Yahoo!'s new-and-improved service features better photo sharing and management as well as tagging.Though its availability is very limited—first come, first served for a tiny group or by invitation only—Yahoo! Photos beta appears to be a move to capture more of the cutting-edge digerati photographers out there. Those who've used the Yahoo! site for some time will hardly recognize it; and in fact much of the underlying technology is new.
Yahoo! is a pioneer in the photo-sharing space, having first launched its very popular photo site way back in 2000 (hey that's an eon in Web time), and it is starting to show its age when compared with the hip, fresh, and innovative sites that have come online recently. Even so, Yahoo! still has on average around 30 million unique monthly visitors to its photo site worldwide (source: comScore World Metrix).
At its core, the new Yahoo! Photos is all about being able to more easily share photos. The shtick here is that the service is Web-based, yet feels more like a desktop application in its use of drag-and-drop tools. Other new capabilities include more advanced search, as well as a new tagging feature for better identifying and cross-referencing. To more fully take advantage of these features, you'll also encounter "Smart Albums" that will detect newly tagged photos and automatically add them to albums. As part of the enhanced sharing experience, others you've shared photos with can add comments and ratings to them.
Other things that have been addressed with this version include at least one long-time peeve of many regular users of sharing sites: not being able to download high-resolution versions of photos that have been shared with you. The folks at Yahoo! intend to foster even more in the way of innovation by providing open APIs to encourage third-party developers. Yahoo! has also promised that the new site has been better integrated with the company's many properties and services including Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Mobile, and 360°, thus making it much more accessible to regular Yahoo! users.
While it is limited to a small number of U.S. Yahoo! Photos users, this will be expanded in the months ahead to a larger beta group worldwide. Stay tuned for our full hands-on review.
