Vince,

This is largely marketing spin.

Although it’s nice to see Flickr matching Zooomr’s recent increase to 100MB of upload bandwidth that TechCrunch covered on Nov. 1st. , http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/01/zooomr-doubles-flickrs-monthly-photo-upload/ this move is largely useless for most Flickr free accounts. Flickr caps their free accounts at 200 photos. So having all the bandwidth in the world is not going to do you any good if you can only share 200 photos on your flickrstream. If Flickr wanted to seriously give their free users a gift, they should increase the limit of the numbers of photos that a free user can have (200 feels, well, kind of Scroogy, given that it’s Christmas and all — at Zooomr we don’t limit our photographers to 200 photos). Unless they increase the number of photos a free account can have, the extra bandwidth is pretty worthless.

In terms of Pro accounts going unlimited, again, here Flickr limits the size of individual photos on Pro accounts to 10MB. Which means that most photos taken at full resolution on a digital SLR must be downsized and degraded in order to upload them to your Flickr Pro account. When you cap your users at 10MB per image, it makes it much harder for them to consume all of that generous “unlimited” bandwidth that you just gave them.

This announcement is nice marketing spin and it’s flattering that they think they need to match Zooomr but with other key limits firmly in place the end result is little, if any, benefit to most Flickr users.

They still haven’t matched our free Pro accounts for bloggers though, but we’ll see, maybe they’ll do this too.

http://blog.zooomr.com/2006/07/20/more-love-for-bloggers-25gb-free-pro-accounts/