Aha, Yahoo! Photos is going to shutdown, a wise move since they bought Flickr and Flickr is cleary kicking ass.

May as well get rid out the old, ugly and outdated Yahoo! Photos.

Yahoo has finally made a decision regarding Yahoo! Photos vs. Flickr battle, and will be shutting down Yahoo! Photos by the fall of this year. Even though Yahoo! Photos currently maintains a higher share of Internet visits, Flickr growth convinced the company to maintain a single photo site from now on.

Says USA Today: ‘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.

Source: USA Today

I have to say I’ve been waiting for this since I joined Flickr about 2 years ago, I always missed the sub-set or grouping feature my old Coppermine gallery used to have.

Flickr only had one level of sets, so you couldn’t group them which led to a very messy layout. Pbase, Smugmug and all the others already had this…so thankfully, Flickr has listened to it’s members and launched what they called “Collections”.

Today we launched what’s probably the most requested feature over the last few years: a way to categorize and organize your photo sets! In the past this feature has been referred to as “sets of sets” or “subsets”. After today, we’ll know it as “collections”.

What are collections, you ask? A collection is a container into which you can place either sets or other collections, allowing you to create a hierarchy as deep as 5 collections. You can place as many of your sets into a collection as you like, and a set can be in as many different collections as you like.

Even more of a reason to use Flickr now, I’m loving it!

Source: Flickr Blog

For the first time since 1989 it is so easy to create an Animated GIF online. Just upload pics or grab them from your Flickr. Create funny flashy slideshows with you and your friends, cartoons, previews, banners, etc. Post them anywhere you can post pictures. No need for flash.

You can see some samples from the gallery here.

Get started here:

Gickr

With the advent of Geotagging and similar (tagging the EXIF info of your pictures with your GPS co-ordinates) and the collaboration between mapping and photography, you can now show exactly where your picture was taken and see pictures taken in certain places or areas.

One gadget to help you do this is the Sony GPS tracker.

The Sony device very interesting little device for recording the position where photographs are taken. The GPS-CS1 is a small (9 cm / 3.5 in) cylindrical device which you simply attach to a backback or belt loop and carry with you while you shoot, it records your GPS location and this information can later be synchronized with your digital images to provide a map of where your photos were taken. We assume it does this using date and time information stored in the image header (which obviously requires your camera’s clock to be synchronized). Interestingly the mapping solution is an online website with maps provided by Google Maps (it appears that the synchronization software will write the GPS location into JPEG EXIF headers).

An example of the Sony mapping site is here and the Flickr geotagging map is here.

Quite a while back (September I think) I chanced upon something called MOO Cards, neat little business cards made from your images on Flickr.

I first found out about them on boing boing who were literally raving about these “stunning custom biz-cards”.

Moo prints beautiful little calling-cards. Each card can have a different back, and the undersized cards are just the right size for your name, email address and a URL or two. The project was co-founded by my friend Stef Magdalinski, who also spends his time hacking British democracy with projects like Wikiproxy and TheyWorkForYou — he’s good people.

You can order your custom MOO cards here, as long as you a Flickr user:

MOO Cards

I chose to make 20 designs 5 times each to fulfill the full pack of 100 MOO Cards, only certain pictures suit the MOO card ratio as it’s quite long and thin.

As above it’s $19.99 for 100 cards plus about $5 postage anywhere in the world, so it comes out to about $25 USD, totally worth it I think!

It’s very easy to make the cards and only requires 4 steps, after that you just put in your details.

I’ll write more about my MOO cards that recently arrived from UK.

TechCrunch also wrote about them here and there is a whole Flickr pool of people doing cool stuff with their MOO Cards here.