1 TB on flickr

In a bid to revive interest in Flickr, Yahoo has redesigned its photo community website and increased the amount of free storage available to Flickr users to 1 terabyte.

That amounts to more than 500,000 photos taken at 6.5 megapixels, which is about the size generated by current smartphone cameras.

It's enough space to attract the interest of developers who see Flickr as a resource for storing any file, not just image files. The reason is simple: A free terabyte of storage is a pretty good deal, particularly when you consider that Flickr is charging $499 a year for 2 terabytes.


The problem with using Flickr for general storage is that it's only designed for images. To get around that, developer Ryan LeFevre has posted Ruby code to Github called flickr-store that lets users encode data as a .PNG image file, so it can be stored using Flickr.

LeFevre, in an email, said that another developer, Ricardo Tomasi, implemented a similar project at about the same time he published flickr-store.

LeFevre said he would not advise anyone to use his code to store critical files. "The ability to store files on Flickr by encoding them as PNGs was more of an academic exercise than anything," he said. "That said, there have been some similar successful projects in the past, such as GmailFS, so it's possible that the project could mature into a somewhat useful tool. Encoding/decoding data from PNG files is also, unfortunately, a bit slow. There is a lot of room for improvement."