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It doesn’t seem right to have to pay a fee to secure your own content. My feeling is that Yahoo should provide free backup CDs as a consideration to customers who once chose to use their service. I had a yahoo photos account because I thought yahoo photos was going to be like Flickr for the average consumer like me.

I like Flickr’s technology, but I’m not the Flickr user type. I have a good number of photos taken with my digital point and shoot camera that I want to store and share exclusively with different people – friends and family – not so much the public. Flickr’s free account has limited storage and privacy settings that don’t meet my needs. On the other hand, I find the other sites you can move to, like Kodak Gallery, Snapfish and Shutterfly to be pretty archaic from a technology standpoint. What new features have they developed in the last seven years? I can’t tell you how long it took to move 100 of my yahoo photos to Snapfish. I didn’t bother trying to move to the other sites. But I am guessing it would have taken just as long. I’m not trying to knock these other sites. I’m just saying that their technology is not up to par. Most of them seem to emphasize photo prints, rather than online storage and sharing capabilities too, which makes me wonder why yahoo is presenting them as options anyway (maybe because they think users like me will settle for a subscription account on Flickr if that is the only robust online sharing solution offered?). Well, I found out about Pixamo, a free site, on another yahoo photos related discussion board a while back and after trying out the Pixamo importer, I am sold on that site – at least for the time being. I had no problems moving my yahoo photos, tags, and album titles to Pixamo and it was really quick compared to Snapfish. I’ve since been playing around with Pixamo’s features like the contact management tools, sharing groups, and community tagging feature. Plus, Pixamo offers video storage! I may fill the 2 free GB account limit pretty quickly, but there are upgrade options, and so far, I’m thinking that Pixamo’s features might be worth an annual subscription. Pixamo to me seems like what I thought yahoo photos was going to become – a flickr for the average consumer.