Back in the beginning of May, Yahoo announced that they would be closing down Yahoo Photos, a process that would occur over several months. Those who have photos stored on Yahoo have been given a few different options as a replacement service, and yesterday marked the day that Yahoo made the tools available so that users can begin the process.
Flickr is the first choice that they are giving users, seeing as they are owned by Yahoo. Afterall, they’re closing Yahoo Photos so that they can focus all of their attention and efforts on Flickr. Flickr isn’t for everybody though, so they have given a list of other alternatives. All you have to do is log into your account to see the options available. According to a recent posting on the Yahoo Blog, it’s a one-click process. Thankfully they made it easy!
Other then Flickr, options include(notice there’s no Google Picasa?):
- Kodak Gallery
- Shutterfly
- Snapfish
- Photobucket
- Download your photos
- Buy an archive CD
If you want to download your photos, buy a CD, and move your photos to another service, you’ll have to do the downloading and make the purchase of the CD first before transferring all of the photos over to the new service. The CD is $6.95 for 700Mb (About 350–400 photos) and is being offered through Englaze.
I was curious what Yahoo Photo users think of the change, and so I turned to the comments on the Yahoo blog announcement. Overall, it doesn’t seem like people are too happy. Change usually doesn’t go over well with people in general, and this is no exception.
- “I just converted to Flickr and now I’m pretty annoyed. My other yahoo sites that relied on yahoo photos are no longer working. This includes content that I pay for, such as Personals. How do I go about getting this fixed?”
I saw this coming a long time ago. It seemed like no-one knew about this great Yahoo! service that offered unlimitd storage for your photos. One thing I didn’t like about it was the poor organization of photo albums — you couldn’t sort them by date or anything, all you had to label them with was a name.
I started uploading my photos here, but then I realized how stupid it was to rely on this as my primary source of storage. I knew that inevitably the service would go offline, and I would loose all my precious photos, I just decided that picking up an external hard-drive with nightly backups was a safer bet to ensure I never lost a single photo. Now I’ve saved myself from this big headache. I would end up just downloading everything, I couldn’t risk it.
I have our photos backed up on another drive as well, but I use the Flickr service now. It’s nice because they offer guest passes which are just hyperlinks that you can give out so that people can view a set of your photos. I keep everything private on there, and currently have more than 5,000 photos uploaded. With the new Collections I am able to replicate the folder structure that I have on my computer, which is also a really nice feature.
I had never really used the Yahoo! photo service so I’m not sure how it stacks up to the others, but from what I gather it really sucked. At least with Flickr there are also photo downloading solutions that let you download the full-resolution photos in case you ever need to get them back.
I think this was a smart move by Yahoo! I never understood companies maintaining competing sites that do the same thing, like Google videos and Youtube. The biggest advantage of Yahoo! photos is that it allowed unlimited storage and didn’t shrink your pics. The beta interface was pretty good, but it didn’t have the incredible features of Flickr. That’s where I’ll be moving to.
Google Videos and YouTube is another great example Nester. I think Google will eventually make Google Video a search engine and let YouTube take care of the rest. At least it seems they’re heading this route.
I wish Google would somehow migrate all of the Youtube videos to Google video, while keeping old links active. What I really like about Google video is that you can download videos as mp4’s. With other sites you have to get 3rd party programs to let you download videos, then video converters.
Yeah, but Google won’t be doing that anytime soon. They have said that they are going to keep the two services separate, which is unfortunate because I think they could combine the best of both services.