Yahoo Photos Overview, Exclusive Screenshots

It isn’t entirely fair to compare the new Yahoo Photos with all of the early stage companies showing their stuff at Demo. But its a very impressive product and it’s good that they came here to demo it. The new Yahoo Photos will be launching this spring.

Everyone knows that Yahoo owns Flickr, the wildly popular photo tagging and sharing service that they bought in late 2004. But what most people don’t know (I didn’t) is that around 30 million unique monthly visitors come to Yahoo Photos (the other Yahoo photo service) v. about 8 million on Flickr. Flickr has mind share; Yahoo Photos is driving real (unique) traffic.

An all new Yahoo Photos is being released in March. It combines many of the most-loved features of Flickr (like tagging and sets) with some entirely new stuff that is pretty compelling. Exclusive screen shots of the new service are below.

Yahoo Photos will be entirely free, and will allow uploading and archiving of an unlimited number of original high resolution pictures. Revenue will be generated from advertising on the site, along with premium printing and other services (books, calendars, prints, etc.). Like Flickr, Yahoo will also be allowing users to pick up prints at their local Target store.

Features

Yahoo Photos will integrate popular Flickr features, like tagging and sets, as well as popular printing options mentioned above. The screen shots below show some of these features.

They are also doing new stuff. They have two types of “sets”, or albums. The standard sets work very much like Flickr. But “Smart albums” allow dynamic creation of albums based on rules (ratings, tags, date, etc.), and also allow inclusion of photos from friends. With smart albums, users can create albums like “highly rated” or “new” that will always be created on the fly.

The all photos view is much better than Flickr. Many more photos can be viewed at once, and an Ajax interface allows for mass dragging and dropping into a tray at the top of the screen for inclusion in albums, sharing (via email and instant messaging), etc.

They have not integrated RSS feeds for photos and albums yet, but this is coming.

The Yahoo photos team includes Darryl Eaton, Will Aldrich, and Scott Schiller, who were all here at Demo this week.

Screen shots: