San Francisco — Last year, Yahoo trumpeted that it had stacked up its possession with a YouTube-like video hosting to its Flickr photo-hosting site — but only for paid users of the Pro version. The struggling Internet pioneer on Monday declared that all Flickr members with free accounts can now upload snippets of video to the website in a budding challenge to Google-owned YouTube, although they are limited to two videos a month, also it has enabled high-definition video uploading and viewing, and use a time-line feature to see when events happen around the world.
Previously, Flickr has offered video to Pro accounts for over a year now. But from now free users will be allowed to upload two videos per month, and each video is fixed to 90 seconds in length and 150 MB in file size limit still applies to everyone.
Presently, these limit seems pretty scanty comparing it with YouTube’s exuberant allowance of up to 10 video uploads at a time with a 1 GB size limit for free account holders. Vimeo permits 500 MB and one HD video upload per week for free users.
Free members currently get 100 MB for monthly photo uploads. The company also said it will allow Pro members to upload HD videos, but all members will be able to view them.
“With the recent introduction of Nikon’s D90, Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II, Flip Mino HD, and others, it is even easier to shoot videos in HD,” Flickr general manager Kakul Srivastava said in a blog post. “Because our focus has always been on allowing our members to showcase their vision in the best way possible, we are also enabling HD video uploading and viewing today.”
“We are continuing to evolve the video experience to make it more compelling, accessible and easy to use,” Srivastava wrote in a post at the company’s website.
“So grab your cameras, and capture and share ‘long photos”’ of your own!”
That said, for those folks out there who are not Flickr power users but still wish to contribute the occasional short film, this is a great time to test this feature out! Just download the Flickr Uploader version 3.1.4 which was previously only available to Pro accounts, and get started.
Finally, Srivastava said that new today in Flickr is a clever little feature called Flickr Clock. Flickr’s new clock will allow members to show and discover when videos were shot so viewers can see a time-line. He urged members to use the feature when uploading their best videos. Flickr Clock enable viewers to see what is happening at different moments in time, he said. The “clock” is set up like a bar graph with slices of images along a time-line. Viewers can explore certain periods of time, popular tags, recent updates, and more.
Flickr introduced video less than a year ago by allowing Pro members to upload short video clips. “It has been truly amazing to see how creative our members can get using this medium,” Srivastava said.
Updating: A company representative explained the free account situation as follows: “Anyone (Free and Pro) can upload HD video but it will only be processed as HD video if you are a Pro member. What this means for Free members is that Flickr keeps the original file, so if you ever decide to upgrade to a Pro account, your video will automatically update to HD, too.”
“We are not attempting to be the highest volume site, but we are striving to be the most interesting, authentic and personal,” Srivastava said when the video-sharing feature launched last year.
“We want to let people share personal content like your child playing in a baseball game or a birthday party with friends.”
Flickr claims more than 35 million registered members and a database of more than three billion photos and videos.
Approximately three million pictures and videos are reportedly uploaded daily to Flickr, which industry trackers say is visited by 73 million people worldwide monthly.
For more information about the changes to Flickr, you can visit the announcement page on Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog.