Flickr, the popular online photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo, said on Monday it is moving to further internationalize its service by creating versions in seven major languages besides English. The three-year-old service already sees more than half of its users coming from outside the United States.

Flickr said it is set to introduce sites in French, German, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and traditional Chinese, with other languages to follow. A Japanese site remains in the works with independently operated Yahoo Japan.

Flickr was first to popularize the notion of Web site "tagging," the simple trick of applying short words or phrases to help other Web users find material of interest.

The sites users have added around 12.5 million unique tags, including generic words and geographic and other names, according to Butterfield. There are some 525 million photos stored on Flickr, the company said in a statement.