"So we’re also giving our Flickr users one terabyte of space — for free."
This is incredible. I remember being blown away with the 1 GB of storage I got with my gmail account back in 2005. I couldn't even fathom needing a terabyte back then. What a fun time to be alive.
Mayer is a pro. She understands user experience. And Yahoo has a solid pile of cash, so they can clearly afford to spend some of it wooing users and repairing their image. Whether Yahoo can ultimately be rehabilitated remains to be seen regardless.
The stock price is up, I'll give you that, but in terms of actual user/profit/revenue growth what are the numbers to suggest that she is turning the company around?
Flashy product acquisitions and page redesigns a turnaround o not make. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just interested in seeing the hard numbers.
I thought Flickr never charged for disk space... the whole premise was you could store an unlimited number of photos, they'd just make you upgrade to a "pro" account if you wanted to upload new photos beyond a limit or get photos out. How is "1TB free space" a benefit now?
Without pro, you could only access your last 200 photos. So unless your photos were of the 100MB+ quality, you would not be able to access most of your previous photos in Flickr.
What’s the difference between a Free, Ad Free, and Doublr account?
There are three kinds of accounts to choose from at Flickr, and all of them are awesome in their own way.
Free:
1 Terabyte of photo and video storage
Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo
Upload 1080p HD videos of up to 1GB each
Video playback of up to 3 minutes each
Upload and download in full original quality
Ad Free:
$49.99 per year
All the benefits of a free account
No ads in your browsing experience
Doublr:
$499.99 per year
2 Terabytes of photo and video space
All the benefits of a free account
Can someone please explain to me how on each they're able to do this? They're valuing each of their users at the cost of 1TB (plus bandwidth, electricity, etc.) Like in the hosting industry, "unlimited space" means "fuck you, don't host shit here other than files that serve your content."
Statistics, most likely. If the average Flickr user only uses 10GB, for example, then it doesn't matter what the upper bound is aside for the 1% of power users.
Ok, great. The iPad experience has gone from mediocre to terrible. Hit targets are too small, figuring out how to click through to detail pages is non obvious, and it just feels slow as molasses on my 3rd gen iPad.
Amusingly, in the Yahoo/Tumblr acquisition thread, I complained about how little Yahoo has improved on Flickr...but otherwise, I was a happy paying customer.
Currently, I pay $25 for a year's worth of unlimited photo storage and being ad-free. With this new plan, I have to pay twice as much for what I have now...because even as a 3+ year (almost 4 now) member, I haven't uploaded enough to fill a terabyte. Kind of a bummer, though allowing more than 200 photos (which was the Free offering until now) is absolutely critical for Flickr to be a success.
edit: one of the things I complained about was how the horizontal-masonry that was implemented months (if not a year) ago had been limited to just parts of the site...and how the default logged in userpage was dull and photoless...with the new redesign, both of these complaints are wiped out. Nicely done Yahoo, I will complain more on HN in the future.
edit2: Unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't see a "let me see the old version for now" button...Which I think underscores my opinion of how outdated the old site design was.
I am a pro user, but I don't have a recurring subscription, I just rebuy it every 2 years, now I'm going to have to pay double for no ads, seems like I got screwed most of all.
You have it as long as you have a grandfathered Pro account. If you switch to one of the new plans (or you don't have autorenewal on your Pro account and it lapses) you lose it.
Hell, I've made thousands of dollars from stats. You'd be surprised how many image thieves at big companies throw a link back to your stolen images, as if that makes everything all better.
I feel a betrayed, too. I really don't understand why the plan went up in price and has less features. I have the attitude that I want to store (indefinitely), search and link my photos without being visually distracted with ads or pagination limits. In 7 years of using Flickr, I've only uploaded about 30GB of photos mostly just for archival use. Only a small group of Flickr users curate more than 20k photos. Most of the high interestingness (and ostensibly talented) Flickr members store less than 5000 photos and in very small file weights so their photos aren't reproduced in print. So why did they go for storage instead of pumping the features with premium subscriptions. I can't see myself paying more for Flickr without some kind of incentive. Hopefully they don't kill off their fairly loyal subscriber base, but stranger things have happened.
> So why did they go for storage instead of pumping the features with premium subscriptions
1TB is a meaningless promise. No one will use a full terabyte for a long time to come. I have about 1,400 photos on Flickr today, almost all of which were shot with a DSLR. Even if you were to consider file size of my current camera in RAW, that would come out to about 31GB total; Jpeg will be a lot smaller.
So, they jettison features that are hard or costly, offer something that no one will actually use for a long time to come, and...profit, I suppose.
I think the time might have come for me to move entirely onto 500px, which kind of bums me out. I love 500px, but I've also been a Flickr user for over eight years.
Agreed on the issue of 1TB. It's curious to see how many people remain concerned they might inadvertently hit that ceiling.
Myself, I'll likely remain primarily on Flickr, simply for the community aspect - that's something which seems to remain imperceptible to the likes of Marissa Mayer, sad to say. I'm also on 500px, but there's no atmosphere there.
So why did they go for storage instead of pumping the features with premium subscriptions.
It's more impressive. Storage is easy to add and increase. Just throw more harddisk at it. This not not the case with features (how do you reliably double your features?)
