Hello,

I'd gotten kind of comfortable using Yahoo Photos to store and share pictures. I had the choice to make albums public with a URL to which I could link from my trip reports, and to keep others available only to invited guests. I'd vaguely heard that they were shutting down but hadn't gotten any notice sent to me, which I figured I was sure to get. Now I was looking to upload pictures from my just-completed trip to Portugal and Spain, and see that Yahoo Photos is set to shut down on Sept. 20 and pictures on file will be deleted. They have many addresses on file for me, including at their own domain, but their address of record for Photos was one that no longer works.

So they appear to encourage moving the pictures to Flickr, but they list other services. At first glance, Flickr appears to offer similar functionality: can anyone confirm this, that an album can be given a public URL that can be posted, or I can choose to keep a section invitation-only? I've used some of these services where no URL appeared when I wanted to have one; they could only be linked from an e-mail. Any recommendations for a service to use that's simple, including moving old pix from Yahoo? I know that Slow Photos is out there but down for maintenance; I don't know if it'll work for my purposes.

I have not used Yahoo photos so I'm not certain exactly how they compare with Flickr. I like Flickr but their free services are a bit lacking.

- You can only have 3 albums but you do have the ability to tag photos to group instead of an album so you can get a url for a group of photos using a tag.

- You are limited to 200 photos that can be visible at one time. If you go above 200, the photos are still there but only the 200 most recent photos will display.

- The flickr API has amazing features. Lots of 3rd party tools out there.

I'd recommend looking at a subscription to flickr ($24 I think) or snugmug. I'm not certain exactly what you get for free with smugmug. One other is photobucket. Of course, also look at Slow photos.

Good Luck.

Someone else I know recently asked me for advice on this, and I am copying what I sent her in email:

You might want to look at this article:
http://solution.allthingsd.com/20070801/how-the-big-pho...ring-sites-stack-up/
and be sure you read the comments. Someone mentioned smugmug, which I have also heard is very good, but it isn't free. I do see that you can move your photos from flickr to smugmug if you want.

Picasa is owned by Google, and seems good, too. I like that you can link to Google Maps if you want to show where your pictures were taken. You have to pay for more than 1 gb of storage, but that will hold a LOT of pictures.
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8989

For ease of transfer you might want to let Yahoo move your existing photos to one of the sites where they will do it for you. Then you could look into opening an account with another site for future uploads if you wanted to.

- Roz

Thanks for the help. I did the process to move my existing pictures from Yahoo to Flickr, and got the message that it will take an uncertain amount of time to convert.

I set up Picasa for my new pictures; an album from Portugal and Bilbao is up here. One warning: when working with Picasa's program on my hard drive, I selected "Hide" for pictures that I didn't want to post; they were dimmed and I figured they wouldn't post to the Web. When I uploaded the folder, those pictures were there (at least while I was logged in; I didn't check how it looked when not logged in) and I needed to delete them.

I would suggest Shutterfly or Smugmug. There is a fee on both. I especially like Smugmug.

beth

I have been using Flickr for the last six months and I like it. I was planning to give Picasa a try too.