The photo-sharing Web site Flickr, until now available only in English, launched new versions of its popular product in seven languages on Tuesday, in a bid to be more accessible to users around the world.
"It's thrilling," Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield said. "This is something we wanted to do a long time ago. It is also one of our most requested features."
Along with English, Flickr Web sites will now be available in French, German, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and traditional Chinese.
Offering its Web site in more languages will allow Flickr to expand its fan base beyond its "global English-speaking tech-savvy audience," Butterfield said.
Butterfield estimated that with the expanded languages Flickr now had Web pages tailored to 90 percent of its users.
California-based Internet titan Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005 and the Web site claims 8.7 million registered users, more than half of them living outside the US.
Approximately 24.8 million people visit Flickr monthly, according to marketing research firm comScore.
"Flickr's growth is outstanding and we still have a lot of gas in the tank," Butterfield said.
Yahoo announced last month that it is closing its photo-sharing service Yahoo Photos and will help users move pictures to Flickr or elsewhere on the Internet in the coming months.
"We will have our hands full operationally," Butterfield said of the upcoming job of shifting images from Yahoo Photos to Flickr.
"The bottom line is for the user to be happy," he said.
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