I'm a premium user, have been for the past 5 years, I don't see what being pro gives me any more and I'm paid up until may 2014! I feel like I'm being screwed over!
is there still a 200 photo limit on free accounts?
are they secretly pushing people back into free accounts so they can kill flickr more easily because there aren't so many poeple paying?
new design is good though, horay for FINALLY being able to middle click the nav now! can't wait till they fix the organizr!
Offering a huge amount of storage is a great way to grab people's attention, but then most people won't actually use anywhere near that amount of space, so marketing wise it's a big win without actually requiring much technical change. Adding new features requires designing and implementing those features which is hard work.
If ads are good I actually love looking at them. Occasionally I click too and if they actually catch my fancy, I buy. But this (the last part) is extremely rare.
"But we are working on a plan to let non-recurring Pro member sign up for recurring Pro subscription. We will post more details when they become available."
There is a component of that, but it's also dangerous to dismiss any negative feedback that way too.
Pro user since ~2005 here. I don't mind change in general, but I think the change they made here is definitely for the worse. Art needs space to breathe, and what they've done here is the equivalent of a photographic gallery plastering all the exhibited images in a wall-to-wall collage.
That sort of in-your-face layout may work for something like Facebook or Instagram, but not for something that is (was) meant to be for more serious photography.
I'm not sure I would consider them power users but it's somehow expected because everyone knows how people can be adverse to change... (It's still fresh in my mind when everyone complained about the new Gmail UI or even G+...).
You can add myself to the list of angry users. I'm not only angry because it's just a terrible interface change, but it's an entire service change. Like if twitter decided it was pinterest, only you've been paying for your tweets.
In my experience, a certain percentage of users will always complain about user interface changes, no matter how good they are. I have always believed in a policy of waiting ~2 weeks to let the changes "soak in", and gauge whether the complaints are just a knee jerk reaction by a small percentage, or is indeed indicative of a larger problem. This is also one of many reasons you find larger companies doing a "roll out" of a new UI change. It's a good way of gauging user reaction while only affecting a small random sample of your user base.
Well I'm a power user (8,000+ photos) and I love it. I guess it helps that my most recent photos are ones that I actually edited...on other days, I might do a photo dump of something dull, which would make for an ugly looking homepage.
Me too (4,000 photos). I had recently let my Pro account expire in favor of just posting to G+, but now I'll probably start uploading again. (Of course, G+ also just changed their photo support last week.)
I've been a Flickr Pro user since 2007. Flickr has been a huge part of my photography hobby. I don't know if I'm a "power user", but I can tell you all about different prime lenses, aperture, Lightroom and Photoshop.
Pro since 2007, so deeply relieved at this update. Many people will complain about any change since it requires them to learn something new, even if the new way is an improvement.
I initially liked the new photostream layout, but after using the site for a little while, I think I prefer the old layout.
The new site definitely looks more modern and glossy, but there's a reason museums don't display photos in a huge mosaic -- it makes it very hard to focus on and consider one image at a time. Now to browse someone's photos I need to go into the "one image at a time" viewer, which takes longer and leaves a long browser history.
I'm not quite sure how I got to it, but go to user's stream and then tack on a ?details=1 to the end of the URL. I have no idea if that's an intentionally preserved view or not, but it's more like you're looking for.
The details=1 query string is added when you click "Edit" in your own photostream's header.
Funnily enough, at the moment the details=1 layout even preserves the old "Did you know you can change the layout of this page?" link at the bottom, linking to a 404.
> Don’t upload anything that isn't yours. This includes other people's photos, video, and/or stuff you've copied or collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be deleted at any time.
I'm down right angry. I loved the old flickr interface. It was simple and usable. Now it looks like a less functional google+. Flickr's job is NOT to be a fancy photo viewer, it's supposed to be a photo organizer.
Looks like yahoo just screwed up the last good thing they had. This will be my last year with this service (I've been a member since 2004 and have had a pro account for several years now).
Give it time. That is the archetypical reaction of a user being confronted by change (angry is else hard to explain).
Flickr's job isn't that easy to be defined. It serves many purposes: Being able to upload and store images there, to organize them, but also to view them of course. Having a new UI putting the images first seems quite reasonable given that definition of flickr.
Besides, the old interface was neither simple nor useable if one wasn't used to it. No one outside of Flickr had time yet to find out whether the new Interface works.
More general remark: We had a good impression what it was likde for the Flickr-Team inside Yahoo. No ressources, no ability to change or improve the service, blocked by bureaucracy and unwilling management. That they are able now to deliver such an upgrade is downright impressive. 1 TB alone is massive and would never have been possible with the old situation, given the description. There really is change in that place.
First it looks good, but only because the old one. When you try out the new look, it is immediate that it lacks any consistency in its design or style whatsoever... (maybe because it is not rolled out fully yet. I guess riding the tumblr hype is more important now.)
On the ux side bringing the pictures to the front is pretty reasonable. Unfortunately it stops with a masonry (which is questionable in itself) and a profile header. Everywhere else it is just too noisy, smells like marketing and distractions that stop you every minute from enjoying the pictures. Just look at the home page with the "sign up" popup.
Yahoo needs designers and style as badly as acquiring the next thing every year...
