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June 14, 2007

Yahoo Photos Begins Closing Down

Michael Arrington

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Yahoo’s planned shutdown of Yahoo Photos has begun. The Yahoo blog Yodel Anecdotal reports that they have started to close accounts and transition users over to Flickr. And as promised, users who don’t want to use Flickr are being given the option of moving to Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish or Photobucket instead. “No hard feelings,” says Yahoo, which is also offering users the option of downloading images or having them mailed on a CD. Users have until September 20 to make their final decision.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 2:03 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Joao Azevedo

    June 14th, 2007 at 2:33 am

    …so much for the value of synergies. Yahoo Photos is quite different from Flickr, so I think not that much people will be happy having to move to a Flickr account.

  2. Rian

    June 14th, 2007 at 2:51 am

    I imagine they will gradually start implementing the features Flickr lacks in comparison to Yahoo Photos.. they kind off ‘have to’ if they want to keep a lot of the users that accept the initial move and later simply leave because Flickr isn’t up to par with their wishes..

  3. Jon

    June 14th, 2007 at 2:59 am

    Migration from one online platform to another is always a tough act to perform… at least they made it relatively easy for customers to do so. It’s always easier to maintain and build ONE platform then multiple… I am surprised customers are still using the older system after they learned it was to be phased out.

    Jon

  4. Cem Basman

    June 14th, 2007 at 3:25 am

    Michael, I’m not quite sure, if you are aware of that there is quite a revolt of users from Europe particularly from Germany at flickr. Against Censorship at Flickr is the slogan for the movement. Unisono you hear:

    “If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off. In other words that means, that German users can not access photos on flickr that are not flaged “safe” … only flowers and landscapes for the germans… We will not let this happen! Copy and upload this picture to your account - show flickr who we are!”

    A lot of people maybe thousands will probably leave flickr for alternatives where democratic rights are respected. Being a customer, a proaccount and a friend of flickr probably I will leave too. Sad.

  5. TwisterMc

    June 14th, 2007 at 3:40 am

    Does this mean Flickr will be gaining unlimited uploads? I’ve maxed out my free account and so I’m no longer a Flickr user.

  6. SELaplana

    June 14th, 2007 at 3:46 am

    that’s the reason why I download all the photos i uploaded to Yahoo! Photos…

  7. Andrew Erlichson

    June 14th, 2007 at 6:25 am

    Yahoo’s closing of Yahoo Photos is the admission that for family photo sharing, which is storage heavy and viewing light (only your really close friends want to see your stuff), the ad-supported model really does make sense. There are fairly few page views per byte stored. While they offered the switch to flickr, the truth is that Flickr is not the appropriate place to put pictures of your kid in the tub. That is why they also offered transfers to Kodak, Snapfish and Shutterfly who do cater to the same audience with unlimited storage.

    Meanwhile Shutterfly, Snapfish and Kodak are a deal with the devil where you have to pretty much buy every image back on paper. They are the black-flag roach motel of photo sharing. Images check in, but they don’t check out.

    Although we are not an official partner, we (Phanfare) did implement a transfer mechanism for existing Yahoo photos users and although we are not free, during the six month free trial we are offering Yahoo folks, you can download whole albums of your fullsize originals to your PC and keep video right alongside your photos. Note that since we are not an official partner, you can try our transfer and still try one of the Yahoo-provided ones later.

    And yeah, this comment is a little self-serving, but given that we are the ONLY way to download whole albums of Yahoo Photos fullsize originals in bulk, I figured it be a benefit to the community.

  8. Ahmed

    June 14th, 2007 at 6:38 am

    weren’t Yahoo! testing a new beta version of Photos a few months ago?

  9. Wallace

    June 14th, 2007 at 6:42 am

    the goal of yahoo is to make Flickr bigger and bigger…and more focus on flickr.

  10. Drazick

    June 14th, 2007 at 6:59 am

    It’s a stupid move!
    Flickr and Yahoo photos are different in their target customers. Flickr is about photography enthusiasm and Yahoo Photos is about sharing photos.

