Flikr Free
A long time ago I did a write up on photo discovery and talked briefly about flickr. Well they have now gone and done it and are about to explode. They are offering 1tb(terabyte) of free storage. What does that mean? Well it basically means that for most people you can now float your photos on the cloud. It means a safe place to store your photos and you don't have to worry about local backups crashing. Thats pretty cool, and I know from multiple losses of back up drive and main drive what a pain in the ass it can be. Right now I have about enough for 10% of the total storage and I don't see going to the max for some time. This includes photos from the last 5 years and the many trips I've taken.
What is also means is an alternate way to share your photos with loved ones who refuse to get on Facebook, and with the online gallery tools it means you can share specific sets. This is pretty awesome for me since my family is on the other side of the world and they are the most tech savvy people in the world. What Flickr needs now is a better desktop client like what Picassa offers. For those of us more in the pro realm we can use Lightroom from Adobe(this is the route I plan on going).
But it means even more, photo discovery can now accelerate with the basic removal of storage cap more people will upload more photos, textures and free stock images. And yes you can find free stock style images with a creative commons license. So look like I know where most of my bandwidth is going over the next few days.
The new interface is a little too aggressive for my tastes though, its like windows metro and Pinterest had an ugly baby(ok most babies look like aliens), and I'm not really sure it is much easier to navigate though user galeries then before. But given how completely crap that experience was before I'm not too worried. So if you have a flikr account start uploading and organizing and tagging and if you don't sign up and get started. And in closing I would like to address those that had been paying for pro, sorry.