Escape from Yahoo! Photos

A death foretold - Yahoo! Photos is closing down in September (later for international sites). I am one of those who have thousands of photos there, and now have less than 100 days to plan an escape route.

Read Yahoo! Photos' announcement and CNet's FAQ

Millions of users, for various reasons, have chosen to store 2 billion photos on Yahoo! Photos. There will therefore be no single best escape route for all.

For me, I have tried most photo storage sites and settled for Flickr (also owned by Yahoo!) and Yahoo! Photos a few months back. Flickr is unrivalled in its web 2.0 capabilities. Unfortunately, its free service is very restrictive. Yahoo! Photos, however, is free and unlimited in storage. So I decided to put the bulk of my travel photos on Yahoo! Photos and the best one on Flickr.

Since then, the excellent Picasa (owned by Google) has increased its storage capacity to 1GB, quite adequate for my requirements (I want to store my scaled-down photos online for web display and sharing; storage of full-resolution photos is not needed). Picasa is now my preferred photo storage service. However, for reason obvious to those who follow the Google-Yahoo! rivalry, Yahoo! Photos does not offer a direct escape route to Picasa.

Perhaps I should do nothing and just let my photos on Yahoo! Photos vanish from the virtual world "on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 9 p.m. PDT". No one is going to shed any tears.