Breaking: Yahoo To Shut Down Yahoo Photos In Favor Of Flickr

it’s about time. Yahoo has too many internally competing services Flickr vs. Yahoo photo is a completely silly waste of corporate resources.

http://www.ebizmba.com

a ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch

one of two courses here:

1. they port everyone to flickr and regular folk wonder why yahoo is screwing with them and why the page and url have suddenly changed. this is the sensible route for the company, but users hate change. there is also the possibility of breaking this migration.

2. they simply stop new users from using photos but continue to support the old ones, turning photos into a leper colony, although a leper colony that doesn’t surprise users (as in, surprise = bad)

either way its a classic case of mismanagement

Other than that, how’s the rest of dinner going?

haha, I didn’t even know there was a Yahoo Photos, I always just used Flickr. Why was around this long?

Bravo to Brad for eating some of his own peanut butter, and shutting one of two competing internal services

I have to agree with Jeremy

Bloggin’ in the middle of a dinner? Is the food that bad?

Anyway, it’s interesting to see that they’ll give users the option to migrate to a competing service. What have they put in that peanut butter?

Flickr costs 24.50 for it to be useful which means that yahoo is basically killng the free service and forcing people to upgrade.

Great move! I wonder why it have taken so long to make that decision.

great chart. nice illustration how superior technology can eventually overtake brand and an installed user base. would have been nice to see the chart start from acquisition date (march 2005).
although yahoo! does deserve some flack for the 2 year period to finally make the migration, you do have to give them credit for recognizing the potential in technology and talent they got when you grabbed flickr.
once this migration is done, let’s see how long it takes to try and catch youtube.

Thts really good news and bad news…Flickr should increase support for multiple albums (sets thts what they call) And ofcourse some more bandwidht…20MB is simply not sufficient.

@jigar - Pro accounts are only $24 and limit-free. You’d like it.

This is not so good news.Lots of people use Yahoo! photos for sharing private photos and not aware of flickr’s guess pass.Hope its advertized a little more.
@jagar shah : flickr monthly limit is 100MB. http://flickr.com/help/photos/#17

Has Yahoo mentioned whether or not they will be allowing free users of Flickr to store unlimited number of photos and unlimited albums (not the current 200 photos). If not, then this move will surely alienate a huge number of Yahoo users. I do love Flickr - it’s interface and features are incredibly more useful and user friendly than Yahoo Photos. However, I still used Yahoo Photos as an easy and free way to store all my original-resolution photos online for anyone to see. If Yahoo doesn’t bring this ability to its free Flickr accounts, then the only major service left that allows free full-resolution storage of an unlimited number of photos will be AOL Pictures, and that thought really scares me. Please, Yahoo, make it right - give free Flickr users the abilities you’ve given to free Yahoo Photos users until now.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a photo on Yahoo! Photos. BTW, for another interesting chart on image and video search, take a look at this brief analysis of the players in the space.
http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=133

Wasn’t this inevitable new taking on the old. Who was using yahoo photos anyways was yahoo itsefl upgrading yahoo photos?i thoght it closed long time back

I’m really surprised (in a bad way) that Yahoo! would decide to completely close down the Yahoo! Photos, which is currently the largest photo sharing site on the Internet. While it’s good they will make it easy to migrate photos to other places, including competitors. I still say that the decision stinks.

Sharing Is Caring!

It’s interesting to see comments such as “I didn’t know Yahoo! Photos existed” or “I can’t remember the last time I saw a photo on Yahoo! Photos”. It shows that TechCrunch readers are quite savvy with this internet thing. If you want to know who is using Yahoo! Photos, just ask your Mom or Pop or Uncle Phil - i.e., the majority of people.

Here are the options Yahoo had:

1) keep supporting both Yahoo photos and Flickr.
2) get rid of Flickr
3) get rid of Yahoo photos

option 1 is a bad idea as it was explained in the famous peanut butter manifesto and option 2 would’ve been insane!

#19 there’s another option:

4) Integrate both services under the one that Yahoo decides to keep moving forward.