Flickr was in need of a facelift, but not a complete overhaul. This just seems to me like a rehash of Delicious (the difference being that Flickr is still a part of Yahoo): redesign the whole thing to make it more "social" and "hip" and lose what made it a great service in the process. Delicious is still awful compared to what it was even under Yahoo's governance and I don't think Flickr is going to recover from this either.
And what's this about dropping their Pro accounts in favor of some 1TB free space nonsense? Yeah, that's going to work...
Wasn't the big advantage of the Pro account unlimited storage? Do the ones with the account really store more than 1 or 2 TB? I understand that the price of the new paid account feels strange, but i don't think it is such a big failure.
I don't know if Flickr really neded just a facelift. The overhaul signals more strongly that Flickr no longer stagnates. It could be that it was indeed a needed one, given the age of the old interface. It could be that they needed that overhaul to get tumblr, to show them thay aint the old Yahoo no more. Who knows.
I agree that it gives the impression of wanting to be more hip and social, but I think that's good if the userbase was in decline before. I think that the lack of a beta and the possibility to give feedback before makes this so hard for existing users.
Delicious was something else, I think. I was under the impression that after their changes, some of the old use-cases weren't supported anymore? What is the new Flickr missing exactly, apart from tiny images as default, strange workflow to get the real image or at least bigger sizes, and ugly menus?
I know that the old Flickr wasn't a place I enjoyed. I used it mainly to get images for a program of mine. Don't think I will be a heavy user of the new one, but for my use case, it sure looks better now (iff the extended search for CC-licenced images still works).
The problem is that now a Pro account (the way to get no ads) costs twice as much.
Maybe the old interface could have used some polish, but the new one goes overboard cramming photos together and hiding metadata/comments. It looks like it is giving photos more relevance, but actually it just creates noise.
Personally, I'd like Flickr to be both a photo viewer and organizer. I don't feel like the new interface is any worse for organizing photos, and I'm much more likely to point people to a flickr set with the new layout.
Your opinion seems very much in-line with the hugely negative reaction thread on flickr[1]. I'd be interested in the specific functionality you lost in the update that you miss.
Front page looks too busy at 1280 px wide. I can't quantify why - maybe it looks too appy rather than like a page. I used to rant a lot about Flickr showing me 500 px wide photos with oceans of whitespace on my large screens - now it looks like they've gone overboard in the other direction...
Photos in different styles don't look great mashed up right next to each other on my photostream. Old design had an option to show them big as one column, or smaller with more whitespace around them.
The default photo height on my photostream is also lower than on the old big one column setting, which makes particularly my vertical photos look worse when you're scrolling by.
But not by default, and not the previous "big photos in one column" layout for first page of photostream. (There's even a leftover link to change the layout at the bottom one's own details=1 page that 404s...)
I greatly miss the whitespace. When I visit my photostream now, I am presented with an entire screen full of things to process. It used to be about enjoying a single photo, but now the experience just feels like "look how many photos I have".
Sure, it's hard to please everyone, but it's hard for me to personally transition from the old layout.
That said, I'll keep my paid account around for awhile if things keep evolving for the better.
This is great news for people like me that continue to use Flickr after a very long time... Unfortunately the new UI reminds me a lot 500px which I think offers, at the moment, a much better community and user experience if one is really a photography enthusiast.
Anyhow hats off to Yahoo for trying to make things right after several years of stagnation. I'm aware the Flickr team have lost some valuable members and that probably affected future plans but that's a different story.
How can they give away 1TB of space for free? Because the cheapest 1TB drive I saw was $67.
Unless.. they assume that only a very small percentage of people will use it. So if on average, everyone still only uses about 1GB of space, then a 500gb you can get for $45. $45/500 = .09 so about 10 cents per person. With 25 million users that is about a $2.5 million investment.
If the average user uses 10GB then that is $1.00 per person though. With 25 million users that is about a $25 million investment.
I, as a regular consumer, just got a 2TB hard drive for $90. That means the space was $45/GB compared to your $67/GB. When you buy enough hard drives to fill a data center I am sure you get better prices too! As other commenters have said, I doubt most people will use a fraction of this space.
You might get the drives cheaper, but you also need to pay for the servers to house them, and rent the space, and hire the people to replace the drives that fail, and so on. The fully loaded cost is far higher than the purchase price of the drive.
"When you buy enough hard drives to fill a data center I am sure you get better prices too!"
I wonder how significant that'd be?
I've got nothing except "gut feel" to back this up, but I can't help but think there's very little margin available in hard drives for even semitrailers sized orders to get significant volume discounting.
Anyone got any numbers for where the volume breaks are and what sort of discounts are available for very large hard drive orders? (I'm sort of expecting something no better than 10 or 15% in volumes up in the 10,000s...)
On really large scale there's little point: disks will fail anyway all the time. It's mostly whether your maintenance plan can keep up with replacement rate.
It's exactly the same as when GMail gave away a gigabyte of space for free. Some people said it was financially ruinous, but of course few people used anywhere close to that much, and storage prices continued to drop.
(Also looks like there's a missing </ul> on that limits page, there.)
Edit: Looks like the page is being edited right this moment - the page used to list the 300MB/month limit but was also mentioning the new account types, at the same time. Guess they forgot to review all the text
I think it's intended to distract you from the actual limit. If they came out and said "Unlimited storage" everyone's first reaction would be "What's the catch?"
