Give your Photos the fun of Flickr

Posted June 13th, 2007 at 3:34 pm by Tim Anderson, Yahoo! Photos & Flickr

 31 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

You may have recently seen the announcement that we’ll be closing Yahoo! Photos and focusing all our efforts on Yahoo’s photo sharing community, Flickr.

If you use Yahoo! Photos, fear not. We’re still committed to doing what is best for you, and by getting laser-focused on a single photo sharing service (Flickr), we’ll be able to give you even more of the great stuff you’ve come to expect from Yahoo!. Many of creative folks behind Yahoo! Photos are heading over to the Flickr team, giving us even more ammo for future innovation.

We’ve watched photography gradually change from a tool for simply recording life events (seen enough baby/wedding/graduation/vacation photos, anyone?) to a social tool for sharing and connecting with others. That’s why we believe it’s time to shift our focus towards Flickr.

We’re doing our best to make this transition as smooth and convenient as possible, and beginning today you will be able to move your albums and photos to Flickr. The next time you log in to Yahoo! Photos, you’ll see your options for moving your entire collection with just one click.

And in case Flickr isn’t for you (no hard feelings), we’re also providing easy ways to move your photos to other services (including Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish or Photobucket), download them, or get them on an archive CD. Find more information on our Yahoo! Photos help pages. You don’t have to choose right away — you have until September 20th to make a decision.

Oh, and if you happen to use one of our international Yahoo! Photos sites, we’ll outline our plans for those services soon. Check your respective Yahoo! Photos site for details later this year.

In the meantime, we hope you’ll give Flickr a try for sharing your photos and exploring the millions of amazing photos uploaded everyday by Flickr members from all over the world.

Tim Anderson
Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Photos & Flickr

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31 Comments Add your own

walter ang | June 13th, 2007 at 6:02 pm

i had a feeling this would happen eventually, which i think is great, streamlining and efficiency and all, but i think yahoo needs to extend the deadline.

i wouldn’t have found out about this if i hadn’t visited yodel.yahoo.com today. what if people don’t find out in time? they’d have a fit.

i suggest an announcement be sent to people’s yahoomails and yahoo 360 accounts. i’ve tried twice this morning but i get the technical message thingy. will try the whole day, i don’t want to lose my photos! *shudder*

and we’re having a mercury retrograde right now too (and i know many people don’t believe in astrology, but hope you’ll indulge me), so you guys might encounter some problems till the retrograde is over.

Mercury retrograde: June 14 to July 9

what is a mercury retrograde?

basic explanation of mercury retrogrades:
http://north-node.com/articles/mercury-retrograde
or
http://www.astrologyweekly.com/astrology-articles/mercury-retrograde.php

next level reading:
http://cafeastrology.com/mercuryretrograde.html
or
http://www.astrologycom.com/mercret.html

walter ang | June 13th, 2007 at 6:06 pm

oh yes! will the photos in my yahoogroups photos section be deleted too?

Dominik | June 13th, 2007 at 10:42 pm

When I transfer the photos to Flickr, will they be censored, too?

Drazick | June 14th, 2007 at 3:11 am

Why are you doing this mistake?
Flickr is for photography.
Yahoo mail is about sharing pictures with no photography value (Family, Friends).
You’ll ruin the quality of flickr and lose the customers of Yahoo Photos (Which is much superior to Flickr for sharing pictures).

Karl | June 14th, 2007 at 7:30 am

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?

Jesse Chenard | June 14th, 2007 at 9:43 am

I had a Yahoo account through SBC Global and have never been able to do anything with the albums once we left SBC. The login stopped working at the point we cancelled our ADSL although the albums still exist. Is there any way to save the albums?

Your insight would be much appreciated as it was literally years of work to implement.

R.A. | June 14th, 2007 at 10:26 am

The transfer to Flickr (yet another moronic social networking-themed site) does not maintain the folders in which yahoo photos originally resided. I have absolutely no interest in Flickr’s omg! features and much preferred Yahoo Photos. Words are not adequate to express my profound disappointment with Yahoo – as a yahoo user and (very small) shareholder. The company appears to be abandoning everything that works and works well for flash-in-the-pan features … some sort of Web 2.0 run amok frenzy, I guess.

Geek Poet | June 14th, 2007 at 11:48 am

Once we switch to Flickr, do we have to pay to get the “unlimited” premium stuff?

With Y! photos, we did not have to worry about how much we can upload in a month or how much we can store!

Flickr seems nice, I would love to give it a try, but please don’t take put all these constraints that might make us move somewhere else!

