There was a big outcry of "someone moved my cheese!" among longtime users when Flickr, the king of photo hosting and sharing sites, recently launched a major site redesign and account policy update. The new look features black backgrounds and an infinite-scrolling, justified view of the photostream. It's a beautiful design that takes cues from Bing and Google image search and Pinterest. With a couple of exceptions, it?s a clear win for most users of the site. But perhaps an even bigger win is that, along with the site remodeling came an enormous increase in storage for free accounts: they now get a whole terabyte. To put that in perspective, it's a thousand times what you get with a free Picasa account (which offers 1GB) and it can hold over 400,000 8-megapixel photos or over 200,000 16-megapixel images.?
In sheer volume of photo-sharing activity, Instagram has overtaken Flickr, but that service, with its limitation to square mobile phone photos, can't match Flickr's website capabilities, vast number of interest groups, full resolution, and organizational tools. Facebook, too, has a larger volume of shared photos, but again, if you're serious about photography, you can't live with the image-degrading compression Facebook applies, and the distracting photo presentation.
The unlimited $25 Flickr Pro account is no longer available to new subscribers, but a terabyte should handle more than most photographers will produce in a lifetime. Free users can also now take advantage of the traffic statistics view formerly available only to Pro accounts. If you're already a Pro member, you'll get the same terabyte limit, but won't see ads for the remainder of your subscription, and you'll still be able to continue recurring subscriptions. New users who want an ad-free experience will have to pay $50 a year. I only saw ads on the home page in free accounts, though. A prohibitively priced Doublr account, at $499.99 a year, does what its name implies, offering 2TB. This may sound expensive, but if you wanted 2TB on a Google Drive account, you'd pay $1,200 a year. I suspect only professionals like wedding photographers might need a Doublr account; for them it's a necessary business expense.
Signup and Setup
You no longer need a Yahoo ID to get a Flickr account; you can use your Facebook or Google account, but of course a Yahoo account still works. At signup, you can choose a screen name, and you can separately set up a custom flickr.com/screen name URL. Once you enter your birthdate, you'll be taken to your home page, where clear instructions tell you the next steps: Personalize your profile, upload photos, and find friends.
The Home Page
Up until this redesign, your Flicker home page listed recent activity?comments and favorites--with separate tabs for this activity and your own photostream. I thought this was an odd choice, since it made the photos take a back seat to the activity. The new home page shifts the focus back to the photos, showing a justified, infinitely scrolling view of your own and your contacts' top recent photos in a black background that lets the larger images take center stage.
Flickr representatives have told me that new photos from contacts are among the top site actions, so it only makes sense to show these on your home page, rather than making you click on it below the activity list. And the homepage doesn't just show the most recent contact photos, but prioritizes the most-favorited and commented ones. If the photo's part of a set, you'll see a few inset thumnails of other set photos.
Since its last, less-drastic redesign, Flickr already started using the infinite scroll for contacts photos, and it was only a matter of time till that design made it to the photostream and the home page. Though it's a cooler way to skim through loads of pictures, it does make it difficult to read the bottom of the page, where Flickr's Help and corporate info are linked. On the plus side, you can now Favorite and share right from the home page or from a user's photostream, rather than having to visit an individual photo page.
The new design unifies the major purposes of Flickr's previous home page: To show activity on your account, your contact's photos, and activity. It also highlights some of Flickr's massive photo assets in a right-hand sidebar, such as the Commons, where historic and other important photo collections are stored; and Explore, where algorithmically chosen?and often gorgeous? recent top-liked and -commented photos on the site are displayed. Your groups get tiles here, too.
If you're a new user and don't have any contacts yet, Flickr will populate your home page with photos of distinction from favorite users, with the suggestion that you add them as contacts so you'll see their future creations on your home page?a nice way to highlight some of the great visual assets of the site.
The Photo Page
The two big differences in the photo page are its new black background and that you have to scroll down to see EXIF, location, groups, and all the other meta data. This last bit rubs some users the wrong way, but after you do it once, you know scrolling down gets you all this info. Just about every website has you scroll down for more info, so it's not such a hardship. Even on this info panel below the black-backgrounded photo, though, the small map showing your photo's location is gone. Instead, you have to click on its place name to open a larger pop-up map.
One problem with the new photo view concerns photographs with a lot of black around the edges, which lose their intended borders. Flickr could offer a choice of background shades, or even change to a neutral gray to solve this. But really, this affects only a small minority of photos, and switching to Large view (with a right-click) does show images on a white background.
The new photo page makes lightbox view less necessary for a good look at the photo. But clicking on a photo page still opens it in lightbox view. You no longer see the View All sizes option at the top, from which you could download the photos. Instead, now you have to know to right click on the photo, which pops out a choice of sizes up to the original. From any of these views, as in the previous Flickr design, you can download the photo if the owner has allowed or if it's your own photo.
I always preferred viewing photos in lightbox view, and then would find it jarring to have to go back to the white-backgrounded photo page, which you had to do if you wanted to share, favorite, or comment. But I found that most non-Flickr aficionados didn't realize they could click on the photo for a better view, so the new photo page makes a lot of sense. Another nice interface touch is that you can hit the arrow keys from any photo view to advance or retreat in the photostream.
Clicking once again on the photo in lightbox view starts a slideshow of the current photostream, which uses the "Ken Burns" Pan and zoom effect. Personally, I'd rather just see the full-screen still images. I do like how hitting the Escape key backs you out of each of these views, back to the photo page.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/yh77gt-e7p4/0,2817,2324482,00.asp
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