From what Mike says, they’re no doing that - they’re shutting down Y!Photos, letting users know it’s coming and give them alternatives.

BTW I wouldn’t say Flickr is “superior technology”. Each service offers features that the other doesn’t have. So there is a risk, but worth taking in the long term IMHO.

I sincerely hope that no one is surprised by this.

I guess user on Flickr is photo enthusiastic and yahoo photos / Photobucket / Shutterfly are serving the “need” (sharing privately).
So migrating “yahoo photo” user to Flickr is tricky, though Yahoo can give users one click transfer of their photo albums to Flickr “sets” (private by default).
BTW, why Yahoo is sharing pie of 2 billion photos with Photobucket and Shutterfly?

This step reminds me this…
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....ower-move/

That seems rather stupid, especially after redesigning YPhotos!, and then having the largest number of users. I wonder what the exact reason for the shut down is. Although good on Yahoo! for giving their customers options in where to take their pictures.

I want to hear more about video coming to Flickr!! Flickrites have been looking for a “flickr for video” for years now, the closest being IMO Vimeo. I wonder if it’ll be integrated side by side (ala Picasa Web Albums), or a separate section of a user’s account. I guessing this is more the “short home videos people record” type video service, while YouTube will keep the “mashups/legal content/digital repository” side of things.

It’s a very welcome change from Yahoo.

I think, it’s very high time Yahoo should get rid of MyWeb & Beta bookmark in favor of del.icio.us

The real big news here is in the last sentence: “Butterfield also confirmed that Flickr will ’soon’ allow users to upload videos in addition to photos.” This is huge!

It’s high time for Yahoo to sell itself to Google.

One more thing …yahoo does not include album feature back to fickr or does not increase number of ’sets’ its definately gonna loose market instead of gaining. And look at their inconsistent user interface. Flickr from no angle looks like yahoo product. Look at picassa, gmail …google docs and spreadsheets….consistent look through out the system. Yahoo photos had similar interface like yahoo mail beta. Consistency really makes difference while using a product.

Good news for users but are they freakin’ stupid???

i don’t need video hosting at flickr. i can use one of 1000 other sites offering this feature.

Yahoo photos and Flickr are not that intersecting. Both have its own niche users. When Google has been on with Google Videos and YouTube for so long, Yahoo might also follow suit..

The users from Yahoo probably will go now to Picasa for example

Jigar you must not have used flickr in a while, they’ve added a ‘collections’ feature
which lets you makes subsets of sets.

Oh please, please, please Flickr don’t have videos. Flickr has built itself a market being a quality photo site. Vidoes are very different, vastly more likely to cause copyright issues and, most importantly, there are many other services providing vidoes.

On a more controversial note, it seems to me that the average wit of a comment-maker on Flickr is substantially higher than a comment-maker on YouTube - many videos seems to be plagued with the most inane comments. Do videos encourage this, or is this just an effect of the particular site that YouTube is?

It was brave of Yahoo! to shut down photos. Stupid in the first place to have two similar services - like Google video and YouTube, but I’m pretty sure the GOOG would have migrated accounts to their service first.

Yahoo! have some really valuable web properties at the moment. If they can streamline their offerings, they can focus more on brand building and promoting these services.

Great! Flickr is a superior implementation of photo management - I don’t care if Yahoo Photos has more pictures, the tools are better at Flickr.

This shows that Yahoo is serious about “peanut butter abatement”. One brand. One photo management web site.

Good to see them cut the peanut butter.

Any word if any jobs will be affected by this decision?

This announcement makes me fear for Flickr.

First of all, the temptation to rebrand it to something lame like “Yahoo Photo Sharing Engine” just got that much bigger.

Secondly, the influx of new users has a potential to create another “September that never ends”

And finally - video? I can only hope that part is wrong. Flickr has a great reputation among photography enthusiasts, but photography has nothing to do with video. Just look at the difference in the community between Flickr and Youtube… the two just don’t mix. And talk about peanut butter - they do have Yahoo Video, are they going to be shutting that down as well?

