[photopress:ma_ph_1.gif,full,alignright] And its time to move your images.Or lose them.

From an email we just received:

“Dear Yahoo! Photos user,

For some time now, we’ve supported two great photo sharing services: Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. But even good things come to an end, and we’ve decided to close Yahoo! Photos to focus all our efforts on Flickr — the award-winning photo sharing community that TIME Magazine has called “completely addictive.”

We will officially close Yahoo! Photos on Thursday, September 20, 2007, at 9 p.m. PDT. Until then, we are offering you the opportunity to move to another photo sharing service (Flickr, KODAK Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket), download your original-resolution photos back to your computer, or buy an archive CD from our featured partner (for users of the New Yahoo! Photos only). All you need to do is tell us what to do with your photos before we close, after which any photos remaining on Yahoo! Photos will be deleted and no longer accessible.

Of course, we hope you’ll join us at Flickr (you can even use your Yahoo! ID), but we also realize that Flickr may not be for everyone. In the end, we want you to find the service that’s right for you, and we hope you take some time to learn more about your options before making this important decision.”

Wow.

So while you are looking around for a new home for your images, you may want to consider our GALLERY. No meta data attached, just your glorious image with a title and copyright.

N.B. Best to post through Firefox. And remember the size and file format listed in the upload instructions. Once your gallery is open , you can add as many images as you want, and share the pages with an easy link.

This all of course brings up the question we are faced with in the digital photography world: Where is the best place to save the images? We suggest – Double back-up at home to multiple hard drives, DVD burn, and, what we predict is the next coming business: back up to an offsite server.
Sound like a lot?
It won’t if you ever have the misfortune to lose precious images. Trust us, we know.

Yes, Kodaks tag line from the days of the Brownie ” You push the button and we do the rest” has been replaced with “you push the button, then get ready to put a lot more time in.”