"Dear [name], as a Pro member continue to enjoy the benefits of unlimited space, an ad free experience and stats."
"Smile [username]. Flickr gives you one free terabyte of space. Share your photos in full resolution. See what's new
Pro members, your subscription remains the same."
The pro badge is no more, and pro accounts exist only as grandfathered in plans. You can renew an existing pro account, but those who aren't currently can't subscribe to it.
It's worth pointing out that you can't renew existing pro accounts manually, only accounts that are set up with recurring transactions will renew automatically. For some reason this doesn't include my account, as far as I can tell. I'm a little annoyed about this.
As I understand it, accounts that were originally a gift, like mine, don't get the recurring transaction treatment. This makes sense, but only up to a point, that point being where the owner of the account renews it with a different credit card and it becomes truly "theirs".
I am not sure that flickr gave this scenario due consideration, there must be a lot of people who received pro as a gift but have since paid to renew it will be unable to benefit from the reduced "grandfathered" price of $25.
I saw that - but I haven't been able to find out what price we can renew at. If it's still at $25 - every pro user in the universe will renew. If it's even $50 - for unlimited storage (versus $500/year for 2 terabytes) - still sounds like a no brainer.
I wonder if Yahoo/Flickr are really going to take that good a care of their existing pro users?
Well, sort of. There's no mention of bandwidth on the new limits page, other than it was previously unlimited under Pro. They apparently haven't completely updated their FAQ page...
I'm curious to see how many people will hit that limit... the largest images I have, at about 6000 x 4000, with 48-bit floating-point pixels, using non-lossy compression, are only 80MB...
It is not. Some id^H^H guy saw the old limit posted before the page was updated, and tons followed to comment without pausing to think that such a limit does not make sense with the new announcement.
The page was using all the new account type names, and seemed like it was otherwise all up to date. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered posting about it. Seemed like a plausible "catch" to the generous storage limit.
The page specifically listed the new account types (free, adfree, doublr) but also mentioned that the free account was limited to 300mb/month. Maybe they forgot to change a paragraph when they published it earlier.
Humour me, but are you on the Flickr team? I'm seeing that page change before my very eyes, clearly as a "oh shit!" response when the discrepancies were noticed, and the cache excuse is as old as time.
It was developer humour rather than an accusation. Many of us have been in the situation where we overlooked changing something, and when it's noticed we quickly change it and attribute the original mistake to some mysterious caching issue.
The google link was just for the calculator feature, noone here's been looking at cached pages.
When I looked at the limits page it was updated to list all the new plans, but it also mentioned a 300MB/month upload limit for free accounts (in two spots, I seem to recall, but at least one, and then it was gone.)
So 1 TB is free, but an extra 1 TB is $500/yr?! I'm not sure I understand that.
On another note, I (surprisingly) like how the disemvoweling is becoming synonymous with the Yahoo brand (with Tumblr now as well). What seemed stale is starting to seem fresh again. Playful, almost, like a wink to Web 2.0 -- though I imagine it could be perceived as being out of touch too, if they don't play it right.
roughly, very roughly - 90%+ of the people on the 1 TB plan will likely use < 20 Gigabytes (at least over the next couple years), and probably 99% will use less than 100 gigabytes, whereas close to 100% of the people on the doublr plan will be using at least 1 Terabyte.
best explanation of their pricing structure yet. What's stopping people from creating multiple accounts and use flickr as a cloud backup system for free?
Agreed that this is why Yahoo is pricing it this way -- but I imagine it won't stop the pricing feeling "wrong" to many people. "Why should I pay $500 a year for just a little bit more than I what I was getting for free?"
I would imagine, at that price point, it would drive people to use multiple accounts despite the irritation -- and that ultimately, because of that irritation, they might leave the service. Not a good situation for anyone.
A while back I was getting nervous about what Yahoo was going to do with Flickr, so I signed up for a $60/ year SmugMug account.
On the technical side of things, transferring the data out of Flickr wasn't a problem at all. If I remember correctly, importing ~9000 (~42 Gb) of photos from Flickr took less than an hour, and preserved almost all of the meta-data I had in Flickr (sets, collections, tags, etc.). It was so fast I almost didn't believe it. Of course 1 Tb would take a while even at that speed.
The bigger problem is getting people to use the new site. My Mom, for example, still goes to my Flickr page.
I would imagine the people that need more than 1TB would be professional photographers who use flickr as a portfolio / advertising.
If you are such a heaver user that you need more than 1TB of space, you are unlikely to want to split your account into two and your would probably be unlikely to balk at spending $500 per year on what would be for you a business service.
$50/year is for the ad-free. They are talking about the two terabyte plan. The (understandable from the perspective of the consumer) cognitive dissonance is, 999 Megabytes is free, but 1001 Megabytes is $500/year. How can two things, so close to each other, be priced so differently?
It's a very, very small number of people (though they certainly exist) that have photo libraries of > 1 Terabyte. And, and an almost insignificant number of people who have 1 Terabyte of curated pictures. (I.E. Eliminating Dupes, Poor Composition, Focus/exposure issues, etc...)
