Earlier, we told you about a new feature from photo hosting site Snapjoy called “Flickraft“. The premise is simple: get all of your photos off of Flickr and onto Snapjoy’s platform. For those who were looking to ditch Flickr, much excitement was to be had. Apparently Flickr didn’t share in this excitement.

We were just contacted by Snapjoy’s co-founder Michael Dwan, and he shared this:

Looks like flickr shut down our api key

Dwan tells us that no warning was given to Snapjoy about its access to Flickr’s API being shut down, nor did his company do anything that other sites do with the freely available access to many other developers.

Since the Flickraft site launched, over 250k photos have been imported to Snapjoy via Flickr, showing that there are many people who were pretty happy about the offering of a “life raft” to get their photos off of the Yahoo! owned photo site.

Perhaps the Flickr team didn’t have a sense of humor about Snapjoy’s reference to Titanic on the Flickraft site:

The site now has a message from the Snapjoy team, instead of the image above:

Earlier today, we launched a Flickr to Snapjoy importer with a tongue-in-cheek promotional page to draw attention to it.

In roughly two hours, our users imported over 250,000 photos from their Flickr accounts. However, we decided to pull the plug because our API key was disabled. We tried our best to stay within Flickr’s API limits, but the overwhelmingly positive response has exceeded our expectations.

What does this mean for you? Unfortunately, you will not be able to import your Flickr photos at this time. We’re working diligently to restore this functionality.

Thanks again for checking us out and please stay tuned for updates.

Sincerely,

- the Snapjoy Team (Michael, JP, and Dustin)

We’ve reached out to Yahoo!’s PR team and will let you know what they have to say on the matter.

In September we told you about a new exciting startup that aimed to host all of your photos in a beautiful and elegant way. That startup, Snapjoy, has announced a new feature in a big way, and it’s shooting an arrow directly at Yahoo!’s Flickr.

Up until now, you could only directly upload your photos to Snapjoy, and it would use all of the meta data from the pictures to build a gorgeous timeline. Today, with a site it calls “Flickraft“, Snapjoy wants to offer you a way to get all of your Flickr photos onto its service.

The site sports an artistic rendition of the “SS Flickr”, Snapjoy’s way of saying that Flickr is sinking like the Titanic. According to the site, 48,863 photos have been “rescued” so far.

The site clearly is meant to grab attention away from Flickr, but the new tool works flawlessly, allowing you to bring every single one of your photos over to Snapjoy for safe keeping. And at least for right now, it’s free.

Once you sign up for an account on Snapjoy, you can then authorize it to work with your Flickr account. All you have to do after that is sit back and relax while Snapjoy does the importing rescuing.

Once you’re done, you’ll be presented with this screen:

So there you have it, for everyone who has been ready to take the dive away from Flickr, now’s the time. Thanks to Snapjoy, this process is now, well a snap.

➤ Flickraft

Once the premiere community for photographers, Flickr has struggled to stay relevant in recent years. The company has been slow to innovate and adapt, facing fierce competition from hot alternatives like Facebook and Instagram. But for photographers who remain committed to Flickr as their platform of choice, the Pro account has been the way to go. With Flickr Pro, uploads and storage are unlimited, files are available in higher resolution, video is high definition, detailed stats are provided and there are no ads. Today, Flickr announced new options for upgrading to Pro, and all subscriptions will now automatically renew (with a reminder of course, and users can cancel at any time and continue using Pro until their subscription is set to end).

The cost per year remains at $24.95, as it has been for many years. A slightly higher priced three month option is available for $6.95, and a two-year subscription now costs $44.95 (previously it was $47.95).

The new options are good for those who aren’t ready to commit to a full year, or those who subscribe every two years and now save a few dollars. The three month pricing plan is also ideal for those of you with photos that are stuck on Flickr that you’d like to move somewhere else. But Flickr’s also used the pricing changes as an opportunity to make its pricing seem more appealing than it really is. As I mentioned, a one-year subscription has been $24.95 for many years, but Flickr now advertises it on the upgrade page as a savings of $2.85 over the three month subscription (which would cost $27.80 over the course of a year). It’s not saving money; you’re just losing money with a three month subscription.

