Yahoo Inc. is closing down its traditional photo-sharing Web site, Yahoo Photos, asking users to move instead to Flickr, an online community to share and discuss personal photos and montages which Yahoo acquired two years ago.

Yahoo Photos will be shut down by the fall. Yahoo that continued to support both Photos and Flickr over the past two years as they appealed to different audiences Thursday said the changing nature of the Internet has forced them to shut down the conventional photo-sharing site.

"People are changing the way they use photography, and we have decided to shift our focus accordingly. [Digital photography] is evolving from its original purpose as a means to preserve memories into a social activity that allows people to communicate and connect," a Yahoo spokeswoman said.

"We are making great strides in our ongoing efforts to align Yahoo!'s resources and focus on core strategic priorities," Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network Division, said in a company statement. "Part of this progress is today's decision to close Yahoo! Photos to better serve our valued customers through Flickr."

In June, the users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of their options, including moves to Flickr or various competing photo-storage sites such as Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery or Photobucket, the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp.'s MySpace, according to Stewart Butterfield, a co-founder of Flickr and a director of product management at Yahoo.

The transition would be easy, with a one-click transfer process, Yahoo said. On their plan to give users multiple alternatives, Butterfield said, "Flickr will get top-billing, of course."

Yahoo Photos is a more conventional photo-finishing site, full of family snapshots, where families share photos and visitors can download and print photos, while Flickr has attracted a passionate fan base of amateur and professional photographers who use the site to showcase their photography for a larger Web audience that largely just look at pictures online, and for whom printing is largely an afterthought.

Likewise, Yahoo Photos has unlimited storage for photos, though it is required that photos have the jpeg/jpg extension, while Flickr sells the unlimited package in the form of a premium membership for $24.95 a year. However, a free version of Flickr is also available but it has limitations.

About yahoo’s latest action, Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr in 2004 with wife Caterina Fake and sold it to Yahoo in March, 2005, says the move validates Flickr's theme that is "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. "People can take a picture and get immediate feedback from all over the world, and you can't do that with a printed photo."

Yahoo Photos, that allows users to create individual photo albums, categorize their photos and place them in the corresponding albums, has seen a steady decline in usage while Flickr, which lets users upload digital photos from computers and camera phones, put together photo albums, and post photos to blogs, among other things, has grown its share over the past year.

The number of Flickr users rose 22 percent between April 2006 and April 2007, according to measurement service Hitwise Inc. At the same time, Yahoo Photos lost 60 percent of its visitors.

Yahoo!, started by two Stanford graduates– Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, is the Sunnyvale, California-based largest and most comprehensive information portal on the Web. The company was incorporated in 1995.