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Yahoo Photos shutting down. Flickr is the new hotness.

Yahoo will announce on Friday that it's migrating its Yahoo Photos users to Flickr.

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
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Rafe Needleman
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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. 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.