Filed under: Fun, Internet, Photo, Yahoo!, Social Software
New Yahoo! Photos now open to US users
The new Yahoo! Photos user interface is being made available to US users. The migration of accounts began tonight and is expected to take a while. It become available in a limited beta back in June and has now completed that phase.
The new version boasts of drag-and-drop features, tagging, dynamic albums, sharing, commenting and enhanced searching. Also included is the ability to download full-size photos without needing to be a premium services subscriber as it was before.
There are two features from the previous version which I feel are sorely lacking from the new. If I want to grant access to my photos to a friend, then I must send them an email explicitly sharing the photos or album with them. Before, I merely indicated which Y! IDs could see photos in an album. This could be a deal breaker for me and cause me to give Flickr another look. Secondly, the frame choices are cheesy at best and lack the feathering options (frosting the edges to create a soft edge instead of a hard edge to the photo). I used the feathering frame types many times and rarely used the other frames at all.
All-in-all, this is a tremendous jump forward for the Y! Photos property. Kudos to the team!

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
flanders said 9:50AM on 8-17-2006
a mini review:
The bad:
-uploading pictures is still an 80% affair. ~20% of the pictures fail to transfer. better luck with less # of pictures best when under 10.
-can't get tag searches to do things like all picts tagged with dunes but not tagged with water. How hard is implementing set theory?
The good:
-Unlimited storage.
-Ability to download the original photo.
-upcoming API (release it already:)) might be a great way to write an app do back up all your photos:)
-Neat interface
-download app as a firefox extension
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Florian said 10:47AM on 8-17-2006
Aren't dynamic galleries a great idea? I like them so much that I implemented that function into http://www.yourep.com . Perhaps have a look at that service? ;)
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Pete said 12:45PM on 8-17-2006
I had the exact same issues with the new yahoo photos! I've emailed yahoo several times on this as this was one of the reasons I like to use Yahoo photos, to explicitly share an album with a friend, not just an email (which, by the way, expires after about 90 days)
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Los Diablos said 9:27PM on 8-17-2006
I think the new Yahoo photos sucks:
- Clicking on an image thumbnail does not show the full image (you have to double-click it!). This is web blasphemy. Why break a universally understood and accepted user interface? This boggles the mind.
- There is no way to link directly to an album slideshow.
- The advertisements are overwhelming and totally distracting.
I still use it because it has unlimited free uploads of any image size. But the new site really irks me. I’m looking for something better that is still free. Any suggestions?
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eyalg said 9:17AM on 8-22-2006
Double-click to view an image? That is truly unheard of. It makes you wonder: "what were they thinking?"
As for sharing albums, I copied the link of an album by right-clicking on its title in the album list, and sent the link to a friend. No problem.
Am I missing something here?
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Joe Beaulaurier said 10:45AM on 8-22-2006
@Los Diablos and eyalg - welcome to the latest in web page functionality. You no longer have to wait for page reloads. Instead you can now drag-n-drop, group select (one click), and open (dbl click) objects just like you do on your desktop.
@eyalg - when you emailed the album link to your friend, that friend probably already had access to the album from permission granted under the previous Y! Photos version or you just uncovered an easy way to grant permissions without requiring the use of the automatically generated cheesy (read not in my voice) email/IM to our friends. I'll have to play with that and see.
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