Flickr Offers 1TB of Free Photo Storage

By Corentin Béchade, redactor, StorageNewsletter.com

Flickr, the photo sharing services owned by Yahoo! Inc.
has gone through a massive and much needed update with an overhaul
redesign of the website and most noticeably 1TB of free cloud storage
for all free users.

With that bump Flickr is the largest photo-only cloud storage services available on the market. Marissa Meyer announced in a blog post that the new service was dedicated to "put photos front and center".

The offer changed deeply Flickr business model. The pro accounts are now gone and there is now only two paid plans available:

• The Ad-Free account:
  The website is now ad-supported to compensate the revenue they drawn
  from Pro unlimited storage plans. People who don’t want to see ads next
  to their photos will have to pay a yearly fee of $49.99.

• The Doublr account:
  For those who want more than 1TB of storage this options allows the
  total storage to be set to 2TB. This plans cost $499.99 and does not
  include the ad-free advantages.

The
people who subscribed to a Pro account before the update can still
enjoy all of the benefice of unlimited photo storage, unlimited
bandwidth and ad-free browsing for $25 a year and the plan will be
renewable once. Although the drop of the Pro offer seems like a step
backwards, most of the people who use Flickr will never reach the terabyte of
storage offered with free account and the size limit is now capped at
200MB for all accounts, even former Pro plan.

The
1TB of free storage is an impressive steps forward in the cloud storage
market. The Doublr account is two times less expensive than a similar
Dropbox plans for example, and even though it does not offer the same
variety of service, Flickr step up in the cloud storage market is a
clear indicator of a new trend in the cloud storage market, the start of
a terabyte-standard model instead of gigabyte-standard model for mass market.

As
we move more and more data into the cloud, the market needs to evolve
to reflect those new ways of consumption. If Flickr is representative
of a first step in the good direction, the bandwidth is still the most
serious problem standing in the way of an all-cloud experience.