Yesterday Flickr announced that they were increasing the monthly bandwidth allotments for their users from 20 to 100MB for free accounts and from 2GB to to unlimited uploading bandwidth for Pro accounts. The increase on their free accounts matched to the t the monthly upload bandwidth increase that we announced for Zooomr back in November. At Zooomr we like seeing this. Competition almost always benefits the consumer and it is nice to see flickr kind of try to step up to the plate to match our level of service for accounts at Zooomr, here less than two months later. Still, and I'm obviously biased here, Flickr's announced increase in bandwidth is largely hollow and here is why. 1. It does not make much difference whether you get 20MB or 100MB of monthly bandwidth on a free account if you are going to be limited to 200 photos. At Flickr, your free account can only show 200 photos at a time. It doesn't do you any good to upload more photos if you in the end can't share them. They may as well have made free accounts 10GB because the limit to enjoying a free account is not bandwidth restriction but rather photo restriction. Flickr could always lift their 200 photo limit and allow unlimited photos for free accounts like Zooomr does and then the 100MB might mean something. 2. An "unlimited" upload bandwidth for Pro accounts doesn't do you much good if you limit your Pro users to 10MB per photo. 10MB per photo requires that virtually every digital SLR shooting at high resolution must have their photos degraded and downsized in order to be hosted on Flickr. Hardly ideal for an online archive or backup. When you cap the photo size of each photo it makes it much harder for you to consume all that generous "unlimited" bandwidth that is being offered. Flickr of course could increase their photo size to 50MB which would accommodate virtually every consumer level DSLR on the market today. It is nice to see Flickr match our recent upload limits for free accounts. It's good to know that they are paying attention. But they still need to make some changes if they hope to really match Zooomr's offer to photographers. It sells well as marketing spin but lacks meaningful impact for Flickr users. We would of course also invite Flickr to match our free pro account for bloggers offer as well, but that too is something that I doubt you'll see Don't get me wrong by the way. I love Flickr, I use it every day. And we are actually flattered that they notice what we are doing over here at Zooomr. Competition is a great thing for consumers. The best photographs in the world have yet to be taken.