Flickr unveils new redesign as Marissa Mayer promises the site will be 'awesome again'

The new interface is based around high-resolution photographs

Yahoo has announced a major redesign of photography website Flickr.

Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, said the redesign includes a new interface based around high-resolution photographs and a terabyte of storage for each user, equating to 537,731 photos at 6.5 megapixels each.

Mayer said “you can take all the pictures ever taken and upload them to Flickr... and there would [still be room].”

Yahoo purchased Flickr in 2005 as the site became increasingly popular, but failed to keep up with rivals such as Facebook and Pinterest.

Flickr’s tagline used to be “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world”, but the humble brag has not been true for years as sharing photos online has become dominated by social networking, while the need to store photographs has decreased thanks to cloud storage services.

Likewise, Flickr failed to capitalise on the mobile market with its basic app for iPhones out-performed by products such as Instagram.

Mayer acknowledged Flikr’s former shortcoming at the launch of the redesign in New York yesterday, saying that the site “languished”. However, she said that Flikr would be “awesome again”.

Flikr’s previously text-heavy layout has had a cleaner redesign featuring the popular “mosaic” layout. A new version of the Flikr app for Android phones and tablets has also been launched.