Flickr as backup doesn't make sense - backblaze, at $50/year, makes a lot more sense. Perhaps this is Flickr's way of encouraging people to start using them as a curated upload site, and not as a backup of their entire photo library.
Nothing will stop them - but, (and I'm just guessing here) - the type of people who host more than one terabyte of photos on flickr probably don't want to screw around with multiple accounts - tracking your detailed stats, alone, gets to be a hassle with multiple accounts. Obviously some people will - but I'm guessing those will be few enough not to matter.
The bulk of the people who want to host 2 Terabytes of Photos will be fine paying $500/year, those who aren't can create multiple accounts. (Those who just want Local+Cloud backups are probably better served by just buying a 2 TB Hard Drive for $90, and backing up with backblaze for $50/year
I agree anyone seriously wanting to host that many photos will not want to split accounts, but FWIW statistics (current Pro feature) don't seem to be offered at all any more.
Completely agree. This is similar to shared host that offer unlimited space. For those using a lot of share/cpu, they'll get a friendly reminder to upgrade, then a notice that they can't continue supporting them as a client with their current plan.
The Flickr Pro account 24.95/yr for "unlimited storage" was an easy purchase. When you login with your Pro account you are suggested to downgrade to the new 1TB (ad) account.
For 49.99/yr I have to ask myself, do I really need this ? what are my other options.
As a current Pro user, $25 per year to continue unlimited storage, no ads (for me and for all viewing my photos) and photo statistics is still an easy sell.
However, if I were signing up for an account today, I would most likely not purchase a paid account - my main reason for paying for an account was to get past the "only your last 200 photos are visible" limitation. That said, if I actually used my flickr account for business purposes, I would not hesitate to pay $50 per year to remove ads from my photos. I suspect many professionals would agree.
That is a random comment in a forum from someone who doesn't represent Flickr.
The actual TOS make no mention of whether you can have a business account or not. In face the best practices page specifically provides guidelines for businesses.
"This guide is intended to help organizations—such as businesses, groups and non-profits—get the most out of Flickr."
I just feel safer using Dropbox or Glacier. Flickr seems more like a social network, specialising in photos, and I wouldn't feel comfortable about using a service like that as a backup. As a business, the TOS are just not clear enough about what I can and can't store.
Community manager at Trovebox here. To go along with the other Trovebox-related reply, we're planning to start work on an iPhoto plugin for Trovebox soon because we've gotten so many requests for it.
If you're specifically looking for Flickr, a little searching shows me this page, which mentions an (unofficial) iPhoto plugin: http://www.flickr.com/tools/
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that it's not just that you don't see ads; it's also that others don't see ads on your photos. The latter can be an important feature for those who use Flickr to create professional portfolios.
The original pro account removed ads while browsing the site, Not from your pages as viewed by others. Plus a lot of the time your Photos are submitted to groups, would adds be removed every time one of your pictures turned up on the page?
Pretty sure it is not a business feature to show a clean page but a viewer option for distraction free viewing.
Anecdotally, I think it is the case that if you're a Pro user, and someone else is viewing your photostream, then they won't see ads next to your photo. This probably doesn't apply to your photos in other groups, etc. So we both may be right.
But surely they don't make $49 per user per year on ads? It looks like they're over-charging on the paid accounts to cover the costs of the free accounts. Especially the 1TB is free, 2TB is $500 deal.
And it seems that after proving people will happily pay for premium features, they've now sent an email to all their customers which essentially says unless you have over 1TB of photos with us (which is pretty-much no-one), you may as well cancel and use the free account instead.
It seems like a very bizarre structure to me and I can't see people subscribing to it which is a shame as IMHO they've just vastly improved what was already by far the best product in its market.
I would if I used it a lot.. Extensive ads ruin a lot of webpages to the extend that I just stay away..
Yes, I know I could use adblock etc., which helps, but the design and layout is still much worse than it could be. It's worth paying a small amount to fix sites I use a lot.
Also, it's the principle of the thing. If they can't see that their site is totally f#¤ useless and ugly, I'm not going to bother with them.
Even though they removed the limit from the terms today, it was still active when I tried to upload images to Flickr just now. They'll probably correct that soon, still not the most trustworthy way of making this kind of announcement.
Yeah, as far as I can tell they removed the 300 MB limit from the limits page less than an hour ago; I'm sure they're still cleaning up the old limits as we speak.
Getting Marissa Mayer is the best thing that happened to Yahoo. Regardless of some of the mistakes that may have been made (thinking of one acquisition in particular), she surely is putting the company back on the map. Personally I still rarely use Yahoo; I only visit Yahoo finance once in a while, but I'm liking what I see.
Naturally the 1 TB storage is a trick. I can't imagine more than a handful of hardcore users filling up that space, but the feeling of not having to worry about deleting old files significantly contributes to a great user experience.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadThis is incredible. I remember being blown away with the 1 GB of storage I got with my gmail account back in 2005. I couldn't even fathom needing a terabyte back then. What a fun time to be alive.
277 years (or 7,242 fortnights) later, and you can finally use all of your space.
Edit: It appears they have removed the limit, disregard.
When I signed up : "You will never lose access to your high res photos".
A few years ago : "Sign up for pro if you want access to high res photos".
Is this a sign that Yahoo isn't going to keep fucking things up?
