At the end of January Flickr sent out emails to all of their users saying that they had until March 15th, 2007 to setup a Yahoo! account that would be used to manage the Flickr service. This caused quite an uproar in the blog community as well as all over the web. Many people were saying that Flickr was screwing them by forcing such a move, but ever since Yahoo! acquired them I knew that this time would come.
Seeing that the deadline for merging your Flickr account with a Yahoo! one comes tomorrow, it is no surprise that Flickr just launched one of the most requested features: collections! The name may not describe exactly what the new feature is, but with it you can create “sets of sets” which can also be considered to be subsets. For the sake of simplifying things you can look at a set as a folder on your computer, and now with collections you can actually have sub-folders to make organizing your photos even easier.
In order to use this feature you’ll need to be a Flickr Pro user because free users are limited to creating just 3 sets, which would pretty much make the collections feature useless. I have yet to pay for a photo service, but my fingers are itching to cough up the $24.95 for a 1 year pro account that offers:
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited uploads
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited sets
- Permanent archiving of high-resolution original images
- Ad-free browsing and sharing
I’ve got more than 8GB of photos that I would like backed up somewhere and Flickr seems to be a good place to do it. There are all kinds of tools available to make managing your photos easy, and the new collections feature is something that held me back from picking any photo service. I like organizing my photos into folders and sub-folders because it makes them easy for me to find exactly what I’m looking for. Previously, I had sent emails to nearly all photo services that I came across requesting that they create some sort of folder management system. Now that Flickr has done this I’m extremely tempted to become a Pro user.
Congrats to Flickr on such a big feature release, but I’m sure it was purely coincidental that this was released just one day before all Flickr users must login with a Yahoo! account. 
I’ve a Flick Pro user for almost a year and I love it. It’s worth the $25 a year.
I’m about to signup for it. I like that you can set images to be private by default…now I’m just looking to see if there is a good software program out there that I can use to sync pictures.
Agree with Cory. I’ve been a Pro user for a while now. It’s well worth it. The ability to organize photos into sets and collections, set permissions to public, private or friends and family is great. It’s also a great way to backup all your photos.
They also provide a Flickr uploader if you want to upload photos in bulk, although 8Gb may take a while
The day Flickr let’s you upload videos is the day I’m sold. I believe Google’s Web Albums just began allowing video uploads, so perhaps Flickr won’t be too far behind.
I just purchased the Flickr Pro account and I’m quite excited. I’m gonna be backing up all 8GB of my photos when I go to my university next time. They have an Internet2 connection and I get 4Mbps upload so it should only take an hour or two.
I checked out the two uploaders they have listed (jUploadr and their official one) and I like the jUploadr one a little better I think. The program says that I have a 2GB monthly upload limit but I’m pretty sure they ditched that limit awhile ago, so the program just must not be updated.
That would indeed be awesome if they allowed videos, and now that you mentioned that I’m quite surprised that they don’t offer it. That is probably one of the only ways Yahoo could actually compete with YouTube in terms of watching videos.
I’ve been wondering for a while when there going to allow videos.
Seeing all the legal problems YouTube is facing I don’t see Yahoo painting a big fat bulls-eye on their backs anytime soon.
It’s really too bad seeing that so many cameras allow you to record short video clips too.