Tech Shout!

Yahoo has announced that is closing down Yahoo Photos, a service that practically held the Numero Uno position as the ‘most-visited photo site on the internet, for years together. The users of the service will now be directed to move their pictures to Yahoo’s hot buy, Flickr.

In its glory days, Yahoo Photos was such a go-to place for photo-sharing that more than 2 billion images are stored on its servers, to nearly 500 million for Flickr.

But the turn of events took place when Yahoo bought Flickr in March 2005, and since then has progressively attained a strong footing. Visitors mounted 22 percent between April 2006 and April 2007, according to measurement service Hitwise. On the other hand, ironically, Yahoo Photos lost 60 percent of its audience.

In closing Photos, Yahoo is adopting a major tenant suggested in an internal memo by Brad Garlinghouse, a senior vice president at the company, which was leaked to the press in November. In an article dubbed the Peanut Butter Manifesto for his description of Yahoo being spread too thin, Garlinghouse called for a number of the company’s products to be eliminated as way to help revive growth and restore focus.

There was no word whether Yahoo planned to close other products. In his memo, Garlinghouse had mentioned redundancies involving bookmark services Del.icio.us and myWeb, and Yahoo Groups message boards and Yahoo 360 social network service, among others.

Yahoo Photos will be shut down by the fall. Users will be directed over a three-month period to transfer their images to Flickr or other photo sites including Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery or Photobucket. According to Yahoo, it will facilitate and ease the transition easy, with a one-click transfer process.

The main reason cited by Yahoo to keep both the services running after the acquisition, was because they both appealed to different audiences. However on Thursday, it said in a statement that Yahoo Photos was closing because of the changing nature of the Internet.

Digital photography has evolved “into a social activity that allows people to communicate and connect,” Yahoo said. “We have decided to shift our focus accordingly.”

While Yahoo Photos is a static photo-sharing site, with links to offers to buy prints and accessories. On the other hand, Flickr is a social community, like MySpace and YouTube, where members can search through photos and comment on them.

Charlene Li, an analyst with market tracker Forrester Research, says that a change was essential as photos on Yahoo couldn’t be tracked in search engines.

On Flickr, users have the tools to add information to images to make them searchable.

Li thinks many Yahoo Photos users will be upset about the move. “People don’t like change,” she says. But Yahoo had no choice, she says.

Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr in 2004 with wife Caterina Fake, says the move is a “validation” of the central idea of Flickr: that photos in the digital age are very different from a physical print.

Butterfield, Flickr’s general manager noted, “We saw it as a means of communication and connecting with people.” Adding, “People can take a picture and get immediate feedback from all over the world, and you can’t do that with a printed photo.”

Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Hitwise, says he doesn’t expect many Yahoo Photos users to move to Flickr, because it’s an older, more entrenched audience. “Yahoo will be successful transitioning some of the users, but certainly not all of them,” he maintained.