Yahoo has just announced a complete redesign of Flickr at its New York City event — the new site is live now and it comes with one terabyte of free photo space. Yahoo SVP Adam Cahan just made the announcement and said that "Flickr had become about words, little images, blue links. It was not about the photo anymore." But the new photostream changes that, will full-resolution images and a clean homepage with all the emphasis on images — it looks a lot like the Instagram web profile header.

In short, Flickr's done away with nearly all of the white space on Flickr, across every page you visit. Other new features include iPhoto-style slideshows (complete with music), full-bleed photos with significantly-reduced UI elements, and extensive sharing options — you can push photos out to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest. It's a massive redesign, and it came together pretty fast — Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that the company talked about this project in March and "rallied as a full company" to get the project done in this quarter.

Flickr now has the tools to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google

However, the big news is the free space — "we want all of your images," said Cahan. He said it was 70 times bigger than what other sites offer, and said it could store 537,731 photos in "full quality." Yahoo directly mentioned the 15GB of storage space "other" companies offer, and it was a pretty direct shot at Google — a company that has made no secret recently about making photos a key part of its services.

Yahoo also announced a new Android Flickr app, which matches the capabilities of the recently-updated iOS app. "Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, any follower, on any service, and make it absolutely beautiful," said Cahan. Along with this new service, Flickr is revamping its Flickr Pro service. Previously, free Flickr users could only display 200 photos at a time, while paid users had unlimited storage and display capabilities as well as analytical data about your photos. However, Yahoo introduced a few new paid options — for $49.99 a year, all ads on the site will be removed, and you'll get access to the standard set of Flickr analytics. For $499.99, you can double your storage space to 2TB. All in all, it looks like a long overdue and hugely-needed update — but now Flickr has an arsenal of new tools to take on sites like Facebook and Google.



