Flickr, a photo service that was very popular a few years ago, is making a huge comeback. It seemed like no one was using it the past couple years since Yahoo purchased Flickr in 2005. However, it now has an amazing couple of FREE features that you won’t want to miss. You can now back up 1 TERABYTE of photos for no cost. Comparing that to Dropbox (2GB at sign up), Flickr gives you 500 times the amount of photo backup. Obviously, Dropbox is a multi-use app that has become indispensable for many, but for photo backup, Flickr is king. To put it into perspective, you could upload 500 000 photos into your account (assuming an average 2MB per photo). That’s probably more than the large majority of people will ever need to upload.

Although Flickr doesn’t have an official iPad app (yet), you can download the iPhone version and it will work fine. You will need a Yahoo! account. Once you download and open the app, it will ask you if you want to automatically upload photos you take on all your devices (Photos are set to PRIVATE as a default, so don’t worry about others viewing them):

In the app settings, you have the option to allow upload using Wi-fi only or Wi-fi + Cellular. If you don’t have a large data plan, I would choose wifi only:

The layout on the Flickr app is appealing, as you can see it keeps the original dimensions of your photos:

Flickr users can now have peace of mind if they ever lose or damage their device. All photos taken on them will be in your Flickr account. Now, if you find yourself running out of storage space on your iPad, you have freedom to delete any (or most) of your Camera Roll.

Apple’s Photostream only will save your last 1000 photos. This blows Apple’s offerings out of the water.

If videos were included (hopefully in the near future), this would be an even better service. Time to dig out your old Yahoo account info! If you don’t an account, it only takes a couple minutes to set one up.

Hopefully other cloud services will follow Yahoo’s lead and begin offering larger amounts of storage. Dropbox does offer the exact same auto-upload feature, but most (non-paying) Dropbox users do not have large enough storage to house all their photos. The advantage of Dropbox is that it uploads your videos as well.

1 Terabyte is definitely a game-changer, and will undeniably give Yahoo an edge in user-base, especially for photos. I look forward to an official Flickr iPad app in the future.