flickr

Yahoo Photos' loss is Flickr's gain.

Yahoo began shutting down Yahoo Photos last month, and now Flickr passed it to become the No. 2 photo-sharing site in terms of Internet traffic in the United States, according to monitoring firm Hitwise.

Flickr now has 6.42 percent of the visits to photo-sharing sites, up from 4.57 percent in March, Hitwise said.

That's a significant jump, but it's not all Yahoo might want: Flickr's 1.85 percentage-point increase was more than offset by Yahoo Photos' 2.6-point drop from 5.79 percent to 3.19 percent. And … Read more

We've been hearing reports of lag and downtime issues involving Yahoo and several of its properties Friday morning: Yahoo's instant messaging client has been on and off, a reader reported that the Flickr photo-sharing site was down (worked fine for me, though) and the Yahoo main home page and Yahoo News portal have been fickle as well. Some CNET editors and writers encountered similar problems when testing the sites out; others found them to be working fine; still others reported unusually slow load times but no downage.

We've put out a request to Yahoo for comment but … Read more

Due to the iPhone's lack of MMS support, you can't send pictures from your iPhone directly to Flickr. Even if you tried to e-mail your iPhone pics, they'd be stuck at the 640x480 resolution. Oh well. At least with the iPhlickr app, you can browse through your Flickr account easily. Similar to Flickr's own mobile portal, you can view your own photos and your contacts' photos, plus search for more within a very nice and simple user interface.

iPhone link: http://www.chandlerkent.com/iphlickr/

On our weekly Real Deal podcast today, Tom and I covered online photo sharing. It's not so much a comparison of the dozens of good photo sites we know of, but rather an overview of the issues for people confused about the whole space. Topics covered: Various services. How to pick a site. Privacy and copyrights. Online editing. And listener questions.

See also our Newbie's Guide to Flickr.

If you want to join the ongoing discussion, come on over to the Real Deal forums.

Photo-sharing site Zooomr is mostly relaunched in its version 3 incarnation, and now the two-person company has begun offering $19.95 "pro" account subscriptions in hopes of raising money.

"We do need to make at least a little money to survive," Chief Executive Thomas Hawk said in a blog posting Monday. "The community has stepped up and helped us in the most generous of ways, and we are hoping that all of you who find Zooomr meaningful will also consider helping us out by turning pro."

Those with pro accounts won't see ads … Read more

Chumby, the snuggly hybrid of stuffed animal and widget device, will be introduced next month to a small group of beta testers willing to shell out $179.95. The device, which has been in private testing for the last 10 months, lets its owners add and access all sorts of Internet-enabled widgets, including weather information, sports scores, horoscopes, and even Flickr slide shows. The team plans to make it available to everyone else later in the year.

According to Chumby's creators, part of the launch delay has been due to the inclusion of video, which required getting Adobe's Flash Lite 3 … Read more

While I was perusing the Flickr camera finder during the last couple days, I was perplexed to note that a number of previously popular models had taken a hit.

The site tracks which cameras are most widely used to upload photos in the last 30 days, but the leading contenders nearly universally got whacked. For example, take a look at the digital SLRs that are leaders with Flickrs' high-upload enthusiasts--the Canon Rebel XT, Pentax K100D, Olympus E-Volt E-500, Nikon D50. They all plunged in terms of the number of photos taken during the last month.

I thought it might be … Read more

Category: Media

Flickr is a popular photo-sharing and hosting service. It supports an active and engaged community where people share and explore each other's photos. You can share and host hundreds of your own pictures on Flickr without paying a dime. There's also a pro service that gets you unlimited storage and sharing for about $2 a month, making it one of the cheapest hosting sites around.

Besides sharing your photos, Flickr has an API that has led to some interesting third-party mash-ups. It's also made for some neat ways to integrate Flickr shots into blogs and … Read more

Here's a fun piece of Webware that made its official launch last week. It's called Graphita Live Studio, and it's a really fun and well-done Web-based photo editor. Unlike some of the other solutions I've looked at in the past, Graphita doesn't have any grand scheme to replace your favorite desktop photo-editing software. Instead, Live Studio provides users with a way to quickly deface, or "enhance" their photos with all sorts of rasterized stamps and a trouble-making doodling tool.

To get started, users simply need to upload a photo from their hard drive. … Read more