What is your opinon on "New" Flickr

[bilwor]

I would like to find out what others think of "New" Flickr. I don't like the layout or the increase of $30 dollars a year to $49.95 for stats and no ads. Just my opinion.
bill word

[Rob Silliman]

Flickr was overdue for a refresh, but the way they handled this was very poor....

It seems like it was hurried through, to capitalize on the Tumblr acquisition.  Previous updates to Flickr have been gradually rolled out (previewed to Pro), and this one was just dropped in.

Cost, Ad's and Stats - Flickr should have had more of a Tiered service a long time ago.  I still see some photo streams where every picture a user has taken gets uploaded.  But as people have been storing more, the price of disk storage keeps coming down.  If they are going to call out the stats as an incentive to sell the service, then it needs to be meaningful.  At least on my photo's, too many pictures are getting hits from 'Unknown Source' - sometimes as much as 50% of the hits are categorized here.  This hasn't changed since forever.

My bottom line - Flickr got a quickie facelift.  Which will start to sag sooner rather than later...

But my Pro membership is paid for another 15 months..so I am waiting to see what else changes....probably go through at least one more CEO between now and then...

[cpasley]

I liked the look and layout for the first five minutes but as I would try to navigate the way I did before I found it very dificult, I had not heard of the price increase which takes from being reasonable to out of my budget now, im still paid up for another 6 or 7 months so might be time to find an alternative and just use the terabyte that Flickr is giving all its free accounts

[Barry Griffiths]

I'm still not absolutely sure that my Pro account is good until my paid up date next April. That deadline of Aug 2013 keeps coming up to muddy the waters.

[Matt Ottosen]

I really like the new look, and all the functionality is still there (you just need to find its new hiding place).  What I don't like is the new price to have stats and remove ads.  I have been considering dropping Flickr for almost a year now, and this might be the motivation I needed.

[Joe Copalman]

The beauty of Flickr is that it's been a great way for serious amateurs to have a place to showcase their work while keeping their overhead much lower than it would be if they moved to Zenfolio or Smugmug, meaning that we get to keep more of what we actually make off of print sales.  The price increase for a Pro account is a little irritating, as it seems to me that the overhead of running a site like Flickr would actually be dropping as hosting and memory costs decline.  It really feels like someone or a group of someones wants a new Ferrari, and has decided that I'm going to pay for it.

I can't really find all that much to bitch about with the new layout, but at the same time, I can't really find anything good to say.  It's a total "New Coke" change - change for the hell of it.  Biggest positive I've found is that the default background is black now.  That change is LOOOOOONG overdue.  Like, I-can't-believe-they-started-a-photo-sharing-site-with-a-white-background overdue.  Biggest negative is when you click on an image a second time, it does this weird, zooming-out slideshow kind of thing that reminds me of something a wedding photographer would put to cheesy music as a "bonus" on the CD with your wedding images.  I also don't like how the basic EXIF data has disappeared from each photo page either.  It was never critical, but it helped answer questions about shots almost immediately, such as "Is that a really high-ISO handheld shot, or a long-exposure from a tripod?" 

Luckily, the changes made on Flickr don't effect how images are displayed on Fluidr, which I like better anyway.

[azspyder]

While I like the fact that that Flickr now has the black background, the pricing structure is a scam. $499 for 2 TB? $49.99 for "no ads" but only 1 TB? 1 TB with hi-rez stuff is not a lot of space. For the people that have thousands of photos up, and are not grandfathered in the old Pro plan, they may have to pay or leave.

I joined Flickr for the social aspects of sharing photos, but I prefer SmugMug as an overall "general" photo storage service. Their basic plan has unlimited storage and they have may customizable keatures, skins, etc.. on the site. While from a commercial perspective, Zenfolio appears to be the preferred site, SmugMug is a great site to showcase and store photos...they just lack with the some of the social aspects that Flickr has.

[Chris Kennedy]

They've posted some clarification about Pro accounts and what the options are here:

http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#150487675

[cpasley]

I guess some folks are doing more then just grumble about the changes

http://www.bgr.in/news/users-trash-flickrs-new-look-demand-it-be-rolled-back/

[Joe Copalman]

They've posted some clarification about Pro accounts and what the options are here:

http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#150487675

Thanks for posting this Chris.  Definitely put me at ease about a few things.  Looks like I'll be staying put.