You know there are some other options out there. I mean, I use Flickr Pro, primarily for the network effects (my pals) and the API (so many great services work with Flickr). But Zooomr.com offers comparable features and a lot more free storage. I think they’re still giving away their Pro accounts.

If all you care about is photo storage, and you don’t already have a network, why not use Zooomr? http://beta.zooomr.com/home. Also, isn’t Yahoo letting you port your photos to Photobucket? What’s wrong with that option?

Finally something being done right by Yahoo.

From a business point of view, it is pretty shocking that they actually give users a choice to export pix to competing sites. I am puzzled as to why they don’t simply transfer the photos to flickr, and next time users login to Yahoo Photos they would be redirected to their flickr acct, and that would be it… Bizarre…

–
We Will Create Your Very Own Domain Name - http://PowerNamer.com

Target has a partnership with yahoo photos so people can upload pictures through Yahoo and get them printed at target. I wonder if this will affect this.

This is a good opportunity for one of the other photo sharing services to step up and offer the same features that Yahoo Photos had in order to gain market share.

Being in this business myself, I think this is a bad move. Flickr is awesome because their authorship base is primarily the pro-consumer niche. People go to Flickr to look at the great photos there, not to look at a bunch of “Alpha Mom” content like soccer games, and babies spitting up blended carrots.

A recent survey showed that the authorship (creation/uploading of content) on Flickr was about 0.2% of the usage of Flickr. That it is so low is why the content on Flickr is so good.

People love to love Flickr because, at the end of the day, they love to look at the quality content on Flickr. It will be a HUGE challenge to separate the different types of content coming in from a different demographic/niche ongoing. They better have considered how well they can keep what makes Flickr unique intact ongoing - otherwise the older user base is going to bail on them.

Zoto targets the “Alpha Mom” demographic directly, encouraging uploading of babies, baseball games, and family events. While we have some basic community sections, we aren’t trying to be a community like Flickr. If you have some baby pics you’d like to share with your friends and family, check it out.

Multiply (http://multiply.com) offers free unlimited photo sharing (among other things) and can import from Yahoo Photos. Of course, it’s not the “free” and “unlimited” parts that attracted me to Multiply, but the excellent privacy controls and the flexibility it offers.

I’m surprised that they are actually shutting it down rather than cutting off new accounts. Generally, if a service is shutting down, you just prevent new users from joining and it will eventually dwindle.

I think its great news. I actually asked flickr help guys for this option 2 years back when I got PRO and they said its not in their TO DO list for now. The only thing scares me is the should not compromise the quality of flickr.

Mike,

Do you have any additional insight into why Yahoo chose to favor Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery, and Shutterfly? Did they come to some kind of agreement behind closed doors? Is there some unseen connection between these companies and Yahoo?

Why did Yahoo choose these competitors and not others like SmugMug, Zooomr, Bubbleshare, and Zoto? These companies, who are smaller and more innovative, would surely have been able to offer comparable (if not superior) service to the Yahoo user base than the ancient web 1.0 dinosaurs who were chosen instead. Why is Yahoo favoring the big companies and shutting out the smaller ones?

Big business gets bigger. And the little guys get shut out. It’s seems a tad unfair. Don’t you think?

Prakash,

I had never heard of Multiply.com. It looks pretty cool. It strikes more of a MySpace alternative than a strict photo hosting service. I will check it out.

It’s about friggen’ time.

This is crappy news in every way. Yahoo Photos and Flickr serve different purposes and different audiences. Forcing average Yahoo snapshooters to merge into the prosumer Flickr service will irritate both snapshooters and Flickrites. And video on Flickr? WHY? There are plenty of places to host crappy amateur videos and Superbowl commercials. Why dilute the uniquely great Flickr community into a uniformly mediocre grey goo of the masses?

Look at the parade of inanity that is Yahoo Answers, or the insipid comments on YouTube videos. Does anyone want Flickr to look like that?

The end result of this will be an exodus of Flickr users to a service which will arrive to fill the hole left by its ruin.

If this allows me to access my Flickr! photos from my TiVo, I will consider it quite wonderful. My biggest fear is that Microsoft will take over and cancel this move.

