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Yahoo enlivens Flickr with a Pinterest-esque redesign and 1TB of space

new flickr UI yahoo

After finally confirming Yahoo’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo held a press conference today in New York City to announce a product completely unrelated to the micro-blogging service. Today, Flickr is getting yet another makeover in Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s promise to make “Flickr awesome again.”

Flickr partyIn the conference hall filled with Flickr-themed walls and photo prints, Mayer and Yahoo SVP of Mobile and Emerging Products Adam Cahan announced the redesigned Flickr. The new UI will boast a larger grid design to highlight photo streams right on the homepage. The photo-centric interface aims to please the photography community and brands to make Flickr profiles more Facebook-esque than ever – minus, of course, the Timeline wall portion.

To lure users back to Flickr, the service will also offer a whopping 1TB of free space. “It’s about putting lifetimes of photos,” Mayer says. The Flickr profile boasts a cover page, full bleed, high-resolution pictures, and extremely minimal white space. No more geolocation data, comments, groups, or tags – those information are now hidden until users scroll downward for the data. Users can also share photos via other social media services, such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and, of course, Tumblr. The service is also hopping on the multimedia trend by allowing users to share photo streams as a slideshow.

new flickr ui full screenIn comparison to the old Flickr, the new interface should appeal to Web users in the Facebook and Pinterest age. It’s more intuitive given the functionalities these social network sites share – a feature Yahoo hopes will make Flickr alluring again.

In addition to PC and iOS, the new Flickr will also come to Android (alas, no Blackberry love) – all iterations of Flickr are now live. Mayer says that a Tumblr and Flickr integration is highly possible, although since the acquisition is still so fresh, that venture is still an opportunity the team needs to explore further.

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Natt Garun
Former Digital Trends Contributor
An avid gadgets and Internet culture enthusiast, Natt Garun spends her days bringing you the funniest, coolest, and strangest…
Yahoo finally rolls out Flickr for iPad
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It's been a long time coming, but Yahoo has finally gotten around to launching an app designed especially for the iPad.

First things first, you'll need iOS 8 or above to run it, so if you're an avid Flickr user and own an iPad 2 or newer and still haven't updated to Apple's latest mobile operating system, now's the time.

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Flickr looks like it's about to get another redesign less than a year after it rolled out its last one.
While the reported revamp is unlikely to be in the form of a major overhaul, there are nevertheless likely to be some noticeable differences that should please the Flickr community.
According to a Re/code report Sunday that spoke to "numerous sources inside Yahoo," the company is gearing up to launched a cross-platform refresh "within the next few weeks."
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Improvements
Although Yahoo acquired Flickr in 2005, for years it pretty much neglected the site, a situation which saw its design grow stale and outdated. The Web version was functional but unattractive, while the mobile offerings were slow and rarely received updates.
However, when Marissa Mayer took the reins at Yahoo just over 18 months ago, all that changed. She clearly saw potential in the photo site and invested time and money in a complete overhaul.
In December 2012, the Web company pushed out an all-new Flickr app for iOS that was actually a pleasure to use, and five months later made a splash with a revamped website with a striking photo-centric interface understandably described by many as Pinterest-esque. The company threw in a whopping 1TB of free storage space, and there was even an overhauled Flickr app for Android users, too.
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flickr photo books book

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After years of neglect, Flickr has undergone many changes since Marissa Mayer took the reins at Yahoo in 2012, with the new Photo Book tool offering further evidence that the Web company is serious about continuing its efforts to develop the photo-sharing site.

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