    They will hurt Flickr Quality and loss alot of clients.

    Silly move in my opinion.

  11. Concrete Stain

    June 14th, 2007 at 7:11 am

    They should have parralleled the (2) more - made Yahoo photos more like flickr -

    - then switch / (if not just redirect) - allow users to use the same username;

    - as they did it ; amazingly weak move

  12. Will

    June 14th, 2007 at 7:31 am

    “There are fairly few page views per byte stored. While they offered the switch to flickr, the truth is that Flickr is not the appropriate place to put pictures of your kid in the tub.”

    Sounds like people here aren’t familar with Flickr.

    Flickr has one of the best privacy configurations around. As a father and photographer, I can post photos with several degress of privacy settings very quickly. I can even share say a photo of my toddler in the tub with just one person, or 10 or none.

    Flickr is much superior to Yahoo ;)

    They bought Flickr for a reason.

  13. Oli

    June 14th, 2007 at 7:47 am

    .. and while getting even “cleaner”, flickr is starting to censor content .

  14. David Hersh

    June 14th, 2007 at 7:56 am

    @Andrew - I have to disagree with your statement that family photo sharing can’t work with an ad supported model. This might be the case for first generation photo sites like Yahoo, Shutterfly and Kodak Gallery, which were really designed as photo printing sites. They do little to create an engaging experience for either the producers or consumers of the content. On Multiply, which was designed for sharing and discussing photos (and other media), we get tremendous traffic (hundreds of millions of PV/month) that allows for an ad supported business model.

    Multiply also allows users to pull over all of their hi-res photos from Yahoo.

  15. Andrew Erlichson

    June 14th, 2007 at 10:03 am

    David,
    Fair enough that some subset of family demographics might support enough page views to go with an ad-model, but I am guessing that the amount of stored data you have per customer is far smaller than what we at Phanfare have. Our desktop organizer syncs all your content (photos and videos) to the Phanfare service and we keep DVD quality originals (4 megabits/second) of your video. We curently have about 4GB of data per paying Phanfare customer. And our 4GB of data per customer does not include the backup copies we keep!

    I see that the multiply uploader defaults to web-resolution images (just signed up and made you an online buddy), so that won’t work for preservation. How much data does multiply have per user?

    I just signed up and see that the ads are in the management interface. the pattern of families taking photos and videos is that they take a lot of it early and then over time, they don’t look at the stuff. hence, I claim that over time, your storage costs might rise faster than your ad revenues.

    And of course, some people just *prefer* not to have ads, and prefer to have an 800 number to call if they need their stuff back. the nice thing about the subscription model is that it is very customer, versus advertiser, centric.

    Feel free to contact me at andrew@phanfare.com to discuss further.

  16. jr

    June 14th, 2007 at 10:03 am

    Actually, anyone can bulk pull high resolution images from Y!Photos if they want. In fact Kent Brewster put together a quick tool to do it for you using BBAuth and the Y!Photos API. No special agreements or other magic needed. I posted a note about it on Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day last week about it, but we don’t get the kind of traffic that a lot of sites do.

  17. Craig Hughes

    June 14th, 2007 at 10:14 am

    A very noble shutdown…

  18. Nicole Simon

    June 14th, 2007 at 10:20 am

    I have no idea how they plan to do that for the international versions of Y Phot (assuming they where used this way) but do assume they launched their international versions for that - but in combination with “restricting” access to all photos not “correctly rated” by Yahoo standards I think most users out of Germany will rather go to a decent photo hoster than trust Yahoo anymore.

    And probably not only German users, judging by the nearly 10K entries for http://flickr.com/photos/tags/thinkflickrthink/ in one day …

  19. anonymous coward

    June 14th, 2007 at 10:25 am

    I’d like to agree with will #12 (Will) above. Not sure how the #7 formed the “flickr is not for kids in the tub” opinion (except that he’s hawking some other photosharing site).

