Yahoo! News . Yahoo! Photos shutter closes

by Kris   ⋅   May 4, 2007   ⋅   Comment now   ⋅    RSS

Yahoo! Photos is closing up shop after an extremely popular run as the #1-#2 most visited internet photo storage site with over 2 billion user album images. Users will be redirected to Flickr, which Yahoo! acquired in March 2005 or external sites such as Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish or Photobucket. Flickr only has about 500 million stored images so far, but it is steadily gaining popularity while Yahoo! Photos is dropping. Yahoo! realizes that it is just the nature of the fickle web and unfortunately Photos (a static sharing site) lacked certain capabilities like the ability to be tracked in search engines. Flickr already has this built in. Y! also realizes that old users may be unhappy with the change and might not migrate to Flickr, but believes this is better for everyone in the long run.

On a related note, around the Ides of March (March 15th) the whole Flickr Yahoo! ID login switch — all Flickr users are now required to sign in with a Yahoo! ID, and “old skool” users (users before the buyout) could no longer be logged on indefinitely — spurned a huge uproar with those who wanted to maintain their “old skool” status.