As Thomas Hawk points out, they use the same misleading logic for the two-year subscription, calling it a savings of $10.65 when it’s only $3 lower than the previous two-year subscription. Nonetheless, Hawk still believes it’s a “screaming good deal for a photographer like me.”

For casual photographers, however, sites like Google+ and Facebook often make more sense, and Flickr will have to do more than slightly tweak their pricing to stay relevant. The company promised big things and a renewed sense of focus for 2012, so Flickr users like myself can hope they’ll live up to that promise in the coming months.

➤ Upgrade to Flickr Pro

In a blog post today, Flickr has promised that a big 2012 is in store for its users. The massive photo sharing community owned by Yahoo! has announced some “New Year’s cleaning”, which includes the removal of a few features, but no actual details on how it plans to make the site better.

Here’s what Flickr had to say about the upcoming changes:

This year is going to be big at Flickr! In the coming weeks and months you will see significant updates to Flickr’s user experience, new features and offerings across devices. Our goal is to build a gorgeous, intuitive, and truly beautiful experience for you, your friends and your photos.

To do this, we are starting 2012 with a renewed sense of focus. This means discontinuing certain features that are not core to our product or that haven’t resonated with you. Since the upcoming new experiences will either require, or work significantly better, with modern browsers. We will also discontinue supporting some of the older browsers that only a very small percentage of people are using with Flickr.

Among the cuts is the photo editing feature powered by Picnik. Picnik was purchased by Google in 2010 and was integrated into Picasa, and now Google+ Photos. Flickr promises to transition into another editing solution, presumably created in-house, but doesn’t say exactly what that will entail. Also, it’s unknown if Flickr is simply choosing to remove Picnik, or if its agreement with the product merely lapsed and Google chose not to renew.

Here are some of the other cuts Flickr is planning on making:

Photo Session

Photo Session is a feature that offered a real-time way to share photos with other people in a browser, with no additional apps to install. The feature had been developed as a technology showcase, but has not seen the user adoption we were hoping for. The feature will be turned-off by March 20, but we will continue to use the technology in other parts of Flickr. For example: Go to Flickr.com on your iPad or iPhone, open the full-screen lightbox view and experience the performance and pinch-to-zoom in the browser – it’s just one place where we are using the technology that was developed for Photo Session.

Flickr Clock

We removed the Flickr Clock from the Navigation late last year. We created the clock to gather visual, video (or “long photos” as we like to call them) moments in time from around the world. It’s a pretty little thing, but its user experience is complicated and it’s not core to our product offering – so we’re going to say goodbye. (Pssst… You can still see it here for a few more days.)

Flickr for Windows 7 Slate PC’s

While we continue to build the best photo sharing app for Windows Phone, we made the decision to discontinue its Slate counterpart. We see great traction with the Windows Phone app and are going to continue to release frequent updates, but the Touch-PC version of the Silverlight App will not be supported after March 20.

FlickrAuth

The Flickr API fully supports oAuth, which is already used by hundreds of Flickr apps, but there are still some apps that use the old authentication system, called FlickrAuth. We are asking all developers to move over to the new standard bu July 31. There is a related blog post on this topic on our engineering blog code.flickr.com.

Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6

For both of the browsers we are seeing a very small percentage of people using them and as of today people with those browsers will see an “update” message to encourage the download of the latest browser versions. This does not mean that IE7 and Firefox 3.6 users will experience problems using the site today, but the features and experiences that we will be releasing this year may not be supported on these browsers. For many reasons, foremost security, we encourage everyone to use the latest browser version on their devices.

Flickr is cutting some of its deadwood products that weren’t gaining much traction and it will be interesting to see where the new focus takes them. I highly suggest that the team works on bolstering its mobile offerings, since Instagram has built a wildly successful community of over 15 million photo sharers on iOS.