    I’d also be surprised if these sites could be effectively ad supported, but I’d have to see numbers. Notice everyone talks about “page views”, “traffic”, “users” and “number of photos uploaded” (nothing audited, all easily fakeable) but never “revenue - expenses”. That’s a tell, just like in the late nineties :)

    But it sure is fun sharing photos for free, or nearly free! Now if only they’d bring kozmo back — that was really cool!

  20. Andrew Erlichson

    June 14th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    If you focus on preservation of media and allow unlimited longerm storage, then an ad-supported sites does not make money IMO. Flickr is rounding error to Yahoo in contribution margin (and flickr is freemium anyway), but the PR is worth millions.

    Personally, if I go to the trouble of putting all my photos and videos at a service with an eye toward preservation as well as sharing, then I want there to be a sustainable business model. More than anything, I want to be the customer if the company is my backup. At purely ad-supported sites, you are just a user, or worse, an eyeball. The people who trusted Yahoo photos got what they paid for.

    That is not to say free sites are not good. Live for the moment. They are providing a service and you are paying with little more than your attention so enjoy it while it lasts. For maps and directions there is no downside. But for your personal photos and videos, the site can not represent an archival backup to you unless the service is going to be around a long time.

  21. kosmar

    June 14th, 2007 at 11:29 am

    i am starting to consider how to pull out of yahoo’s services, if the situation does not change within 3 days.

  22. Da Truff

    June 14th, 2007 at 11:51 am

    I have tons of hardcore amateur porn on my Flickr account and share it with my mates. You just can’t have it flagged as “public”.

  23. anonymous coward

    June 14th, 2007 at 1:40 pm

    @Andrew (#20): good “contribution margin” comment — Flickr’s cost to yahoo, as you mentioned, is most-properly thought of as a marketing expense (ditto youtube’s cost to google now, for now). In fact one of the reasons flickr probably doesn’t allow video uploads is they’re not prepared to take that additional hit (but hopefully soon!) :)

    Incidentally, I pay about 25 bucks a year for my flickr account, and I still don’t see how it could function as a standalone business. Not unless adsense clickbots are involved (oh yes, I went there :) )

  24. نرم افزار

    June 14th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

    It’s be pretty bad thinking you know your countries history and then finding out one of the greatest events that happened in the past 50 years was censored and you didn’t even know about it. That’d be like being completely ignorant of the Civil Rights movements in America. It’s a wonder there’s not more Chinese that are wising up, demanding freedom (though it may be scary, as they’ve been unfree for so many centuries).

  25. Jordan Meeter

    June 14th, 2007 at 10:20 pm

    So now Flickr will be spammed with even more family photos, right?

  26. Censr

    June 15th, 2007 at 5:09 pm

    the latest happenings the last 36 hours…
    - 8,800 members in “against censorshop at flickr”, http://flickr.com/groups/againstcensorship/
    - 10,000+ photos uploaded with the tag “thinkflickrthink”, http://flickr.com/search/?s=re.....amp;m=tags
    - yahoo censoring protest images on interestingness/browse, stewart butterfield statement here, http://www.flickr.com/help/for.....eply231892
    - no blog post yet adressing the issues, still stating the benefits of the new localized versions
    - no official detailed response from yahoo inc. as to what’s going on

    And no reporting on this at techcrunch at all - arrington not ready to put light on the practices of the web2.0 poster site?

  27. John

    June 19th, 2007 at 4:21 pm

    Flickr uploads are more than double their normal volume since the announcement. You can view a chart here: http://photodoto.com/index.php.....to-flickr/

  28. Erin

    July 5th, 2007 at 4:05 pm

    Does this mean I will have to manually download and save each photo myself, or will Yahoo! do it for me while making the move to Flickr?

  29. Rohit

    July 7th, 2007 at 8:19 am

    You can download the hi resolution photos from your Yahoo album using http://www.smart-techie.com/yahoo/ It will work only for non-beta accounts though.

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