This isn’t a big surprise nor some important event, but it may mean a lot in the future of Flickr, a photo-sharing portal. Two years after buying this digital photo storage, Yahoo will terminate its Yahoo Photos portal. The company is now encouraging Yahoo Photo users to migrate their collections to Flickr over the next three months. Flickr, with nearly 8 million registered users, offers more Web 2.0-style features; however, it remains to be seen if such photo sharing portals can draw healthy profits. Yahoo Photos will be shut down by the fall. Users will be directed over a three-month period to transfer their images to Flickr or other photo sites such as Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish or Photobucket. Yahoo says it will make the transition easy, with a one-click transfer process.

Yahoo has said that it kept both services going after the acquisition because they appealed to different audiences. But Thursday, it said in a statement that Yahoo Photos was closing because of the changing nature of the Internet. Digital photography has evolved “into a social activity that allows people to communicate and connect,” Yahoo said. “We have decided to shift our focus accordingly.” Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr in 2004 with wife Caterina Fake, says the move is a “validation” of the central idea of Flickr: that photos in the digital age are very different from a physical print. “We saw it as a means of communication and connecting with people,” says Butterfield, Flickr’s general manager. “People can take a picture and get immediate feedback from all over the world, and you can’t do that with a printed photo.” Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Hitwise, says he doesn’t expect many Yahoo Photos users to move to Flickr, because it’s an older, more entrenched audience. “Yahoo will be successful transitioning some of the users, but certainly not all of them,” he says. I’m really satisfied user of Flickr, mostly because very friendly user interface and all these AJAX features.

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