Yahoo Asks Users to Switch Photo Sites

Yahoo is shutting down Yahoo Photos, a photo storage site, and asking users to move instead to its photo-sharing site Flickr, which emphasizes community features, a Yahoo executive said on Thursday.

In June, tens of millions of registered users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of their options, including moves to Flickr or various competing photo-storage sites, according to Stewart Butterfield, a co-founder of Flickr and a director of product management at Yahoo.

Mr. Butterfield and Caterina Fake, his wife, sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005. Yahoo continued to operate both its older photo service and Flickr over the last two years, reflecting the different customer base of the two sites.

Yahoo Photos is a more conventional photo-finishing site, full of family snapshots, while Flickr has attracted a passionate fan base of amateur and professional photographers who use the site to share digital photos online, and for whom printing is largely an afterthought.

According to data from comScore supplied by Yahoo a year ago, Yahoo Photos counted 30 million registered users, who had uploaded two billion photos as of June 2006.
Source :http://www.nytimes.com