a limited selection of uploads, I would much prefer a menu option on each photo to set it as cover photo or profile photo) and some features got left out (the mini-map on the right side for example), but it’s good to see the site moving forward with great mobile apps and more storage.

Update: Actually, on second look the free vs. pro comparison doesn’t look that complicated. If you are already a Pro-user you can continue to pay the annual fee and get unlimited storage, stats and no ads – but you will loose the Pro-icon next to your name. Stats have never been that insightful for me, so I guess I’ll just let the Pro subscription expire and then move to the free tier, as I highly doubt I will ever manage to fill a terabyte of space.