Jim | June 15th, 2007 at 10:46 am

So you’re closing Yahoo photos. ok – this cas happen. But I thought you would propose to transfer our photos to flickr or some other services such as smugmug, photobucket… or even ipernity a new very interesting one. And what about people who have more than 200 photos ? this point is not covered in any information fromp yahoo. very disapointed too.

Alison | June 16th, 2007 at 10:42 am

When I do transfer all my pictures (over 7,500 of them) to Flickr, or any of the other sites, will they be automatically deleted from Yahoo Photos?? It seems more logical to delete them all when the site closes, that way we have a chance to maybe save the pictures at more than one location if we aren’t sure where to go, or if we change our minds??

Knottyshoe | June 20th, 2007 at 2:08 pm

It can be nothing but disaster. Well, who hasnt got a program 2 view/store photos already ?? Yahoo!photos was all about sharing-and sharing only. Thats what made it special. Well, for me personally, I’ll just keep my JASC PAINT PHOTOALBUM . Just no sharing with yahoo. But as for Yahoo ? U’ll just have lost a valued client — and soon there’ll be more like me,who’ll prefer Gmail 2 Yahoo..

Janet | June 20th, 2007 at 6:10 pm

You people LIED. My photos were just transfered to Flickr and now I get the following message upon log-in:

“About your photos… You’ve run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you’ve uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account. None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they’ll all come back unharmed. ”

Huh? Why did you lie to me with the following statement when you first told me that I needed to move my photos elsewhere:

“To make the transition easier on our users, all Yahoo! Photos users moving to Flickr will receive 3 months of Flickr Pro for free, which has none of the limits described above. Then if these limits become an issue after your three-month free trial expires, you may choose to upgrade to a Flickr Pro account $24.95 per year. ”

So, my photos are finally on Flickr (by the way, it took you almost a week to move them there) and you are telling me that I have a substandard account and no one can see more than 200 of the photos unless I upgrade NOW.

YOU LIED, Yahoo & Flickr, plain and simple. Shame on YOU.

Tim Anderson | June 21st, 2007 at 4:53 pm

Thanks for sending in your comments about the closing of Yahoo! Photos. I saw a few recurring questions and I wanted to take this opportunity to answer them for you.

Will the photos in Yahoo! Groups or Yahoo! Personals be deleted when Yahoo! Photos are deleted? No, photos uploaded directly to other Yahoo! websites will not be affected by the closure of Yahoo! Photos.

Do users who switch from Yahoo! Photos to Flickr need to pay for unlimited photo uploads? As soon as we finish moving your Yahoo! Photos to Flickr (if you choose that option), we will give you a 3-month Flickr Pro account for free, which includes unlimited uploads. However, you will eventually need to pay for Flickr Pro if you’re looking for a service with no limits. For more information on Flickr’s upload limits, click here.

Will photos be deleted immediately once users transfer their images from Yahoo! Photos? After you move to another photo service, Yahoo! Photos continues to store your photos for a limited time to ensure that the move was successful, but shortly thereafter the photos will be deleted from Yahoo! Photos when we know your photo collection has found a new home. If you are interested in trying more than one service, you may want to consider purchasing an archive CD (for users of the New Yahoo! Photos only) and uploading into the service(s) of your choice.

Kristi Duggins | June 25th, 2007 at 4:38 pm

Does Flickr have an archive CD option so that I can archive my photos later?

Joe Blaze | July 19th, 2007 at 10:12 pm

I was very happy until now. I will miss Yahoo! Photos very much, downloading was a piece of cake.
This new service sounds like it will be harder to download and a membership fee as well. Its change is all about money and politics.

Raymond Savory | July 24th, 2007 at 5:19 am

Why change a good thing, Reading all of the comments I feel that you are going to lose a lot of members.
Has this gone to far to reverse.I would happily pay a fee to yahoo to leave well alone.
Yours ………..Ray Savory

gidget | July 25th, 2007 at 9:58 am

This is horrible. Flikr is pathetic with it’s discretion. With yahoo you could mark who could see the photos. With Flikr you can just do a word search and get into private pictures.

I find this just deplorable!

Pat McKay | July 26th, 2007 at 12:52 pm

I am very disappointed with the changeover. As others have already pointed out, you can in reality only have 200 photos displaying for free at Flickr. All the others are in some sort of limbo until you fork out money.
Yahoo photos was great. I am now looking at other sites than Flickr to store photos. I feel I was tricked into doing the transfer.

