Yahoo took yesterday, while the world was watching, to announce major design, mobile, pricing and storage updates to its photo-sharing platform.

In a bid to create more of a social feel, and reinvigorate an ageing site, the familiar pink and blue navigation has been replaced by a Tumblr-esque waterfall news feed complete with infinite scrolling and a one-click share button. “Everything that we’ve done in this new redesign has been about putting the photo front and centre,” said Flickr VP Brett Wayn.

Flickr is now offering 1 terabyte of free storage for every user – there are currently 89m – giving each the space for more than 500,000 photos. It is also getting rid of its Pro pricing tiers in favour of offering an Ad Free account for $49.99 a year, along with the new doublr account for power users, which comes with an extra terabyte and is priced at $499.99. The Android app has also been brought in line with the desktop and recently updated iOS version. The move to a photo-centric tiled UI has seen downloads increase by 25 per cent on Apples platform. 

So far, feedback invited by the company has been overwhelmingly in favour of the old Flickr. Hate is a strong word but its been used a lot by the Flickr faithful, reminiscent of Facebook and Instagram change deniers, but will these people really take all their photos down and leave the platform..? 

As if yesterday’s acquisition wasn’t enough work for one day, Tumblr’s iOS app has also been updated, giving it a consertina-style menu option for composing posts. Tumblr launched mobile ads on its apps last month in the form of sponsored stories and it is likely that the same approach will be taken on Flickrs free accounts. While desktop ads have appeared on the blogging site for more than a year, they have been resigned to the side of the page, but you can probably expect news feed stories across both the Flick and Tumblr websites too. Yahoo said it might also work with some bloggers who want ads alongside their work.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer indicated that the sites, which already conveniently share a dropped letter, will become more closely integrated. “We have a nice set of the creator brands,” she said. “Photographers and writers. With that, there is natural set of opportunities that arise between Flickr and Tumblr and we’ll deal with that as it comes.”