I’ve never really been a fan of Yahoo!, not their search engine, or their home page, or any of the 30 other services they have been offering over the years. I used to say that the only good service that Yahoo! really had to offer was Flickr.  This was true 10 years ago, but then something happened.  The web started to change, new services such as 500px started popping up, more and more websites focused on not only design but also improved functionality.  But…Flickr didn’t change.  And that was a problem.  To me it still looked the way it did 10 years ago, it looked “old school internet”.

But that’s all changed.  Marissa Ann Mayer, the new President and CEO of Yahoo! has been busy making some great changes to a number of their services.  Today Flickr has unveiled a completely new design, one that is much more appealing to view and easier to use also.  When you visit the front page now you are greeted with a large selection of photos from your contacts recent uploads, as well as groups you belong to, recent activity, “The Commons”, the Flickr Blog, and suggestions of people you may know.

The new changes are not just aesthetic, they’ve also made changes to the memberships.

Biggr. A free terabyte of space

At Flickr, we believe you should share all your images in full resolution, so life’s moments can be relived in their original quality. No limited pixels, no cramped formats, no memories that fall flat. We’re giving your photos room to breathe, and you the space to upload a dizzying number of photos and videos, for free. Just how big is a terabyte? Well, you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.

And yep, you heard us. It’s free.

They have done away with the “Pro” accounts of the past and instead offer an “Ad Free” membership for $50 per year.  This is twice the price of the old “Pro” memberships and adds no additional storage space, but simply remove’s ad’s from your browsing experience.  They do have an option to double your available storage space to 2TB…for an extra $500 per year!  But the really big news is the Free Membership with 1TB of storage space.  This is more than enough space for most people it’s even adequate for most professional photographers as well.  Free memberships can also share their photos in full resolution, another upgrade from the previous free memberships.

So will you like these changes?  It depends.  If you are someone like me who had a very limited free membership before you will probably love these changes.  If you were a “Pro” member before you may have different opinions.  So what do you think about this change?  Tell me in the comments below.