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Before Facebook, before Instagram and Twitpic, there was Flickr, a photo sharing site from way back in the pre-Youtube days of 2004. It's easy to forget the site's humble roots in the wake of so many photo sharing services today, but to help remind us that it's there, Flickr just had a big revamp.
“Everything that we've done in this new redesign has been about putting the photo front and centre,” says Flickr VP Brett Wayn and that's quite clear from the newly designed homepage. The space is a wash of bright, colourful snapshots, many of them of impressive scenes that the average Flickr user is unlikely to capture – but that's the point, turning everyone into semi-professionals.
The Flickr revamp also features lots of missing vowels.
The site hasn't only gone for a facelift though, it's also had some other surgery to make the experience far more tailored. Free users now have a terabyte of space each, which is far more photographic storage space than the average user will ever fill. Presumably this is the idea, as millions of users with a terabyte of data each would be an insurmountable amount to handle. To put it into perspective, Flick's little slider explains it all, suggesting that even at 16 megapixel quality images, you'd be able to store over 200,000 photos. Good luck with that.
Of course better mobile support is on the cards too. There's now an Android app that's as good as its iOS counterpart, if not better. It's also taken on the design notes from the main site, becoming an infinitely scroll-able photo wall, letting you comment and share among friends in an easier manner than before as well.
“We want to make Flickr awesome again,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer during a talk yesterday.
Kitguru Says: What do you guys think of the changes? Will this make Flickr “awesome,” once again? [Cheers Wired]
Having slagged them off the other day for doing significant nothing for years, only fair to be glad when they finally bring in an update. Except for most purposes it’s not really an update, it’s just a new shirt.
The slow speed, the need for too many mouseclicks to get where you want, the lack of customisablity… all still there. And it’s not a particularly radical, just looks like they’ve been copying the worst aspects of the early Tumblr styles. If my CPU is running at over 50% because of image overload you’re doing it wrong, I can’t image how abysmal the experience must be on a slow laptop.
One free Tb is the only thing to really shout about, the rest could have been done by a student on his final year project. And though I do have a Tb of photos, if navigating between them is going to be so painfully slow it’s not really worth the upload time. Meh.