If you’re a longtime Flickr user, you know that getting photos out of the service isn’t always a piece of cake. If you’re planning on not renewing your Flickr Pro account, then you most certainly need to find a way to get those precious pics a new home.

UnifyPhotos is an app by Goyaka Labs that aims to make copying your Flickr photos to Facebook set-by-set super simple.

The app launched yesterday and the Goyaka team tell us that in its first four hours it transferred some 20k photos and over 500 albums from Flickr to Facebook.

Goodbye Flickr!

The process to migrate your photos to Facebook using UnifyPhotos is rather simple. You have to connect with your Facebook account and allow it to post on your behalf, and then authorize the app for use with Flickr.

Once you’ve authorized your accounts, you’ll be shown all of your available Flickr sets to migrate. Make sure that your Flickr Pro account hasn’t lapsed yet, or you’ll only have access to your last 200 photos. The other thing to note is that UnifyPhotos will only migrate sets of photos, not single photos that you’ve uploaded. I’ve asked the team about that feature and hopefully it’s something that they’ll add.

By selecting all of the sets you’d like to migrate to Facebook, they’ll be placed in a queue and uploaded to Facebook as an album. It’s really nice that the Flickr set is sent to an album complete with its original name, so that you can keep everything sorted. The photos that are sent to Facebook are automatically set to private so you can hand select which ones you’d like to share with your friends. Again, that’s a nice touch, because nobody wants to accidentally share a photo on Facebook.

I noticed that my photos sat in a queue for a while on UnifyPhotos, but if you refresh the status page, you’ll be updated on where you are in the process. After about an hour, all of my new albums were placed on Facebook, ready for me to share. If you’re looking for a way out of Flickr, this might be your lucky day.

➤ UnifyPhotos

One of Yahoo!’s remaining properties that still has some life in it is photo sharing site Flickr. Dedicated users still post their best photos on the site, providing us with amazing insight into what happened in 2011. It makes us wish that the site never sold to Yahoo! in the first place.

While Instagram has captured the imagination of budding mobile photographers everywhere, Flickr still has some amazing near-professional content on its platform.

Flickr has posted its Year In Photos 2011 which covers everything from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan to the Royal Wedding, and everything in between. All of the photos in the 2011 recap are from Flickr users.

Amazing shots from 2011

Flickr has listed out the top photos from its users and displays them month by month. I would have really liked to have seen a list of most viewed or shared photos from the year as well, as I think that it would give a better idea of what content meant the most to the community.

Regardless, the shots that the site has included are sometimes breathtaking. Here are my three favorites:

Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched in the final mission of the U.S. Space Shuttle program:

Remembering 9/11, ten years later:

Apple fans around the world mourn the loss of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs:

You can see the entire gallery and share your favorites, as well. What will become of Flickr in the future under Yahoo!? Nobody knows, but imagine for a moment what would have happened if the site had stayed independent, and created a really great mobile experience. Apps like Instagram wouldn’t have had a chance to compete.

Sad, really.

Tell us in the comments which moments in 2011 stood out to you the most, and which picture captured that moment perfectly.

➤ Flickr’s Year In Photos 2011

As we know, sharing photos is one of the most popular things to do on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr. The act of sharing photos has also spawned services like Flickr, Instagram, and 500px who serve that purpose exclusively.

While you probably haven’t gotten around to storing all of your photos in one place with a service like Snapjoy, it can be a maddening experience to try to figure out which site you shared what photo on. Especially if you’re trying to show one to someone at a bar or family function.

SuperAlbum won’t store all of your photos for you, but the iOS app will let you view all of your shared photos from one interface within the app. It’s extremely well done, and fixes a problem I’ve been facing for years.

The app is $.99 cents, which is a steal if you’re facing the problem of “where did I post that photo?” like I am.

All the photos

Once you open up SuperAlbum, you connect the app with all of your accounts. Luckily, most services provide quick and painless authorization, so this shouldn’t take but a few minutes. After you’ve connected your accounts, you can start taking a look at all of the photos you’ve shared over the years.