Flashy product acquisitions and page redesigns a turnaround o not make. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just interested in seeing the hard numbers.
I wonder if there are any strings attached.
What’s the difference between a Free, Ad Free, and Doublr account?
There are three kinds of accounts to choose from at Flickr, and all of them are awesome in their own way.
Free: 1 Terabyte of photo and video storage Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo Upload 1080p HD videos of up to 1GB each Video playback of up to 3 minutes each Upload and download in full original quality
Ad Free: $49.99 per year All the benefits of a free account No ads in your browsing experience Doublr:
$499.99 per year 2 Terabytes of photo and video space All the benefits of a free account
Links: [1] http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#150470666
http://yodel.yahoo.com/blogs/general/we-re-moving--120325712...
Currently, I pay $25 for a year's worth of unlimited photo storage and being ad-free. With this new plan, I have to pay twice as much for what I have now...because even as a 3+ year (almost 4 now) member, I haven't uploaded enough to fill a terabyte. Kind of a bummer, though allowing more than 200 photos (which was the Free offering until now) is absolutely critical for Flickr to be a success.
edit: one of the things I complained about was how the horizontal-masonry that was implemented months (if not a year) ago had been limited to just parts of the site...and how the default logged in userpage was dull and photoless...with the new redesign, both of these complaints are wiped out. Nicely done Yahoo, I will complain more on HN in the future.
edit2: Unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't see a "let me see the old version for now" button...Which I think underscores my opinion of how outdated the old site design was.
1TB is a meaningless promise. No one will use a full terabyte for a long time to come. I have about 1,400 photos on Flickr today, almost all of which were shot with a DSLR. Even if you were to consider file size of my current camera in RAW, that would come out to about 31GB total; Jpeg will be a lot smaller.
So, they jettison features that are hard or costly, offer something that no one will actually use for a long time to come, and...profit, I suppose.
I think the time might have come for me to move entirely onto 500px, which kind of bums me out. I love 500px, but I've also been a Flickr user for over eight years.
Myself, I'll likely remain primarily on Flickr, simply for the community aspect - that's something which seems to remain imperceptible to the likes of Marissa Mayer, sad to say. I'm also on 500px, but there's no atmosphere there.
It's more impressive. Storage is easy to add and increase. Just throw more harddisk at it. This not not the case with features (how do you reliably double your features?)
I'm a premium user, have been for the past 5 years, I don't see what being pro gives me any more and I'm paid up until may 2014! I feel like I'm being screwed over!
is there still a 200 photo limit on free accounts?
are they secretly pushing people back into free accounts so they can kill flickr more easily because there aren't so many poeple paying?
new design is good though, horay for FINALLY being able to middle click the nav now! can't wait till they fix the organizr!
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633549071436/
"But we are working on a plan to let non-recurring Pro member sign up for recurring Pro subscription. We will post more details when they become available."
Disclaimer: Flickr Pro user since 2005. More than $25/year? Off to Dropbox.
Pro user since ~2005 here. I don't mind change in general, but I think the change they made here is definitely for the worse. Art needs space to breathe, and what they've done here is the equivalent of a photographic gallery plastering all the exhibited images in a wall-to-wall collage.
That sort of in-your-face layout may work for something like Facebook or Instagram, but not for something that is (was) meant to be for more serious photography.
I love the new UI and the new app.
The new site definitely looks more modern and glossy, but there's a reason museums don't display photos in a huge mosaic -- it makes it very hard to focus on and consider one image at a time. Now to browse someone's photos I need to go into the "one image at a time" viewer, which takes longer and leaves a long browser history.
Funnily enough, at the moment the details=1 layout even preserves the old "Did you know you can change the layout of this page?" link at the bottom, linking to a 404.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/getdavidhiggins/
I disagree with people claiming Flickr is just for pictures of Daffodils and Sunsets. I just dump memes and humorous pics there.
> Don’t upload anything that isn't yours. This includes other people's photos, video, and/or stuff you've copied or collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be deleted at any time.
Looks like yahoo just screwed up the last good thing they had. This will be my last year with this service (I've been a member since 2004 and have had a pro account for several years now).
Flickr's job isn't that easy to be defined. It serves many purposes: Being able to upload and store images there, to organize them, but also to view them of course. Having a new UI putting the images first seems quite reasonable given that definition of flickr.
Besides, the old interface was neither simple nor useable if one wasn't used to it. No one outside of Flickr had time yet to find out whether the new Interface works.
More general remark: We had a good impression what it was likde for the Flickr-Team inside Yahoo. No ressources, no ability to change or improve the service, blocked by bureaucracy and unwilling management. That they are able now to deliver such an upgrade is downright impressive. 1 TB alone is massive and would never have been possible with the old situation, given the description. There really is change in that place.
On the ux side bringing the pictures to the front is pretty reasonable. Unfortunately it stops with a masonry (which is questionable in itself) and a profile header. Everywhere else it is just too noisy, smells like marketing and distractions that stop you every minute from enjoying the pictures. Just look at the home page with the "sign up" popup.
Yahoo needs designers and style as badly as acquiring the next thing every year...
