Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

San Francisco (Reuters) - Picture having an Olympian view of millions of photos the world's photographers and camera phone users have produced over the last day. That's what Flickr , Yahoo Inc's online photo sharing site, said on Sunday the company plans to offer this week, by introducing a set of mapping features that makes it easier to find photos based on their location. Starting on Monday, Flickr will unveil a way for Web users to browse photos from tens of millions of geographically located photos loaded up to its site, http://www.flickr.com/ . The service, called "Places," identifies on a global map the latest hot spots for photo contributions. "It's a new way to browse what is happening in the world," said Kakul Srivastava, senior director of product management at Flickr. Flickr Places also allows users to search by more than 100,000 geographic place names to find photos that might interest them. Many of the

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. is shutting down Yahoo Photos, an online photo storage site, and asking users to move instead to its Web 2.0 photo sharing site, Flickr, a Yahoo official said. 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. Outside sites include PhotoBucket -- the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp.'s MySpace -- or more conventional photo printing and storage site such as Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly Inc. or Snapfish, he said. "Flickr will get top-billing, of course," Butterfield said in an interview late on Thursday about the plan to give users multiple alternatives. Butterfield and co-fo