Yahoo to Close Yahoo Photos and Focus on Flickr

Posted on May 8, 2007

TechCrunch reports that Yahoo plans to close Yahoo Photos this fall and focus on the more rapidly growing Flickr property for photo sharing and storage. There is no message about this currently on the Yahoo Photos website.

ITnews.com.au points out this prediction by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake made around the time of the Yahoo Flickr acquisition that the two photo sites would continue to co-exist.

"Yahoo Photos will get a lot of Flickr features, and there are a lot of other areas around Yahoo that will also be Flickrised where Flickrization would be good," Fake said in a blog post about the acquisition. "Yahoo Photos and Flickr have different kinds of users with different needs, and will remain separate for the foreseeable future."
Flickr ended up being that brand that ways growing the fastest and many at the time Yahoo bought Flickr thought the two photo sites would eventually become one. That has turned out to be the case. It must have been a tough decision for Yahoo because Yahoo photos has many more photos than Flickr. TechCrunch says Yahoo Photos has 2 billion photographs compared to Flickr's 500,000 500 million. However, Flickr has passed Yahoo Photos in traffic according to Comscore traffic and the name has been a symbol of Web 2.0 success. Flickr may also need any extra resources and staff that can come from Yahoo Photos. This excerpt of a post on Odd Time Signatures explains some recent problems on Flickr.
Since Flickr IDs were merged with Yahoo IDs, I've seen problems at Flickr that I hoped wouldn't invade. My photos have been faved by people intending to use them for their own profit, trolls have driven by some of my favorite groups and taken a shot, and hackers played some serious games with people's heads and accounts at the end of March. I attribute a large part of this disruption to the accessibility that the Yahoos had when their ID worked seamlessly with Flickr, since it was concurrent with the merge.
By shutting Yahoo Photos maybe Yahoo will be in a better position to grow its much hotter Flickr proprety.



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