Like everyone else my first reaction to Flickr’s new storage plan was jaw-dropping happiness. Flickr was not only the first web service that I actually paid for, but I also spent an insane amount of time uploading, organizing my collection of images. Flickr used to be awesome until Yahoo stopped working on it. I recently looked at the Google+ image storage/backup service and I think it is much much better than Flickr, at least for me. Here is why:

• Unless you have very good internet speed with the top-notch upload speed and take a lot of pictures, you most likely will never use, or even come close to using even a fraction of Flickr’s offering. That’s Flickr’s fault, but they know the math, which is why they can offer such ridiculous space. If Flick offered more than just image uploading, then it would have been a different story. The Flickr desktop uploader hasn’t been updated since 2009.
  
  
• Because of my horrible upload speed, and its not only me, it will take me months (if not years) of continuos uploading to store my tens of thousands of image in its original size. So to upload my images to Flickr I will have to resize all my images from its original size. If I am going to resize my images, why not use Google+ offering, which offers unlimited storage in standard size?
  
  
• Image hosting is more than just storage. Google+ with its recent update made image hosting smarter, better looking (I know subjective), more fine-tuned options, and overall looks like something that is made for 2013. With features like Auto-backup, Auto-enhance, Auto-awesome, Highlight; it’s way ahead of almost everyone else I can think of. While the much needed new Flickr update looks better than what it used to be (again subjective), underneath the simple design changes it’s still the old Flickr with the same set of features and settings that have always been there. Visually it’s not as pleasing as Google+, it has a long way to go.

Don’t get me wrong, I am anything but a Google fanboy. But when it comes to polish and feature set and the reality of uploading a large number of photos online, I honestly think Google+ is way ahead of the pack, perhaps Facebook can be considered a second-best option. Flickr, being the only other Image backup service I have used, comes in third for me. I hope Yahoo continues to refine Flickr and doesn’t wait another 5 years for feature bump and I also hope that Yahoo, under Mayer’s leadership, becomes a serious challenge to the present 3-4 tech behemoth. Yahoo may have shown some early glimpse of change in direction but this was not the defining “It” factor I was hoping for. As a matter of fact, the biggest take away from Flickr update was not the storage bump, but that it actually did something new.