Michael Arrington just broke the story that tomorrow Yahoo! will be shutting down Yahoo! Photos in order to focus on Flickr as their primary photo sharing service. I think this is an excellent decision by Yahoo! and will be a huge boost for Flickr, one of my favorite web services (I now have over 17,000 photos on Flickr).
If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly. Yahoo is currently one of the largest photo sharing site on the Internet, with around 2 billion stored photos. Flickr, by comparison, has around 500 million photos. But Flickr is also growing much faster than Yahoo photos and co-incidently has just exceeded Yahoo! Photos in traffic, according to Comscore.
Mike also mentioned that according to Stewart Butterfield Flickr will soon be supporting video. Now that should make things really interesting when it comes to video sharing services.
UPDATE: Valleywag called this back in February.
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It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Local MSM source SFGate is reporting that Microsoft is interested in acquiring Yahoo.
As a Yahoo! Photo user, I will be sad to see my free unlimited uploads go away. Perhaps it’s time to switch to Google Photos (a.k.a. Picasa).