Yahoo! and its new CEO Marissa Mayer really are on a mission to make the company ‘cool’ again. Shortly after announcing its whopping $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo! has announced big changes for photo sharing site Flickr, which it bought back in 2005.
A big redesign is coming to the desktop version of Flickr, bringing about several much needed changes. Yahoo! is describing these changes as Biggr, Spectaculr and Wherevr. Get it? They dropped the ‘e’, just like Flickr and Tumblr!
Biggr refers to the huge upgrade in free storage each Flickr user will get – 1 terabyte, to be precise. That’s a huge amount of storage to be giving thousands and thousands of users for free, and will no doubt be costing Yahoo! a lot of money in servers and storage. To save you doing the math, that’s 537,731 original size photographs, which is more than Photobucket, Imgur or any other photo sharing website.
Spectaculr relates to the redesign of Flickr’s desktop app. Photos have been brought to the fore and are in full resolution, with a neat new slideshow function that allows users to easily scroll through photos and browse photos in the quality in which they were captured. This of course ties in with the new ability to upload full-res photos using your handy 1TB of online storage space.
Finally, Wherevr is Flickr’s expansion in terms of mobile devices. Yahoo! saw success in the iOS app which it launched at the beginning of this year and has now launched an Android app, which is available from the Google Play Store in 10 different languages. It’s all very well getting 25 or 50GB of free Dropbox with your new Android phone, but a terabyte is far, far more space for your mobile snaps. Yahoo! is betting this will make Flickr big again, after buying the company in 2005 for $30 million and seeing it fall by the wayside somewhat.
And of course, you’ll be able to share your images from the new-look Flickr directly to Tumblr.