Home » The New Flickr
I’ve been a Flickr Pro user since early 2005. Practically forever, in internet terms. And the service has just gotten its biggest update in years.

Aside from the new appearance, the biggest changes are huge increases in storage capacity for free users, and the (rumored) first steps toward sunsetting its paid user (Pro) accounts. Mashable have a great summary up of the changes.

From today, free Flickr users will have access to up to a terabyte of storage, individual image size limits increased to 200MB, and the ability to upload full HD videos up to 1GB or 3 minutes long.

And what of the Pro users? They still have unlimited storage, access to viewed stats on their photos, and will enjoy an ad-free experience as long as their membership continues to be renewed.

But there are a few oddities leading to the rumors of the end of Pro:

  • Pro users are still capped at 50MB image sizes, and 500MB videos; the only way to get the new, increased file sizes is to convert to a free account. 
  • You can no longer purchase a Pro account, they stopped being sold in March 2013. Your two upgrade options now are to pay US $49.99 (twice what a pro-account used to cost) per year for an ad-free Flickr, and/or US $499.99 for an additional 1TB of storage. 
  • There doesn’t seem to be any way for free users to purchase the ability to see viewed stats on their photos; one of the biggest draws for professional photographers, and those who’d come to rely on Flickr for promotion (rather than personal sharing). 
After a quick zoom around the new layout, most of the little features and widgets are still there, and function the same, they’ve just moved around on the page. 
But early buzz indicates the strangeness around the handling of the Pro accounts is alienating a lot of users. It’ll be interesting to see which services they end up migrating to, and how the ad-full experience is received. 

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