Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service is now offering one full terabyte for users, enough storage space to hold whole swathes of the world’s photos. The service is offering this benefit in addition to its full resolution photo storage service.
While the average user will probably not touch the outer limits of this storage space in a lifetime, this alone is probably enough to draw dedicated photographers to the service and, more important, bring lapsed users back to the Yahoo fold.
This move is important. Given the odd nature of most photo sharing services, you are either limited to a few dozen gigabytes or, in the case of Instagram and other mobile services, an unstated upper limit that is not part of the marketing collateral. While I don’t doubt that Google or Facebook could make the terabyte claim in the near future, being first to market with this particular feature is an important milestone.
This move is quite clearly a play by Yahoo to make its wares relevant. The long-beleaguered Flickr has at once enthralled and frustrated pro users with claims of abandonment by the web giant.
As Marissa Mayer noted in her presentation, this is about “bringing lifetimes of beauty into Flickr.” It’s also about convincing casual photographers to trust Flickr as a universal shoebox for their old snaps – a lucrative and surprisingly important thing to be.