“We were talking about another company that dropped the e before the r, and we realized we wanted to make Flickr awesome again.” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said before the redesigned Flickr‘s big reveal. Of course she was referring to Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr, which we reported on earlier today. But the redesign of Flickr, it’s lovely new Android app, and especially the 1 TB of free storage available were certainly big news as well.
Flickr’s site has looked pretty tired for a long time, with lots of blank white space and annoying navigation. Originally intended for photographers to share their work, the metadata for each pic is prominently displayed, something casual users could care less about. In recent years, Yahoo owned Flicker has been losing out to image sharing platforms designed with smartphones in mind like Instagram -which was acquired by Facebook last year. The new update fills up nearly all the blank space with a mosaic of images with large, high res photos prominently displayed. The navigation is revamped as well and the whole thing looks and functions like a dream.
Of course, if this doesn’t bring the masses back to Flickr, the Free Terabyte of Storage will! It’s an amazing amount of space to hand out, and it put’s Google’s 15 GB to shame. Yahoo must know most users won’t come close to using this, at least not yet. But the new Flickr will host full resolution images and the sensors in all of our devices are only growing, so this huge amount of storage might not seem so big someday.
Which leads me to the updated Android app. The iPhone got a refreshed Flickr app a few months back, and now Android phones and tablets can join in the party. The design is similar to the website. The photos are dynamically resized and placed in the same type of tiled layout. Also, the photos aren’t cropped, but presented in the full aspect ratio.
“The new Flickr for Android maintains your photos’ original quality, so every image you take, edit, share, or view on your phone or tablet looks spectacular,” CEO Mayer wrote in a Tumblr post announcing the Flickr update. She wasn’t kidding, it looks incredible. We might just have a contender here, Instagram, especially those of us who prefer sharing our pics uncompressed and without filters.
[Via: Wired