Yahoo has announced it will shut down Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr, which recently completed its own transition to Yahoo property. Current Yahoo Photos users will have the opportunity to move their pictures over to Flickr, though no details about how that transition will work are available yet.
In a somewhat surprising move, CNet reports that Yahoo Photos users will also have the option to move their photos to Shutterfly or the Kodak Gallery. The additional options are Yahoo's way of dealing with the radical differences between Yahoo Photos and Flickr.
Yahoo believes that some Photos users may not like Flickr's very different approach to photo management. Compared to Yahoo Photos, Flickr uses a more open, sharing-oriented model, which eschews traditional storage metaphors like “albums” in favor of more flexible, but arguably less intuitive, “sets” and “collections.”
That said, I don't think Flickr is all that much of a stretch and as much as I've given Flickr a hard time for how it handled the transition to Yahoo, it remains my favorite photo sharing site. If you're a Yahoo Photos user, I would recommend checking out Flickr, it's a little different, but once you wrap your head around it, I think you'll enjoy it.
For some handy tips on how to use and get the most out of Flickr, check out the tutorial we wrote about a while back.
Yahoo Photos Users will have three months to migrate to whatever alternative service they choose.
