Yahoo Photos is the world's largest online picture storage and sharing service, having stored more than 2 billion images provided by about 5 million users. Moreover, in terms of unique visitor traffic, Yahoo! Photos leads among major online photo album sites: Yahoo! Photos has 31.1 million visitors, Flickr has 28.5 million, Photobucket and Facebook Albums have 28.1 million and 23.5 million respectively. However, Yahoo! will announce tomorrow that it plans to shut down Yahoo! Photos, a process that will last for several months. This cannot fail to surprise many people. Nonetheless, upon closer examination, one can understand Yahoo!'s predicament: between April 2006 and April 2007, Flickr’s user base increased by 22%, while Yahoo! Photos' user base dropped by 60%. The gap between the two is indeed striking, which explains why Yahoo! intends to focus on developing the newer, more social Flickr. Still, there are a few points that remain unclear; the head of Flickr stated that... (the sentence cuts off with "%E" which seems like an encoding issue or incomplete translation source.)