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!