Flickr's Major Upgrades

Flickr launched their from the Flickr Blog here.

The 90 second limit is an interesting one and will likely keep a lot of copyrighted material off of the site. When even a basic music video is over 90 seconds, it will be hard for anyone to really put any majorly infringing material on the site. This would be consistent with Flickr trying to create a more "authentic" video experience than users might find on YouTube or other video sites where more copyrighted non-original material shows up.

Interestingly it seems that Flickr plans to censor the video experience to only include "safe" or "moderate" videos. So far their rules for video seem pretty simple:


2. Only upload videos you have created yourself."

Videos can be embeded into web pages (as the video above shows by example).

I do think that it is interesting that Flickr seems initially to have chosen not to allow filtering of the video experience. Personally I'm worried that a bunch of crap videos will clutter up my Flickr experience. I was hoping that Flickr might have built an option to allow users to opt out of the video experience. Instead it looks like video will be everywhere that photos are on Flickr without giving users an option to filter out or screen out video from their Flickr experience. I'm surprised that Flickr would not include filtering tools to opt out of the experience with this offering.

Most of the initial comments on the video service from existing Flickr users seem to be negative, especially given the decision to not allow filtering of video from the Flickr experience.

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You can read more comments from the Video, Video, Video, has already sprouted up where you can view some of the earliest video uploaded to Flickr here.

Although I'm personally not so interested in 90 second videos, Flickr also doubled the sizes that they allow for uploaded photographs on the site. Free accounts will now be able to upload 10MB files, Pro accounts will now be able to upload 20MB files. This is a welcome improvement as many higher-end digital SLRs produce file sizes larger than 10MB.

Another change made by Flickr today has to do with groups. Flickr marks many of the groups or forums on the site as adult only. These groups are NIPSA'd (not in public search areas). In the past these groups were more limited to groups that Flickr or other users flagged as offensive or restricted. Many groups are marked "adult only." For instance, one of the groups where I participate from TechCrunch here. More from CNET here.

What do you think? Are you happy with video on Flickr or would you rather do without it?