Buying Tumblr isn't the only big thing that Yahoo has done today. Flickr, the photo storage and sharing site bought by Yahoo way back in 2005, has been brought into the 21st century with a new look, new pricing, and a new Android app.

Gone is the old Flickr interface of small thumbnails, gobs of whitespace, and lots of metadata. In its place is a site with big thumbnails, full-screen pictures by default, and metadata for each image tucked below the fold. Flickr's Lightbox view, that removes the clutter around the page and shows pictures on their own, remains available.

The home page now shows photos of everyone you subscribe to with the most recent handful of pictures that your contacts have uploaded. Each user's photostream displays a big tiled view of their pictures. This isn't entirely new to Flickr—it was a feature of the site's Explore page—but it's new to individual user pages.

It's a logical design. Flickr's a photo site for sharing photos. Photos should be the focus, and now they are in a way that they never were before. The old view is more or less available for things like editing your photos and metadata, but the site is now built around looking at pictures rather than managing them.

To go with the new look is a new pricing model, one that's almost unrecognizable compared to the old one. The old Flickr had two tiers, Free and Pro. Free was extremely limited, allowing users to upload 300MB of photos and two videos per month, with only the newest 200 photos visible. The $24.95-a-year Pro, on the other hand, was extremely liberal, with unlimited photos and videos per-month, ad-free browsing, and detailed statistics on your photos.

In the new Flickr, the Free account is a lot, lot better. Free users get 1TB of storage and can upload an unlimited number of photos or videos (with videos limited to three minutes of 1080p). Individual photos and videos are limited to 200MB and 1GB each. There are then two paid options beyond that: $49.99 a year removes ads but otherwise changes nothing, while $499.99 (yes; a penny less than five hundred bucks) doubles the storage to 2TB.

New Pro accounts are no longer available, though current Pro users will, for the time being, be able to renew their Pro subscriptions and continue to reap the benefits of both ad-free and unlimited storage. They'll also to continue to be able to access more detailed stats. It's not clear how long these renewals will be offered.

Along with all the updates made to the Flickr Web experience, Yahoo also released an updated version of the Android app. This takes many of its design cues from the new website, making photos the focus and keeping metadata and extraneous clutter to a minimum. It's a slick, good-looking app. Contacts view is particularly attractive. Contacts are listed vertically with horizontal scrolling swiping through each contact's recent pictures.

The result is that Flickr feels a lot more visual and is a lot more appealing as a result. Flickr was once the go-to site for photo hosting. Competition, both from dedicated photo sites like 500px and SmugMug as well as social networking sites, has seen it fall in stature and prominence. Facebook in particular now dwarfs Flickr's size. Its billion or so users document their lives in about a quarter of a trillion pictures.

Flickr has also been an extremely conservative site, doing little to change its look and feel, which left it looking dated and more than a little unloved. As is common with any major update to a familiar appearance, there has immediately been a backlash among some Flickr fans calling for the old site to be brought back. In this writer's opinion, the new design is a welcome improvement.

The new interface and new pricing should make Flickr a lot more competitive. On top of that, Yahoo has promised an advertising campaign to promote the site and win new users. Flickr is now getting the love it has long needed.

For free users this is clearly massive upgrade. In fact, it's an astonishing new pricing model. You have to hate ads an awful lot to pay $50 a year just to remove them. That's twice as much as Pro cost, but without any of the extra features that Pro offered (removal of limits, detailed stats). And if 1TB really isn't enough—it's hard to imagine that Flickr has many users for whom it isn't—the next storage option isn't cheap and unlimited, as it is in Pro.

All in all, it seems that the new Flickr is designed to do one thing in particular: discourage people from buying any of the upgrade options so that they keep viewing ads instead. Subscriptions are no longer the point. Yes, there's a token effort to continue subscriptions, but $500 a year for an extra terabyte is never going to be a big seller.

The new pricing will make it a lot more viable for snap-happy casual users, which must surely be the point, but Facebook has become a dominant monster in this space. Flickr has its advantages—for example, it lets you upload full-size images with no resizing or recompression, and it has a clearer position regarding photo licensing. While these are important to photography enthusiasts, Yahoo's real job will be to make them appeal to the Facebook generation. The new site and pricing are a start, but there's much more work to do if Yahoo wants to make Flickr the photo destination it once was.

Listing image by Alexander Kaiser