Flickr Yahoo relaunches with a new look and ample ... - RTVE

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a Flickr user. Flickr

ÁLVARO IBÁÑEZ ‘ALVY’ (Special RTVE.es)

When a small company is acquired by one of the Internet giants usually suffer a curse : agile development and vibrant of its services is frozen, imagination disappears and the slowness of the great detract corporations agility to compete.

Many new firms newly acquired perish at that stage, and somehow these acquisitions are an early death sentence unless the absorbed know adapt. In the case of Flickr, one of the pioneers of photographic services web 2.0, the long freeze presaged the worst. But suddenly has been renovated with new courage and is ready to continue making war for a while.

Flickr The main idea is to serve as a warehouse amateur photographic professional photographers and : there may store and share your photos with social network have formed. Discover new values ??and quality photos was in fact one of its most interesting features from the start. With this renewal has gone to that spirit using two factors: a bit of style and a little brute force .

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Brute force gives nothing less than a terabyte of storage that the service available to all users, even the free ones. The figure is as amazing as it was the gigabyte Gmail offered a decade ago to archive email, to many it is even hard to believe.

A 1TB hard drive costs between 50 and 100 euros in the store , and Yahoo / Flickr offer it free to anyone who can fill, something that will not be easy because it would take 500,000 5-6 megapixel photos or 50 hours of Full HD 1080 to make it overflow.

Well you could say that storage is ‘almost infinite’. But put a figure is well and allows comparison with their peers (especially 500px, renewed naturally Google Plus and Facebook). It’s also nice feeling to see the stick of use with a large percentage of ‘headroom’ always available.

‘s nice to see the bar for use with a large percentage of ‘headroom’

storage limits for this is that each image can occupy a maximum of 200 MB in size. In video format also accepts although not as popular as the photograph can upload files up to 1 GB or 3 minute HD 1080 maximum resolution.

Flickr The experience can be improved by hires a version called Ad Free for $ 50 a year (about 40 euros) which frees you from advertisements. You can also double capacity to 2 TB for 400 euros, in a version called doublr (alternative to the current “Pro” will disappear in August). This version also offers detailed statistics display photographs.

A visual style and big screen

On the other hand, improvements in style has been in line almost all the service redesign giving priority to large images , more suitable for the decade in which we are that small thumbnails which we had already used.

mosaics composed photos of friends and acquaintances are now more colorful, the collections, and albums themselves seem better than usual and the area to explore quality photos (chosen by publishers, or in proportion to the votes of the community) are simply stunning .

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Taking advantage of Flickr

change has also renewed its app for Android, which now gives more importance to image mosaics, includes 16 filters and more facilities for creating groups, collections of pictures and buttons to share pictures and videos with friends.

For lovers of customization, Flickr now cover can be customized with a giant background photo , the style of the covers of Facebook or Google Plus.

As for the quality of the image files saved or uploaded from mobile devices, Flickr offers save in the original format without additional compression. Something that makes you lose a degree of quality, something almost imperceptible but far from optimal. It is something that probably should imitate those services which have not offered it to the various alternatives is clearly better safeguard the quality if the cost for all purposes is free.

We will have to let go a few months to clarify certain questions: the extent to which users feel better this version or the traditional, if the advertising included in the service is acceptable and effective or how about sell optional paid subscriptions. But best of all: the fact that Flickr is renovated mean not dead . That for what has always been a “great little service” in the hands of one of the great Internet gorillas is saying something.