The thing you’ll notice right away, is that SuperAlbum has a prettier and easier to navigate interface than most of the apps it supports. For example, one of my major gripes with Instagram is that I can’t swipe through a feed of photos, or through someone’s personal collection. SuperAlbum lets you do just that.

Additionally, SuperAlbum will let you save any picture you see onto your iDevice’s Camera Roll, which is really handy if you’re trying to text or email it to someone. The app will also let you tweet a picture instantly, or send it to another application for editing or sharing that SuperAlbum works with, seamlessly.

For the price, SuperAlbum is completely worth it, and as soon as I started using it, I didn’t feel like my pictures were as scattered around the Internet as I first thought. Some of the other services out there should take note of SuperAlbum’s features their own adoption, as I find that even Facebook’s app is sluggish when cycling through photos.

➤SuperAlbum

According to TechCrunch Google has accidentally announced its read-only APIs for Google+ Photos and Videos in a blog post the company put up too soon and then pulled down today.

The removed blog post said:

Google+ gives users full control of their information, and we’re starting with read-only access to public albums, photos, and videos. Google also supports Creative Commons licensing, which we expose so developers can easily respect copyrights.

Using the new API, developers can get a list of public albums from a Google+ user, and list the photos and videos within each album. Combined with our existing public data and search APIs, I’m hoping to see new services such as a family-focused ‘screen saver’, a new way to crowdsource great images, or a live photo wall for a party.

We don’t know exactly when the APIs are to be released and officially announced, but we assume that it’s going to be soon, since someone had their hands on the finished blog post already.

As we reported before, the Google+ team is taking a slow and very calculated approach to the release of its APIs. Not wanting any privacy disasters like it had with Buzz, the company is choosing to release read-only versions of APIs at first. No writable APIs have been made available for the service, yet.

The photo below shows the official post that was pulled down almost immediately:

What does the API mean for app developers? It means that companies that develop apps that pull in photos from all different social networks and sites now have one of the biggest ones to pull from. For example, photo sharing app Batch will benefit greatly from being able to pull in photos from Google+. It also can help Google+ catch up with top photo sharing sites Facebook and Flickr.

How long can the service turn down growth opportunities with having a read and writable API? Twitter saw incredible growth when third parties started building apps on top of its service.

Photos, Photos, Photos. Now that photography is all digital, we’ve got hundreds of them, sometimes thousands of them. With the iPhone, we’re taking pictures of meals, our cats and dogs, our feet, a funny sign, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Taking photos has never been easier. Furthermore, photo sharing has never been easier thanks to services like Facebook, Google, Flickr, Instagram, and the list goes on and on.

Everyone is a photographer now, which is fantastic because moments that have never been captured before, are.

But what are we going to do with all of these photos? It’s an area ripe for innovation where I’m personally seeing little or none.

Photo Hosting

Photo hosting is somewhat easy for startups to get into, since cloud storage has become so cheap on services like Amazon EC2. Facebook has developed amazing technology to host photos for over 800 million users, with next to zero downtime. Google, with its infinite server farms, can host photos for every person in the world. Apple has gotten into the game as well with iCloud, sending photos that you take from your iPhone or iPad and sending it to the sky forevermore. Shoot, even Twitter will host your photos now. These services let you host them there and maybe let you categorize them into albums, but that’s about it.

As far as I’m concerned, the best photo feature I’ve seen in years comes from photo host Snapjoy. They let you see a random photo, and give you simple shuffle button.

But so what? You’re storing our photos. That’s just not enough anymore. What’s next?

Photo Sharing

Photo sharing is something that most of us do with the really great photos that we’re proud of. Be it an artistic shot, or a photo of a street sign that says something ridiculous, we’re posting them on the internet for the world to see. The thing with photo sharing though, is that they’re sent into a stream of a zillion other posts.

When I post a photo on Twitter or even Google+, perhaps 50 of my 15,000+ followers are paying attention at any given second.