I agree on the side of it being a bad look for Yahoo! to end Yahoo! Photos storage. I can only see that making people mad - especially those who miss the deadline to run their migration tool and might not have saved copies of some of their photos there. My parents got burned hard when Zing Photos (anyone remember that one?) one day just deleted everyone’s photos. Step carefully here, Yahoo. I doubt your brand is so disposable to you.

That said, Sharpcast http://www.sharpcast.com/ is the shit. Unlimited photos, full resolution, free, can be automatically synchronized with your computer, doesn’t have a WTF name like Zooomr…

I wish I knew a way to grab all of those soon to be disgruntled users. We spend a lot of time at Glowfoto trying to lure in new users, and Yahoo wants to get rid of them.

wow. people care ay?

i use both.
flikcr is better. period.

in everyway. it has one of the most elegant UIs.

it uses folksonomies very very well.

i can send a client to view a set. why would i send a client to yahoo photos. its a mess.

it’s a NO BRAINER.

Multiply doesn’t do a full import unfortunately. However, it’s still better than nothing.

“Note that our import tool cannot bring over the hi-resolution versions of your Yahoo! photos. If you plan to order prints, your best bet is to upload the originals.”

Y!Photos had advantages over Flickr for some people. It was great for personal sharing, easy album organization and unlimited space! The new interface design was great too, surprised they would can this right after the re-design.

Oh well, I’ll definitely be switching services if they don’t make Flickr unlimited space.

Aha..! Good move.. Spin her off before Microsoft gobbles you (Yahoo) up..

BTW, Picasa has allowed video uploading for about 3 months now.. This happened around the same time they quietly upped all free accounts from 250mb to 1g. And ramped the top pay for storage option to 500g.

It was not noticed here or anywhere else from what I can remember…. But news nevertheless..

Interesting times lie ahead..

Free isn’t always a good price. I used Yahoo photos till they redesigned the UI into a mess. I use Flickr now - $25/yr. is a good price for what you get there. I don’t care at all what others post or the community aspect. I like that my photos aren’t all cluttered up with ads. Bubbleshare is good too if they would just get some decent tools there.

This makes no sense. I really doubt that Yahoo will go through with this.

I agree with Kord that this seems to dilute Flickr’s brand as a site for great photos. Though the reality is, the content on Flickr now is pretty diverse. If the user base and corpus grows considerably, I’d guess that the Interesting photos will still be interesting (though perhaps slightly less so), but that far more great photos will never have the chance to be “interesting”.

I do want to point out that the stat that only 0.2% of Flickr’s usage is uploading should be put in context. That’s 0.2% of visits. Taken on a montly basis, I’d guess that a significantly larger % of visitors upload content. It’s still a small number. If you spend some time looking around, only about 1/3rd of Flickr’s registered users have any public content. Depending on the outside numbers you look at, registered users may only make up ~20% of monthly unique visitors to Flickr. Also, on the day I looked, only about 45K users had uploaded to Flickr on a given day (based on numbers from their camera finder) when they probably have 100x as many monthly unique visitors.

So are they going to move the people’s photos to flickr? I don’t really see the point of this move. I think flickr is good for what it is but I don’t see how this could improve it.

Definitely nothing wrong about trying to increase revenue with improved service ; what I very strongly dislike though is Yahoo’s revenue lock-in strategies : after starting using FlickR (I uploaded 200 hundred pics ++), Yahoo tells me that I have to pay a monthly fee if I want to upload more than 250 pics (or is it 200?)… Do they at Yahoo realize that they are just doing the same as old copper-wire telcos used to do (and Tony Soprano as well, I reckon) : lock us in …
what they should remember also is that, when the squeezed is too hard, the average user becomes ready to accept switching cost (tedious transfer of data, loss of material) to another - less sneaky - supplier. I used to be a Yahoo fan (and I dont mind paying for premium services!), but I am starting to get very annoyed with their robber-baron attitude.

Good to see they are serious about consolidating there acquired properties, no announcement yet on whether the photos will be moved over?

