Looks like yahoo just screwed up the last good thing they had. This will be my last year with this service (I've been a member since 2004 and have had a pro account for several years now).
Flickr's job isn't that easy to be defined. It serves many purposes: Being able to upload and store images there, to organize them, but also to view them of course. Having a new UI putting the images first seems quite reasonable given that definition of flickr.
Besides, the old interface was neither simple nor useable if one wasn't used to it. No one outside of Flickr had time yet to find out whether the new Interface works.
More general remark: We had a good impression what it was likde for the Flickr-Team inside Yahoo. No ressources, no ability to change or improve the service, blocked by bureaucracy and unwilling management. That they are able now to deliver such an upgrade is downright impressive. 1 TB alone is massive and would never have been possible with the old situation, given the description. There really is change in that place.
On the ux side bringing the pictures to the front is pretty reasonable. Unfortunately it stops with a masonry (which is questionable in itself) and a profile header. Everywhere else it is just too noisy, smells like marketing and distractions that stop you every minute from enjoying the pictures. Just look at the home page with the "sign up" popup.
Yahoo needs designers and style as badly as acquiring the next thing every year...
Flickr was in need of a facelift, but not a complete overhaul. This just seems to me like a rehash of Delicious (the difference being that Flickr is still a part of Yahoo): redesign the whole thing to make it more "social" and "hip" and lose what made it a great service in the process. Delicious is still awful compared to what it was even under Yahoo's governance and I don't think Flickr is going to recover from this either.
And what's this about dropping their Pro accounts in favor of some 1TB free space nonsense? Yeah, that's going to work...
I don't know if Flickr really neded just a facelift. The overhaul signals more strongly that Flickr no longer stagnates. It could be that it was indeed a needed one, given the age of the old interface. It could be that they needed that overhaul to get tumblr, to show them thay aint the old Yahoo no more. Who knows.
I agree that it gives the impression of wanting to be more hip and social, but I think that's good if the userbase was in decline before. I think that the lack of a beta and the possibility to give feedback before makes this so hard for existing users.
Delicious was something else, I think. I was under the impression that after their changes, some of the old use-cases weren't supported anymore? What is the new Flickr missing exactly, apart from tiny images as default, strange workflow to get the real image or at least bigger sizes, and ugly menus?
I know that the old Flickr wasn't a place I enjoyed. I used it mainly to get images for a program of mine. Don't think I will be a heavy user of the new one, but for my use case, it sure looks better now (iff the extended search for CC-licenced images still works).
Maybe the old interface could have used some polish, but the new one goes overboard cramming photos together and hiding metadata/comments. It looks like it is giving photos more relevance, but actually it just creates noise.
Your opinion seems very much in-line with the hugely negative reaction thread on flickr[1]. I'd be interested in the specific functionality you lost in the update that you miss.
Photos in different styles don't look great mashed up right next to each other on my photostream. Old design had an option to show them big as one column, or smaller with more whitespace around them.
The default photo height on my photostream is also lower than on the old big one column setting, which makes particularly my vertical photos look worse when you're scrolling by.
Sure, it's hard to please everyone, but it's hard for me to personally transition from the old layout.
That said, I'll keep my paid account around for awhile if things keep evolving for the better.