I just remembered that Yahoo!Photos was closing so that Yahoo could “focus our efforts on Flickr.” No comment on whether that’s the best thing they could be doing with their resources, but I had a few things up on Yahoo photos, and while naturally, I have copies of these photos in various places, I didn’t want these to get lost in the dead-service ether.
Luckily, they provide a number of options for you to take your photos with you – you can export them to flickr, but also to Shutterfly, Photobucket, Snapfish, and another I’ve forgotten. You can also get a 3rd-party service (whose name I also forgot) to sell you a cd of the photos in your old account. I hadn’t realized how many photos I had on there. I thought I could use their one-by-one download tool, which they recommend if you have around 20 photos. I had 129!! I have no idea why.
So I chose the flickr option, but only because as a thank-you, they offer 3 free months of Flickr Pro account status! I received that once before, with the clogged-tubes contest, so I know flickr pro is great (I’m just too cheap to buy it myself).
And after I give my approval to have the photos moved, they’re like, “We’re so glad you picked us! thank you! yippee! (or should that be ‘Yahoo!’?)” Flickr’s always been kinda cutesy, but in a fun way, and (usually) not in that overly contrived, insincere way. More like, in an unabashedly enthusiastic glee that I find sort of endearing.
Anyway, they seem to promise an easy-to-export experience, so I hope to find that they make it clear which ones were imported from Yahoo (the better to tag them with), and that the photos transfer okay. I don’t doubt they will, though.
update: Grrrr, I am disgruntled! Flickr sent me another happy email yesterday morning saying the migration had been completed, but I’ve been checking my Flickr intermittently since then, and my photos have yet to arrive! And I can’t login to my Yahoo! Photos account anymore, as they say it’s been locked for migration. So where the heck are my photos, flickr??
A quick check of the forums reveals this isn’t an isolated problem, so I won’t be shooting off an angry email just yet. But seriously, if this is a known issue, can’t they just delay sending that happy “We’re Done Moving your Photos!” email until, like, you know, they’re actually done?
On the plus side, I do have Pro now. Yay.