Monday, May 20, 2013

Flickr Upgrades Services to 1TB


There you have it. Melissa Mayer has decided to revitalize the ageing service with 1TB of space for FREE! So what the hell happened here?

Apparently this was in the works for some time, just that she didn't bother to tell anyone. As of recent past, Flickr has been declining in usage. People who take photos wanted to house them somewhere else because Flickr's membership plans limited your sharing abilities. You had a limited number of photos which you and show online and uploads was limited too. This caused a mass exodus of users and I was one of them.

Mayer's stint in Google taught her a few things. The first being that you need traction to succeed. Without users, you don't have any market traction. Where else would your revenue come from? For one, you can turn to ads, but again without user traction, who would advertise?

Face with a chicken or egg situation, why not kill the old membership plan and let people upload everything at high resolution? Yea, that's fucking fantastic!

No more poking around Facebook or Instagram. Flickr has it all. Even 500px.com has to innovate to play catch up now.

So what are the old membership plans good for? Well you get to go Ad-free.



You can of course pay to double your fun with 2TB of storage but that cost US$499 a year. With that sort of space, you could well be sharing your stash of porn. But hell no. You can upload all your files first and then delete those you don't want. A lazier way of photo sharing no doubt.

For editing, the new Flickr has Aviary—an open photo editing platform which you can use like any webapp. Not bad but not great.

With the new mobile App, your photo portfolio also looks cleaner. Tiled for maximum effect, it has a more visual UI. Available on iOS and Android.

Lastly, Flickr hopes to attract a new slew of sponsors and advertisers. This might work since Flickr captures EXIF files and turn them into charts.


DSLR manufacturers who wish to target a cameraphone audience can use advert placements in these communities to wear them down and get them to upgrade to a fucking camera instead of using a puny one. Not a bad idea I must say. 

At this juncture, I think Flickr offers a great deal of stuff for free and there is nothing freemium about it. There are no hidden cost, agendas or for that matter limitations you should be wary of like the previous time. 

For me, I think I need to rethink my digital workflow in view of these new features. 




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