Flickr was in need of a facelift, but not a complete overhaul. This just seems to me like a rehash of Delicious (the difference being that Flickr is still a part of Yahoo): redesign the whole thing to make it more "social" and "hip" and lose what made it a great service in the process. Delicious is still awful compared to what it was even under Yahoo's governance and I don't think Flickr is going to recover from this either.
And what's this about dropping their Pro accounts in favor of some 1TB free space nonsense? Yeah, that's going to work...
I don't know if Flickr really neded just a facelift. The overhaul signals more strongly that Flickr no longer stagnates. It could be that it was indeed a needed one, given the age of the old interface. It could be that they needed that overhaul to get tumblr, to show them thay aint the old Yahoo no more. Who knows.
I agree that it gives the impression of wanting to be more hip and social, but I think that's good if the userbase was in decline before. I think that the lack of a beta and the possibility to give feedback before makes this so hard for existing users.
Delicious was something else, I think. I was under the impression that after their changes, some of the old use-cases weren't supported anymore? What is the new Flickr missing exactly, apart from tiny images as default, strange workflow to get the real image or at least bigger sizes, and ugly menus?
I know that the old Flickr wasn't a place I enjoyed. I used it mainly to get images for a program of mine. Don't think I will be a heavy user of the new one, but for my use case, it sure looks better now (iff the extended search for CC-licenced images still works).
Maybe the old interface could have used some polish, but the new one goes overboard cramming photos together and hiding metadata/comments. It looks like it is giving photos more relevance, but actually it just creates noise.
Your opinion seems very much in-line with the hugely negative reaction thread on flickr[1]. I'd be interested in the specific functionality you lost in the update that you miss.
[1]http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633547442506
Photos in different styles don't look great mashed up right next to each other on my photostream. Old design had an option to show them big as one column, or smaller with more whitespace around them.
The default photo height on my photostream is also lower than on the old big one column setting, which makes particularly my vertical photos look worse when you're scrolling by.
Sure, it's hard to please everyone, but it's hard for me to personally transition from the old layout.
That said, I'll keep my paid account around for awhile if things keep evolving for the better.
Anyhow hats off to Yahoo for trying to make things right after several years of stagnation. I'm aware the Flickr team have lost some valuable members and that probably affected future plans but that's a different story.
Unless.. they assume that only a very small percentage of people will use it. So if on average, everyone still only uses about 1GB of space, then a 500gb you can get for $45. $45/500 = .09 so about 10 cents per person. With 25 million users that is about a $2.5 million investment.
If the average user uses 10GB then that is $1.00 per person though. With 25 million users that is about a $25 million investment.
It'd take you 277 years to actually hit that TB with a free plan. To even use a tenth, it would take 27 years.
Edit: It appears they have removed the limit, disregard.
I wonder how significant that'd be?
I've got nothing except "gut feel" to back this up, but I can't help but think there's very little margin available in hard drives for even semitrailers sized orders to get significant volume discounting.
Anyone got any numbers for where the volume breaks are and what sort of discounts are available for very large hard drive orders? (I'm sort of expecting something no better than 10 or 15% in volumes up in the 10,000s...)
Remember that places like Yahoo and Google operate at levels where a file service issues a monitoring warning if there's less than a petabyte left.
Terabytes are the new gigabytes.
It'd take 291 years to fill up the 1TB allowance: https://www.google.com/search?q=1TB+%2F+(300+MB%2Fmonth)
(Also looks like there's a missing </ul> on that limits page, there.)
Edit: Looks like the page is being edited right this moment - the page used to list the 300MB/month limit but was also mentioning the new account types, at the same time. Guess they forgot to review all the text
This makes the entire 1 TB craze seem like a giant farce.
Edit: It appears they have removed the limit, disregard.
"Dear [name], as a Pro member continue to enjoy the benefits of unlimited space, an ad free experience and stats."
"Smile [username]. Flickr gives you one free terabyte of space. Share your photos in full resolution. See what's new Pro members, your subscription remains the same."
It seems Pro is still here.
As I understand it, accounts that were originally a gift, like mine, don't get the recurring transaction treatment. This makes sense, but only up to a point, that point being where the owner of the account renews it with a different credit card and it becomes truly "theirs".
I am not sure that flickr gave this scenario due consideration, there must be a lot of people who received pro as a gift but have since paid to renew it will be unable to benefit from the reduced "grandfathered" price of $25.
[1] https://secure.flickr.com/help/limits/#150487675
* Starting on 5/20/2013, we will no longer be offering new Flickr Pro subscriptions. After that point, the following things will happen: *
* Recurring Pro users currently have the ability to renew. *
[1] https://secure.flickr.com/help/limits/#150487675
I wonder if Yahoo/Flickr are really going to take that good a care of their existing pro users?
Your Flickr Pro subscription:
1-year Pro at $24.95 Your Pro account will renew automatically on 3rd September, 2013
https://secure.flickr.com/account/order/manage
Well, sort of. There's no mention of bandwidth on the new limits page, other than it was previously unlimited under Pro. They apparently haven't completely updated their FAQ page...
I only see: "Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo"
Ugh.
Here are their newer plans --
Free-Accounts:
+ 1 Terabyte of photo and video storage
+ Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo
+ Upload 1080p HD videos of up to 1GB each
+ Video playback of up to 3 minutes each
+ Upload and download in full original quality
Ad-Free accounts: (older pro-accounts are gone!)
