SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo has added video sharing to its Flickr photo website in an effort to carve a niche in an online arena dominated by Google-owned YouTube.

Short videos can be posted along with pictures on Flickr pages that let users share images photo-album style with select people, as opposed to the way videos are displayed on YouTube for the world to see.

"Flickr is a very different experience from anything else out there," Flickr director Kakul Srivastava said, demonstrating the video-sharing feature for AFP in the Internet firm's San Francisco office.

"We are not trying to be the highest volume site, but we are trying to be the most interesting, authentic and personal."

The video-sharing feature rolled out Tuesday in eight languages on Flickr websites worldwide.

Basic Flickr accounts that let people store and share several hundred digital photos are free at the ad-supported website.

Only people with "pro" premium accounts, costing 25 dollars annually, can upload videos to their Flickr pages.

However, any Flickr members with permission can view videos.

"We found that pro users' passion and standards determine what Flickr feels like as a community," Srivastava said. "We want to maintain that feel."

Photos on Flickr typically capture moments in people's lives or candid aspects of what is happening around them.

A survey in the United States by Yahoo and Decipher Inc. indicates that while digital recording is common, people rarely share the videos online.

People often opt to use camera-enabled mobile telephones to record spontaneous moments, such as family outings or antics among friends, the research showed.

Meanwhile, videos on YouTube and its rivals tend to be snippets of movies, television shows or other professional broadcast content, Srivastava said.

User-made videos on YouTube are commonly imitations, parodies or commentaries based on broadcast content, the research concluded.

"We want to let people share personal content like your child playing in a baseball game or a birthday party with friends," Srivastava said.

Flickr caps video length at 90 seconds, saying the time was chosen after an informal survey of company workers revealed that most videos kept on their computers were no longer than that.

"Flickr is not the place for a one-hour wedding video," Srivastava said. "People who've tried it so far have found that 90 seconds is plenty of time when it comes to video."

The video-sharing feature went through Beta testing by invited users prior to its public launch.

Flickr videos can be "geo-tagged" to indicate where they were taken, with the spots marked on online maps.

An online Flickr atlas will be continuously updated with videos designated for public viewing, essentially giving visitors glimpses at what is happening around the world at given times of a day.

Flickr has long provided a public map showing photos users upload for public viewing. From two to three million pictures are uploaded daily to Flickr, which has 25 million registered users.

Approximately 46 million people visit Flickr monthly to partake of the more than two billion pictures in its database, according to Yahoo.

"People are trying to share their lives with pictures," Srivastava said. "There is a lot of math and magic to what we are doing, but it is really about this elemental need to share our lives."

Yahoo said Flickr is evolving to keep up with a trend toward digital video, and promises people's uploaded memories will be safeguarded.

"At Flickr, privacy and preventing data loss are the two most important things," Srivastava said. "We will put ourselves down on the railroad track before we let anything happen to your data."

The new service comes as Yahoo strives to display its independence in the face of an effort by US software giant Microsoft to takeover the California Internet veteran with an unsolicited 44.6-billion-dollar offer. - AFP/ra