14 DAY TRIAL // Flickr, one of Yahoo's more interesting products that has been pretty stale for the past few years, is getting ready for a major revamp this year. The first changes will start to roll out in a few days, come March.
The updates will start with a new photo view, BetaBeat, which interviewed Flicker's Senior Product Manager Markus Spiering, reported.
The new photo view will put a much greater focus on the actual photos, perhaps unsurprisingly. Currently, the photo view shows small thumbnails of the photos in the list and a lot of white space and text.
All of that is gone in the redesigned page, the photo thumbnails now take up all the space and even fit together nicely regardless of their actual aspect ratios, very similar to how images are grouped in Google Image Search or Yahoo Image Search.
More info about a particular image is available when hovering the mouse over it. Along with the new photo view, Flickr is also debuting a new upload page that takes advantages of all that the modern web offers, like drag-and-drop uploads, for a much more "appy" feel.
But this is just the start, there are plans to completely revamp the site, or at least the parts that are in need of an update, this year. What it will amount to is hard to say at this moment.
There is a sense that Flickr will start working more on the mobile front, part of Yahoo's new "mobile first" strategy. It may be too little too late, Instagram has proven enormously popular and there are countless other photo apps and services out there.
That's not all, Flickr is also seeing some big competition from Facebook Photos, because of its size, and Google+ Photos, because of the social aspects and some of the unique features. Both of them are free.