Yahoo! Photos Closing In Favor of Flickr

SXSW 2007

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.

photo by Scott Beale

Scott Beale
Scott Beale

Scott Beale is the founder of Laughing Squid and is based in New York City. When not running the blog, Scott can be found posting on Threads and sharing photos on Instagram.