Raymond Savory | July 27th, 2007 at 2:31 am

Sir/Madam.
I suspect that I am not the only one to make use of Yahoo photos, to be able to extend the capacity of showing Photos for the group I have on Yahoo. Plus we were able to make some of our albums public. This came about because the groups could only hold 30 meg until recently, even now since this has been increased it is still not enough room for a group such as mine.
QUESTION
1. If I am willing to pay could you increase my group’s capability to hold more Photo’s?

Regards ……….Ray Savory

Brendon | July 29th, 2007 at 9:37 pm

I’ve been a Yahoo Photos user for a long time. I have pictures that have been hosted on Yahoo Photos for close to 9 or 10 years; and now the number of pictures I have on Y! Photos is well into the thousands. However, after having read the comments here and on the Yahoo 360 Team’s blog, it doesn’t sound like Flickr’s a good choice; I have individual ALBUMS that have more than 200 pictures… so for me to suddenly be barred from viewing my own photos until I fork over some money seems asinine. I must confess that I’m really disappointed. I had waited months to see when my account would be magically converted to the “New Yahoo Photos”, for which I had seen an ad for close to a year or more every time I visited the site… only to find out that not only am I and all my photos being evicted, but I must find another non-Yahoo home for them if I want anything close to the same features I enjoyed in the first place. I do hope that someone at Yahoo’s taking all this disappointment and feedback to heart; Yahoo is a business, and we are its customers. The customer is not stupid; and if some manager somewhere thought it was a great idea to inconvenience thousands of customers and potentially lose many of them because he/she thought customers would be dumb enough to shell out money for a service that doesn’t even provide the same features they used to enjoy for free… well, that manager thought wrong. All I can say is that I am glad that I at least had the sense to look into the reviews and comments of other people, particularly those who fell for it and now aren’t even able to access their OWN PICTURES. I will be looking into the other services to see if they at least offer the same features Yahoo Photos did, especially for free… I can at least give Yahoo kudos for giving us the option to choose.

Nicki Dugan | August 2nd, 2007 at 12:26 pm

@Raymond Savory – Glad your Yahoo! Group is finding photo-sharing useful. The Groups team is always evaluating ways to improve the service and they’re looking into whether they can make additional capacity available for a fee. They have lots of great features in our product pipeline to prioritize. Thanks for the suggestion.

Raymond Savory | August 2nd, 2007 at 11:53 pm

Thank you for your reply.
as time is of the essence, can we expect some quick action please. ………Ray Savory

Ak Walter | August 7th, 2007 at 5:37 pm

Yahoo, how did you manage to have outdone yourselves this time? I am not most disappointed in the fact that Yahoo is suggesting that we loyal users agree to move our precious photos over to Flickr’s servers. This is obviously, from the plentiful comments here, a huge disservice to users such as myself who have grown to love and trust Y! Photos’ convenient ability to share photos and albums to a select or unlimited amount of people (without the recipients’ having to sign up—come on, how annoying is that Snapfish), plus the sheer ability to upload as many full-size copies of the original photos with the camera-stored info such as date, time, camera position, f-stops, etc. as the user wanted. Unlimited storage, that’s what us Y! Photos users most value, and I thought that was what you were going for with the e-mail gig, blowing up the storage limit, right Yahoo? So what is the rationale for this? Easier to compress email attachments like photos and mp3’s than it is to just compress users’ photos?
This action has been obviously unmasked as a blatant attempt to coerce users into paying for what they have had up until now for free, and what they’re going to go elsewhere than Flickr for. Only get to see your last 200 photos after 3 months of Pro if you don’t fork out $25 a year? Give me break already. 3 albums or sets or whatever? Get a grip, man. Is the ship sinking?

Anyway, what I really am most upset about is the situation in which Yahoo, in all its brilliance, has “deleted” the ability to drag and drop mail attachments which was one of the best things IMHO Y!Mail had to offer (which I was told by Y! cust svc. That somehow was related to the IE add-in Yahoo Photo Upload tool—go figure?!?!). For almost 2 months now, photos, files, .zips, whatever—everything all Y!Mail users used to accomplish by simply opening a Windows Explorer window with the file or photo you wanted to attach in view, JUST DRAG AND DROP photo or file right into the message. Boom! Done! If it were a photo, the Y!photos upload tool would give you a ton of options like borders, rotation options, thumbnail size, layout for thumb appearance plus you could insert text or name photos and call attention to a particular photo, among other options. If you dragged and dropped a file, it’d simply appear as an attachment, no going through 3 more steps and an attachment page with 5 fields, then clicking BROWSE and painfully navigating through 6 layers of folders to find that darned file, one by one… It makes me lose my mind because this was the greatest feature of Yahoo Mail and when I showed friends this ability (like Outlook has, too) they thought well, Wow, maybe I should be using Yahoo. Yeah, right.. Don’t switch over so fast, my friends.