Interesting also that this is happening right at the intersection of uniques.

testing, testing 123 hello TC

i think yahoo make a decision based on facts that yahoo!photo performance is declining and in the other side, flickr show a great increasing performance.
So it takes time for them to decide to close Yahoo! Photos. As far as i know, to shut down a service need a very lot consideration

@Kalyan It comes 2000 INR….really big amount.

@dave Collections is also for pro accounts.

And I am done ….transferred 700 photos from flickr to picasa web album. No more limited functionality, Free and from google…has almost everything from sharing to tagging to API and absolutely no bandwidth limits….Storage is still limited…but sure google has plenty of tht…(Look at gmail)…It will surely scale up for future needs.

I agree service like photo hosting needs some sort of limits to avoid misuse. bandwidth limitation was ok in flickr …but no album / collection for free…it sucks

great JS…
so if tomorrow google decide to aquire photobucket and move them to picasa where you will go :). I dont see any point in what you deed but good luck anyway. If i finde PWA better than Flickr i will sure move to it but not just because they are moving yahoo photo user to flickr. BTW i dont see any official news from yahoo or flickr so this may be just a belated april fool from Brad and Stewart to Michael :).

Not surprizing* Flickr is still thee Shining Light of the Web2.0 Universe* In fact MySpace + Facebook + YouTube are a Joke compared to Flickr*

;))

@Maulin

I am not switching it because they are transferring YPhotos to Flickr. But because of no support for album. I have more than 700 pics in flickr and they dont allow me to have any ways to organize them apart from tagging ? I don’t want to shell out 2K INR just for album feature. I don’t use lots of bandwidth. And i feel insecure to use a flickr service . Flickr is earning a lot from paid user so it does not seem it will make collection or “more sets” feature available to free user soon. I feel one should be charged for usage not for functionality. Thts y PWA..:)

I have an google

“I sincerely hope that no one is surprised by this.”

I am shocked. Y! Photos and Flickr are *very* different and serve very different users and uses. Both are easily big enough to support sufficient resourcing.

“Competing” with yourself is *not* bad. Think of automobile companies or Proctor & Gamble.

I just don’t understand! Come on I love Yahoo photos. I have over 4,000 pics alone on my account. Why would you do this to people who really enjoy pictures. I can’t get them all printed out at once… I’m a mom with little income.. at least give me a year or two to get them printed out and then you can dump yahoo photos if thats really what you want. So be it…. you’ll do it anyway and I’ll loose all of my son’s baby pictures… I’ll cry for days and days.

hi
i’m vishnu

Another bad move from Yahoo! just after they have regained my confidence in their Yahoo Photos service (by revamping it with a great Upload Tool, new interface and making the storage unlimited)… Now, I have to download all the hundreds of photos one by one and then re-upload again somewhere else. At the very least, create a DOWNLOAD TOOL which allows me to download everything into a Zip file. Thanks Yahoo. *sarcasm* If you are going to shut down a service, leave a good reputation with the people. It will be a misfortune if Microsoft spends the money on acquiring Yahoo (and I am not exactly pro-Microsoft - I use Linux)… I have already ditched all Yahoo services (no longer search on Yahoo, no longer uses the Bookmarks, neither Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Calendar, Yahoo Groups etc.), and this last one will be as well. Oh btw, those of you who love Flickr, just wait and see, Yahoo has a history of bastadizing the good things. I suggest you back up your photos NOW…

To Photo or not to Photo, thats not the question !
The decision is about:
To multimedia or not to multimedia

I don’t mind to have Videos on flickr, it seems obvious since video streaming is built into almost any camera now a days.
BUT, more importantly, I think documents comes before Videos !
Haven’t anyone thought about saving your itinerary (or diary) along with your photos ?
Surely this would be my prime requirement.
Documents is not possible to share - not in flickr and not in Picasa (WebAlbums). Only streams of html. What about the huge number of files from the WordPerfect days back in the 80’s ?

regards from a
Picasa, Google, Yahoo, flickr and soon perhaps my own website ‘document manager’…