Twitter now shares the photos that you’ve posted recently in a place that gets the least amount of traffic, your profile. How much time do you spend on someones profile on Twitter? Not a lot. So that’s just not going to cut it. Google+ has photo albums using its Picasa platform, but it still feels disconnected from the overall experience.

Facebook lets you tag people in photos, which is very social, and even has facial recognition software behind it now. This still feels like a utility sharing overall, but maybe Timeline will bring older photos back to life.

Flickr was the absolute best place to share photos, because the community that used Flickr really used Flickr. We used to spend hours pouring through photos, commenting on them, and marking favorites. And then Yahoo! bought them, and the innovation, heart, and soul died.

Instagram has picked up the slack for Flickr by letting you share a photo, slap a filter on it, and post it to a…stream. Mind you, Instagram has done a wonderful job with its “Popular” feature, which lets you see the photos that have been liked the most on the platform. A real community is building there, and since it’s completely mobile, people are interacting there a lot. It still needs work though.

What’s next for photo sharing?

Photo Editing

Photoshop is great, but requires a lot of attention to detail that most normal folks just don’t have. Editing a single photo requires time and passion. A lot of the photos are tossing into a stream don’t feel like there’s enough passion behind them to spend a half hour making them pretty using Photoshop. It’s also expensive software.

I’m excited that Google purchased Picnik, because it’s a nice editing tool that should evolve under Google’s wing, but as we know with Google, products sometimes get purchased and die. I’d hate to see that happen to a product like Picnik.

You could count Instagram as a photo editor, because of its filters and effects, but it’s a bit of a stretch.

Photo editing just isn’t something that has been innovated on enough to make the average Joe and Jill want to do it. But why not? Hosting is bountiful, and sharing is simple!

Photo cards and postcards

Now we’re getting somewhere. We have a ton of photos, putting them on postcards or greeting cards is a perfect way to bring moments to life in a new and physical way.

Apple Card launched, Postagram is doing well, so that’s a space I’d like to see evolve as well. Surely cards and postcards aren’t the only ways to bring a photo to life in a unique way. Digital prints are just boring, so I won’t even spend time on them.

My point is, photos have been around for a long time. It used to be really expensive and time-consuming to get photos taken and developed. You don’t have to do those things anymore, so we’re taking and taking photos, storing them all over the world, and we’re doing nothing with them other than share them briefly, get a comment or ten, and forget about them. I’m seeing some interesting things starting to happen with Instagram’s API, which is a step in the right direction.

Startups, it’s time to start innovating in photography. Fast. It’s a golden opportunity to give us something to do with amazing moments taken and shared in real-time. It’s the day after we take the photos though that the real innovation can begin. Even further innovation can take place on photos we took years ago. Yes, years. Remember those?

If you’ve seen great apps and companies doing new and cool things with Photos, drop them in the comments!

In a blog post today, photo sharing service Flickr announces that it has hit 200 million photos that are available for use via the Creative Commons license.

By adding a Creative Commons license to your photo, you can allow others to share it or re-work it, as long as they give you proper attribution.

The Flickr team had this to say:

We are proud to announce that – thanks to you – we now have 200 Million (and counting) public Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr. This makes us the largest CC photo repository in the world!

You can browse and search those CC photos by license, or find exactly the one suitable for and available to you. by using advanced search, ticking the CC checkbox, and searching for whatevery image you are looking for.

If you would like to take part in CC and provide your photography under a less restrictive license than “All Rights Reserved”, familiarize yourself with Creative Commons, and apply a CC license to you photos, by either changing your default license upload setting or an individual photo’s license under “Owner settings” on any of your photo pages.

Flickr is clearly one of the most attractive pieces that Microsoft is looking to pick up in their potential bid to acquire Yahoo! That is a story that we’re watching closely. Also, other larger photo hosting and sharing services including Facebook don’t allow you to offer your photos with a Creative Commons license, so this announcement doesn’t make Flickr largest host of photos in the world.