Losing this ability to drag and drop documents, photos, whatever kind of file into messages efficiently, easily, visually—without bureaucracy and hassle-free—I can’t believe that more users aren’t up in arms about this! What is wrong with Yahoo? This was a huge mistake, even more of a gaffe than the Yahoo Photos closing nightmare and the comments expressed in the Flickr forum certainly attest to that.

Yahoo, get it together and stick to making money off of your advertisements. People aren’t going to pay for simple photo sharing services, you’re just irking those who where once loyal users, and who actually liked the services you were providing…so we put up with your annoying, obtrusive, blinking flash ads. Now—you’re not giving us even any incentive to do that.. how are you going to stay around and curry favor with users now? Your search engine is worthless, your social networking “groups” are lame and the only thing you have going for you is the largest free email site in the world. Don’t blow that as you go about setting shining examples of what not to do. You should know by now… users are finicky and will adapt to who provides them with the most bang for the buck. In this case, users like myself feel boondoggled and it’s pretty darned obvious that you’re ready to start charging for something that you were giving to us for free up until now. I hope it works out satisfactorily for you, for me it’s looking like a true disaster.

In the end I’ll probably switch over to Flickr anyway, hopefully recover my photos from there and then find the next Picasa or something that’s going to hook me up for free. I’d think that instead of giving Y! photos users 3 months for free, you’d do something like a year for free or $10 first year trial… maybe you’re actually good enough that that would work, I dunno.. Guess we’re gonna find out tho.

Raymond Savory | August 14th, 2007 at 1:02 pm

HELLO.
An old saying springs to mind.
** if it aint broke don’t fix it **.
………………Ray Savory

Chervonyy | August 31st, 2007 at 11:34 pm

At first I thought what a good idea. I had used Flickr to upload photos for the Tate “How We Are Now” and it looked good.

But…

Now, just one photo set later I have used up my bandwidth and it will take months to transfer all my photos. Correct me but we had no issue on bandwidth with BT Yahoo Photos.

This appears to be a way of getting me to pay for a service that was free before.

Ph

lightnrod | September 8th, 2007 at 12:52 pm

Really disappointed with Yahoo on shut down of yahoo photo.

Disappointed with Yahoo’s lack of information and disclosure.

Not good Yahoo.

Moving to non-yahoo photo.

Looks better.

LR

Linda Mellor | September 30th, 2007 at 9:13 pm

Well I’m sure glad I didn’t transfer my photo’s. I got the cd instead. Flickr stinks for folks like me. It is not for family, friends and sharing. Flickr is for the serious photo hobbyist with higher end cameras, advanced photoshop software and possibly an art degree. It is harder to use, is missing many of the fun little edit tools, and doesn’t really let you share with folks unless they sign up. (if it does let you share with non-members then they make too hard to find the directions) After 3 weeks of having a test picture up, you still can’t find it using the tags, and the photos come out rather dark compared to the appearance when on the home machine.

I would have been willing to pay to stay with Yahoo photo, a friendly little site for family albums with room for photos from the low end digital camera and amateur user. No way am I staying with Flickr even for free. Oh I do so miss you Yahoo photo!

mahtab | October 5th, 2007 at 10:40 pm

hi for people in the world.i like all people in the world with every race.

BillyjoeG | October 5th, 2008 at 6:26 am

Funny, I can’t even find my photo’s in a search or even a “Tag” search. Yeah I have a free account, Maybe that’s it. Flickr will only post photo’s from paying customers? Whatever…Flickr Sucks in my opinion. NOT HAPPY ! Yahoo would post anybody’s. I have even used Special Tags to go directly to my photo’s yet all I get is a stupid jerkweed message that reads…”Okay, We give up”… How stupid.

If some one on here should find my pic’s? Please tell me how? Providing you found them without going straight to my name. Signed One Ticked off user! BillyjoeG.

BillyjoeG | October 5th, 2008 at 7:54 am

Okay gang..Think I got this figured out? Been talking with some on flickr since I posted my comment above. Seems the best way to get your photo’s on there and made easy to find? (Join a Group) It seems to work and I’m sorry for the post above. I never would have guessed.
Guess I should have researched that in the beginning. BillyjoeG.

Jacques Snyman | Website Design | April 29th, 2009 at 7:27 am

I never quite realised Flickr was a yahoo company, and it came as a pleasant surprise to find thios out whilst trawling the archives for research purposes. Good one!