+ $49.99 per year
+ All the benefits of a free account
+ No ads in your browsing experience
Doublr-Plan(extra 1 TB space):
+ $499.99 per year
+ 2 Terabytes of photo and video space
+ You get all the benefits of the free account
When I looked at the limits page it was updated to list all the new plans, but it also mentioned a 300MB/month upload limit for free accounts (in two spots, I seem to recall, but at least one, and then it was gone.)
You get 1TB extra i.e total 2 TB + no ads.
Some interesting observations -- the cost of Free account for Yahoo is -- 450$ per free-user/year.
So, lets be prepared to get ads all around. :)
Now this is like -- 1TB online storage = 450$/year, doesn't make sense now.
On another note, I (surprisingly) like how the disemvoweling is becoming synonymous with the Yahoo brand (with Tumblr now as well). What seemed stale is starting to seem fresh again. Playful, almost, like a wink to Web 2.0 -- though I imagine it could be perceived as being out of touch too, if they don't play it right.
I would imagine, at that price point, it would drive people to use multiple accounts despite the irritation -- and that ultimately, because of that irritation, they might leave the service. Not a good situation for anyone.
And you'd find it quite hard to leave a service after you've uploaded 1TB of data to it..
A while back I was getting nervous about what Yahoo was going to do with Flickr, so I signed up for a $60/ year SmugMug account.
On the technical side of things, transferring the data out of Flickr wasn't a problem at all. If I remember correctly, importing ~9000 (~42 Gb) of photos from Flickr took less than an hour, and preserved almost all of the meta-data I had in Flickr (sets, collections, tags, etc.). It was so fast I almost didn't believe it. Of course 1 Tb would take a while even at that speed.
The bigger problem is getting people to use the new site. My Mom, for example, still goes to my Flickr page.
If you are such a heaver user that you need more than 1TB of space, you are unlikely to want to split your account into two and your would probably be unlikely to balk at spending $500 per year on what would be for you a business service.
It's a very, very small number of people (though they certainly exist) that have photo libraries of > 1 Terabyte. And, and an almost insignificant number of people who have 1 Terabyte of curated pictures. (I.E. Eliminating Dupes, Poor Composition, Focus/exposure issues, etc...)
Flickr as backup doesn't make sense - backblaze, at $50/year, makes a lot more sense. Perhaps this is Flickr's way of encouraging people to start using them as a curated upload site, and not as a backup of their entire photo library.
The bulk of the people who want to host 2 Terabytes of Photos will be fine paying $500/year, those who aren't can create multiple accounts. (Those who just want Local+Cloud backups are probably better served by just buying a 2 TB Hard Drive for $90, and backing up with backblaze for $50/year
Stats are gone anyway with the new account types.
The Flickr Pro account 24.95/yr for "unlimited storage" was an easy purchase. When you login with your Pro account you are suggested to downgrade to the new 1TB (ad) account.
For 49.99/yr I have to ask myself, do I really need this ? what are my other options.
However, if I were signing up for an account today, I would most likely not purchase a paid account - my main reason for paying for an account was to get past the "only your last 200 photos are visible" limitation. That said, if I actually used my flickr account for business purposes, I would not hesitate to pay $50 per year to remove ads from my photos. I suspect many professionals would agree.
I suspect you meant MEGAbytes ;-)
I've built an image library for a FTSE100 company. $499 per year for storage and access to a decent API would have looked pretty cheap to be honest.
I've seen nothing that says that's changed.
The actual TOS make no mention of whether you can have a business account or not. In face the best practices page specifically provides guidelines for businesses.
"This guide is intended to help organizations—such as businesses, groups and non-profits—get the most out of Flickr."
http://www.flickr.com/bestpractices/
I'm tied into iPhoto on a very full SSD and am longing for a way out.
[0] https://trovebox.com/
If you're specifically looking for Flickr, a little searching shows me this page, which mentions an (unofficial) iPhoto plugin: http://www.flickr.com/tools/
Can't help but think their money men might be about to screw this up. Hope not, love Flickr :-s
Pretty sure it is not a business feature to show a clean page but a viewer option for distraction free viewing.
And it seems that after proving people will happily pay for premium features, they've now sent an email to all their customers which essentially says unless you have over 1TB of photos with us (which is pretty-much no-one), you may as well cancel and use the free account instead.
It seems like a very bizarre structure to me and I can't see people subscribing to it which is a shame as IMHO they've just vastly improved what was already by far the best product in its market.
I Hope I'm wrong.
Yes, I know I could use adblock etc., which helps, but the design and layout is still much worse than it could be. It's worth paying a small amount to fix sites I use a lot.
Also, it's the principle of the thing. If they can't see that their site is totally f#¤ useless and ugly, I'm not going to bother with them.
I'd never pay for them to be turned off, unless perhaps if it was a small site or community that I wanted to help out / donate to.
Oh, and the audio ads in Spotify, I'd pay in blood not to hear them :D
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633531669359/pag...
Naturally the 1 TB storage is a trick. I can't imagine more than a handful of hardcore users filling up that space, but the feeling of not having to worry about deleting old files significantly contributes to a great user experience.
I paid for Pro until 07/2014 I hope they don't switch me to Free a year early !