Fresh from unveiling the $1.1 billion deal to buy Tumblr, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has made another huge announcement - the relaunch of Flickr.
The photo storage, presentation and sharing service was purchased by Yahoo back in 2005, but in recent years its fortunes have dimmed.
With a stagnating design heavy on white space and small thumbnails, the site had also been held back by restrictive storage and bandwidth limits.
Rivals were quick to fill in the gaps. On the app store Flickr has been overtaken by quicker, instant-sharing apps like Instagram, while Facebook has taken the crown for photo sharing among groups of friends. Meanwhile Google has recently launched its own fresh assault on the photo storage space with updates to Google+.
Now Yahoo is making a new push for Flickr to regain the lost ground. Alongside an all-new design, which focuses on larger images, improved search and fewer thumbnails, and freshly updated apps for iOS and Android, Yahoo also announced that users will get a massive terabyte of storage space - for free.
By comparison, that's 1,000 times as much space as Gmail gives away.
And you could take a photo every hour for 40 years without filling it.
Flickr said:
"At Flickr, we believe you should share all your images in full resolution, so life's moments can be relived in their original quality. No limited pixels, no cramped formats, no memories that fall flat. We're giving your photos room to breathe, and you the space to upload a dizzying number of photos and videos, for free. Just how big is a terabyte? Well, you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one."
Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer, also told users that their photos will "be there forever", trying to calm the fear that accounts will one day disappear - as happened to the long-moribund Geocities.
In a blog post - via Tumblr, naturally - Mayer said that the new service was a "completely re-imagined experience".
"We hope you'll agree that we have made huge strides to make Flickr awesome again, and we want to know what you think and how to further improve! "
Here's what the new site looks like:
New design:
Old design:
