Internet giant Yahoo is shutting down it Yahoo Photos storage site and asking users to move instead to its photo-sharing site, Flickr.
In June, tens of millions of registered users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of various options including upgrading to Yahoo's Flickr service or various outside-photo storage sites, according to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.
Yahoo also will offer consumers the option of loading their photos on competing sites when users are notified next month.
These include PhotoBucket - the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like MySpace - or more conventional photo printing and storage site such as Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly or Snapfish, he said.
The move follows the explosive surge in growth by PhotoBucket, an independent photo storage site, from a quarter of the market a year ago to around 40 per cent last month, according to Hitwise data.
In the same period, Yahoo Photos' share has been cut two to three times over to around 5.8 per cent of the US market. Flickr has grown to 4.5 per cent, up from 3.7 per cent, according to Hitwise data.
Yahoo continued to support both Photos and Flickr over the past two years, reflecting the different audiences of the two sites.