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:
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Wow! Yahoo indeed is coming with impressive array of tools to target the PhotoMarket.
Once they incorporate RSS,ATOM,use face recognition technology of Riya (if acquired) and Searchfox.
Its going to best time for consumers and investors, since currently only 2-10% of PhotoMarket is being explored and the potential is huge. Daily 10 million pictures are uploaded and only around 1-2 million are tagged.
I think you might have the Target relationship backwards– I seem to remember Yahoo Photo having that feature first.
Hoo boy. I’m still waiting for them to combine the best aspects of Del.icio.us and MyWeb so that I need only one. Now I’m to deal with two competing photo services under the same roof?
Maybe it won’t be that hard to decide, since Flickr still has a unique and clean interface, while the new Yahoo Photos seems to sport the typical cluttered Yahoo look.
Very very cool. I definitely didn’t know about the Flickr/Yahoo traffic relationship. Very interesting.
I guess it’s still sort of a little community we have here, if our big superstar is still a little guy compared to a more established photo sharing service.
Excellent little bit of perspective.
Mike, are you sure “Everyone knows that Yahoo owns Flickr”? Did you ask any of those 30 million people that go by Yahoo Photos?
Dave, that’s a great point about the little community we have here.
I was reminded of that last night when one of my friends (who I consider pretty tech savvy) didn’t even know about Flickr.
So it’s safe to say Flickr will be gone soon and moved over to Yahoo! Photos.
Rob - I don’t think Flickr will ever be “gone soon”…Obviously there are some key overlaps but also some major differences - the interactivity and community aspects of Flickr being one of them.
I think in the future it won’t matter to the user where the photo is stored, rather - what do they want to do with the picture - get it printed, have friends critique it, etc…and Yahoo will have all types of activities covered.
Once they incorporate RSS,ATOM,use face recognition technology of Riya (if acquired) and Searchfox.
I sure hope Searchfox comes back soon.
OK…great. I’ve invested a little money and a helluva lot of time, efforts and photos into Flickr. So what’s next of Flickr?
ToddZ — what in gods name about those screenshots do you consider cluttered? That’s as streamlined as you can get (maybe even more so than Flickr at this point). I think it’s pretty impressive, and as others suggested really leaves it up to what you want to do with your photos, rather than which is competent.
It’s worth noting that Flickr was purchased by Yahoo Search, not by Yahoo Photos. I believe the Flickr people sit with the search team in the search building, and probably have more contact with My Web than they do with Photos.
The Photos team passed on Flickr for very legitimate reasons — the whole sharing/community/tagging thing is really a niche in the greater Photos market.
I’d like to see one of these big players implement something like imgSeek does (http://our.imgseek.net/). It’s a kind of social photo bookmarking service: you tag images, rate them, get recommendations, search for similar images, etc. Something like reddit meets delicious meet Flickr.
Pancho - maybe “cluttered” wasn’t the right word, though it certainly doesn’t lead my eye and draw me in the way the Flickr layout does. It’s just such a typical Yahoo-service look. If the speed and cool functionality are really there, I might warm up to it. I use Yahoo stuff extensively — but I just hoped that a photo app might have a little different flavor than mail, calendar, addressbook, MyWeb, 360, etc.
looks just like aol pictures (pictures.aol.com)
Yeah. Photos looks excellent. If anyone wants to see it in action, you can view the DEMO video…
http://www.demo.com/demonstrat.....63052.html
Definitely big improvements and great to see them bringing the tagging to more mainstream traffic.
As a former Yahoo employee and actively connected with Yahoo search, I can say its only going to get cooler!
Why would Yahoo not just take Flickr off the line I mean this new Yahoo Photos looks like it basically rivals Flickr feature by feature with some new features to boot, why should I pay 50 more bucks in march when my pro account is up for renewal when this thing is going to be free.
Seth - gawd I hope they don’t take away Flickr or merge the two services and their very different user bases.
