Too late to revive Flickr?

Yahoo has just given its Flickr photo sharing service a much needed facelift. I have a Flickr account and used to love the service, but switched to Google’s Picasaweb more than 2 years ago. I loved the Flickr user interface, in fact I much preferred it to Picasaweb, yet I moved on.

Admittedly, Flickr’s 100 MB/month traffic limit was inconvenient, but what really killed it for me was that they limited free accounts to a maximum of 200 uploaded pictures. Not per week or per month, but in total. Facebook has no picture limit at all and Picasaweb has none provided you use the default setting in which it resizes uploads such that the width and height does not exceed 2048 pixels, which is more than enough for anyone with a 1920×1280 or smaller monitor. The greatest user interface was worthless without the ability to upload more pictures. Over the past 12 months alone I uploaded 7.3 GB in 107 sets consisting of 3385 pictures and videos to Picasaweb.

It’s great that Flickr will now offer up to 1 TB of storage for full size images. But how many former users will be prepared to give them another try, now that they have become familiar with Facebook and Google’s competing services? On a positive note though, the new Flickr will force Google to be more careful where it moves with Picasaweb / Google Photo. The Flickr facelift may not make it a winner yet, but any misstep by Google could.

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