Flickr was one of the first service that offered online storage for photos for free. It used to be everybody’s favourite site. But with the arrival of a myriad of Photo Social Sharing apps, spearheaded by Instagram, Flickr creds began to dwindling down, especially with the younger generations whom only want to share their ‘life’ easily and instantly, and Flickr just wasn’t prepare for this.

The released of the Flickr iOS App has probably helped a little bit. The app enables people to upload and share photos directly from their smartphone, it even has filters like Instagram. And then for a while Flickr was giving away 3 month-worth of their Flickr Pro account, which gave the account holder unlimited upload and viewing of the uploaded photos which the Free Account didn’t have.

This I supposed might have enticed many people to sign-up and try the service. But at the end I could imagine when the free trial is over, many just simply reverted back to the Free account, and go back to their Instagram and co.

Well today the Gloves have come off, and Flickr is fighting back!

Flickr has got rid off the Pro account and has ‘upgraded’ the Free Account with some privileges that were originally only give to the Pro.

So, for the Free Account, you are now given:

  • 1 Terabyte of photo and video storage – That amounts to about 400+ thousands of 8 Mpx Photos.
  • Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo – iPhone 5 photos generally are about 2Mb in size.
  • Upload 1080p HD videos of up to 1GB each
  • Video playback of up to 3 minutes each
  • Upload and download in full original quality, A.K.A Full Resolution!

And you have all of the above for Free!

It’s a No Holds Barred! Flickr wants to come back to the Photo Storage arena as a winner and they are not afraid to throw everything at their disposal to the fight.

Let’s compare this to some of the recent offerings from other Cloud Storage providers.
For a Free Account below services will give you the following Free Storage:

  • Dropbox.com – 2Gb + 500Mb more if you sign-up via this link.
  • Box.com – 5Gb.
  • Copy.com – 15Gb + 5Gb more if you sign-up via this link.
  • Google Drive – 5GB share storage – and ability to upload photo at full resolution.

None of the above offerings would make a dent on what Flickr has prepared to give-away.

I am really happy that Flickr, and ultimately Yahoo as the owner, has decided to do this. I have loved Flickr, it was my first Photo Sharing place and they have great communities. With this awesome offering, my long-time quest to find a perfect solution to store all my photos might be over!

By the way, if you have a Pro Account, don’t worry, you still have all the awesome things that you had before, including the cool Statistics which the Free Account doesn’t have. Check out this help page to know more.

It would be really interesting to see the reaction from other service provider, especially from Google which at the moment is betting their Google+ venture on their photo sharing offering.

So, if you haven’t sign-up yet, go visit Flickr.com and get yourself a nice Terabyte awesomeness! They have revamped their website too, it looks more ‘modern’ and ‘hips’ now, very nice!

Oh, and don’t forget to say hello when you are there 🙂