Brad Garlinghouse, SVP of Yahoo and author of the famous "Peanut Butter Manifesto," in which he told people inside Yahoo that the company was spread too thin, told me tonight at a dinner that "I'm eating my own peanut butter." On Friday, he said, Yahoo will begin to close down Yahoo Photos, in favor of Flickr, the competing photo sharing site the company bought about two years ago.
Flickr is about more than storing photos; it's about finding other users' good shots, too.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Yahoo Photos users will be given the opportunity to move their pictures over to Flickr. But Garlinghouse admits that Flickr isn't the right sharing site for many users of Yahoo Photos, so people will be given the option to instead move pictures to Shutterfly or the Kodak Gallery.
This is an interesting move for Yahoo, a company geared toward serving the mass audience of online users. Flickr is a great service, but it's the black sheep of popular photo sites--it's got a different organizational system from most sites, it's more open, and it attracts a more tech-adept user base.
As with most big Yahoo service changes, this transition will take several months.
If you have shots on Yahoo Photos and need to figure out what to do with them, I do recommend giving Flickr a whirl. It's a fast and flexible sharing system for which smart people are building some very clever apps and mashups. It's not based on the standard "album" metaphor that most photo sites use, but when was the last time you put your digital photos in a printed album?
For more on this development, see TechCrunch. For help getting up to speed with Flickr, see the Webware Newbie's Guide to Flickr.
Flickr is a popular photo-sharing and hosting service with advanced and powerful features. 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 (more on that later).
Flickr was created by a small Canadian development team in 2002 before being acquired by Yahoo a year later. Many other photo sites (including Yahoo Photos) are easier to use, but none offer Flickr's interesting features or its cohesive community of enthusiasts.
If you have the Flickr uploader installed, you can upload any picture with a right-click.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Adding your photos to Flickr
First step: Get your photos into the service. Flickr has a few options to get photos from your camera into your account, the easiest one being a little uploader app you can install on your PC or Mac (there's also a Linux version.) When it's installed on a PC, you can right-click on any photo and send it straight to Flickr. You also can use this uploader to create albums (Flickr calls albums sets) for your pictures. You can install software that lets you publish from any folder in Windows XP, without the need to use the uploading program. If you're using a Mac, there's also a plug-in for iPhoto.
If you're not keen on downloading a piece of software, Flickr lets you upload six individual photos at a time. This might work for some weekend shots, but if you've got more than 20 shots it's worth trying out the batch uploader. We recommend using the downloader software, or if you've got Yahoo's Widgets Engine installed, the latest version comes with a widget that doubles as a photo viewer and uploading tool.
Continue reading to learn how to tag and organize photos, add notes, geotag, create albums, find out if you need a premium membership, and our list of Flickr users worth checking out.
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PreClick announced its photo-messaging service last week at the Demo conference. The free app, called Instant Photo Messenger (or IPM) lets you share photos with others using a simple drag-and-drop interface. On the receiving end, users with the IPM software installed get a taskbar notification letting them know photos have been sent their way. They can then view the shots without leaving the program.
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Preclick)
IPM doubles as an e-mail program of sorts, letting you send photo messages to any e-mail address. You also have a contact list, as you would on any other instant-messenging client. Contacts are added automatically after the first time you send them some photos.
IPM also automatically resizes your photos, making it simpler to fit more photos into one message and stay under the 10 MB cap of most Web mail applications. It also lets you view received photos as a slide show. If you use Apple's Mail program, then you're likely used to these features.
PreClick's IPM service is an interesting take on sharing photos. I find it effortless to send shots to friends using regular Web mail, but I can see how some might find it difficult on the receiving end if they're not sure how to view attachments. Another option is to use a photo-sharing service such as Webshots, Flickr, or Yahoo photos and send your friend or relative a URL to that photo set. PreClick's IPM may make it easier to share and view photos, but requiring a Windows-only install on the recipient's side to enjoy some of the cooler features such as slide shows is a big barrier to entry.
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