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Bhopu / Tags /
Yahoo Photos
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Posted On
Oct 05, 2007
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Yahoo Photo
The most substantial improvement to Yahoo! Yahoo photos was a revamp of Yahoo. This photo property of Yahoo launched in the year 2000 was rolled back in few months back .
Yahoo users had a number of advantages of the new version. For starters, the information assigned to each photo included tags (comma separated tags no less - my favorite) for easy locating later, ratings to help the better photos rise to the top, sharing at the photo level.
Yahoo Photos' breakout feature was its browser-based photo editor that handled cropping, resizing, and image adjustments (such as contrast and brightness), and also add borders and perform special effects, such as pixelate. The editing feature in Yahoo Photos was so easy to use that one might forget what a neat trick it was to have this inside a browser.
Yahoo photos made it much easier to share images with other users, and also get buddies' new public photos in your own Yahoo Photos home page. It was a simple implementation of community, but was very effective.
Another best things about Y!photos was that there was no published storage or bandwidth restrictions, that smoked Google which just carried a 250MB limit on a free account.
The strength of Yahoo Photos was not in any one particular feature, but rather in its overall clear design and good user experience. It was a top-tier product, and it has all the basic photo organizing and editing tools that most users would need.
Yahoo shuts their photo site
Yahoo, finally shuts its popular free photo-sharing website on Thursday September 20, 2007. Users were given notice in advance to change their services to Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Photobucket. But unfortunately a large sum of users who waited too long to switch their platforms, or download their pictures from the site, will lose all their photos as yahoo will have them deleted by that time.
To sum up, Yahoo purchased Flickr (Vancouver, British Columbia) on March 2005. This website was a popular award winning photo sharing sire that time magazine stated as ‘completely addictive’.
Launched in 2004 by by Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, this website allowed users to upload digital pictures from computers and camera phones, put together photo albums, and post pictures to blogs, among other things. One of the main reasons for Yahoo to buy this website was the traffic score that was higher than Y! photos as per the comscore.
I would like o give a lot of credit to Yahoo here for recognizing the true potential in technology and talent and go ahead with the million dollar Flickr purchase.
It was quite surprising from the business point of view that yahoo gave a choice to their users to export pictures to other photo sites (competitors), instead they could have just transferred the same to flickr.
One more issue was that Yahoo photos provided unlimited photo storage. Flickr on the other hand offered a capacity to upload up to 100 MB per month with a viewing limitation of 200 of its most recent photos. However, with a Flickr pro account the photos will always be available for viewing. Nevertheless, we must be willing and able to adapt, as users of new and established platforms, when sites evolve to compete globally.
What made Yahoo do this?
There can be a number of reasons why Yahoo took the step of rolling back in its most popular photo-sharing site.
Managing two photo sharing sites
For a very long time after Yahoo! Inc. purchased Flickr photo sharing service, there was intense speculation over how will they manage photo sharing sites. There were conclusions that the good features of Yahoo! Photos and Flickr would be merged into one consolidated photo sharing website under the Yahoo! banner.
Yahoo continued to support both Photos and Flickr over the past two years, reflecting the different audiences of the two sites.
Yahoo Photos was a more conventional photo-finishing site, full of family snapshots, while Flickr has attracted a passionate fan base of amateur and professional photographers who use the site to share digital photos online, and for whom printing is largely an afterthought.
According to data from comScore supplied by Yahoo a year ago, Yahoo Photos counted 30 million registered users, who had uploaded 2 billion photos as of June 2006.
To my knowledge Yahoo couldn’t have merged Flickr and Photos as they both appeal to a completely separate set of audiences.
Comparison between the two
Flickr offererd almost the same tools as Yahoo photos. One area in which Yahoo! trumped Flickr, however, was prints. While Flickr has started to offer some printed products, such as photo cards via a partnership with Moo, Yahoo! Photos offers a full range of photo prints via the mail and for in store pick-up at Target department stores. I would guess that this might be an important feature for many users, especially since Yahoo! Photos generally caters to an older audience, which Yahoo! will need to move over to Flickr.
Because Flickr had tools that allowed users to embed metadata -- tags, EXIF info, etc. -- directly into photos, Flickr images tend to be easier for photo search engines to index. Yahoo! had no choice but to make this move,
So what does this all mean? At one time, Yahoo! Photos was the place to share photos online, and it still hosts many more photos than Flickr (about 2 billion versus 500 million), but Yahoo!'s homegrown property was never able to match the buzz that Flickr created.
A smart move?
Well, I would not agree to any reason why Yahoo should have closed the Y!Photos as I think these two services has completely different user base.
Having run similar services makes one more innovative and test the waters, while keeping one safe service that is familiar to many who look for stability over innovativeness.
I don’t think Yahoo realized that these two groups of people exist are not fully interchangeable
It would have been a smart move if they moved Flickr to be the innovation platform and Photos a stable platform. The two groups of use are needed. Those in the perpetual beta and innovation platform are likely to jump to something new and different if the innovation gets stale. The stable platform users often are surprised and start looking to move when there is too much change.
Overall this closure will not affect Yahoo’s international users, they might soon get out while its going good. Flickr has soared among a younger demographic, and merging the two competing properties was inevitable. Everyone expected it when Yahoo! bought Flickr in March 2005 (the way we all expect del.icio.us to eventually kill off MyWeb), it was just a matter of which site would eat the other.
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