Compare the quality of participation at a relatively small, paid subscription forum like Ask Metafilter vs. the global, free, and completely worthless Ask Yahoo. As I mentioned, I like Yahoo, but the Ask service is doomed to utter uselessness without massive twitfiltering. I certainly don’t need all those same people viewing and commenting on my photos.
It would be great if the site made it possible to easily convert from one to the other. So Flickr users could move everything to Yahoo Photos and vice versa.
As a long-time and dedicated flickr-ite, this makes me uncomfortable. And what’s wrong with simply adding some shiny features to flickr (smart albums, the much-needed ability to view more photos at once and to drag and drop) and send people that way?
I don’t think that flickr is going anywhere, either, but I question why Yahoo! feels the need to have two products so similar.
That Schiller is a pimp developer. I miss him.
Cant wait for that .. guys at google are so innovative
http://feedjeff.com/2006/02/10.....msn-looks/
Looks like Yahoo’s homepage is starting to align with Yahoo Photo looks too.
Are these people insane?
Nice looking. Is this DHTML/AJAX or Flex/Flash. It’s drop-drop seems to be Flex.
Is it me or does Yahoo Photos seem more branded than Flickr? It looks more bland. Why does Yahoo have to compete with it’s own product?
Excellent. And what about more image formats PNG,RAW,etc ?
Just wondering where you got the usage statistics from. I’m writing up a journal article on Flickr and would love some corroborating statistics. Thanks!
I hope to see more Flickr-like on Yahoo!
The reason I don’t use this site is due to my personal protest over the way that Yahoo tricks so many people into installing their toolbar. IMHO there should be NO software that gets installed by default when installing another unrelated piece of software. Ever install Adobe ACrobat Reader? Unless you tell it otherwise you’re going to get the Yahoo toolbar.
So - I boycott all Yahoo services - at least those that are branded as Yahoo. DOn’t konw what I’ll do if Flickr ever installs the Yahoo toolbar by default somehow.
Jim G, why do you use internet explorer?
Now all they need to do is grab RIYA.com and it’d be the best photo sharing tool avaliable.
Hi Mike A.,
Its true more people use Yahoo Photos than flickr. Reason being, Yahooo Photos has been there from long time and people who have got all albums uploaded there, will not like to switch.
However, I am more eager to know that will Yahoo Photo’s new version will be able to show my old photos too at high resoltuion again ? which they have archived by reducing the resolution. This resolution loosing is the only reason which forced me to switch to Riya.com .
I would be most happy person if I get original resolution of the photos uploaded already at yahoo. Since, I have now lost the original copies of those photos and only things I am having is the yahoo’s stripped down version of photos.
Thanks
Let’s not forget too, that yahoo photos is already on tivo (http://www.tivo.com/4.9.11.asp) by default. No special knowledge required, as with getting Flickr on Tivo.
my yahoo will not receive pictures at times it will not download only a star that will not down load or open
can’t enlarge these screenshot. ??
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ahmed
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did you see msns new photo space thing it beats this ….it look nice
I have been using Yahoo Photos for years. I don’t like the fixed photo size. I would like to see a larger size.
I like Yahoo because they gave me unlimited space. I have over 10K photos. I hope the new photo site allows me to direct link to the photo for blogging.
Can’t wait to try the new beta site.
I like Google’s Picasa web album. However, they are limited to 250MB for about 1000 pictures. Or you have to pay $25/year for 6GB.
isee plenty something in this pes that is where i click i need some like peasce in my area
I need someone understand me very well as a girl friend who wants to share a thing……………….
this my all poster
Yahoo! photos beta seemed impressive. The min i aceepted to migrate iam not able to see my albums ! It says “ERROR CHECK_MIGRATION” I guess it takes them 10 days to set me up there. Just hoping i dont lose my albums.
Still I Love Yahoo! and everything abt them.
please upgrede my photos beta thnxxxx to you alwas
i need to mail beta