When Yahoo purchased photo-sharing site Flickr last year, the speculation about how the acquisition would affect the impending re-launch of Yahoo Photos immediately began. Now, the new Yahoo Photos has been unveiled — the beta went live Thursday afternoon.
Mike Arrington has a review up at TechCrunch. At first glance, it looks like Yahoo has taken the best bits of Flickr and rolled them into Yahoo Photos. The community features like commenting and voting are all there, as are tagging, organization with sets, and easy uploading via a browser-based tool. The big news is unlimited uploads and bandwidth, all for free. Another new feature is the inclusion of "Smart Albums" that update automatically based on tags, popularity, or date. Users can keep a "Latest Photos" set that gets populated when new photos are uploaded. These dynamic sets can also allow friends' photos.
Yahoo Photos also appears to be able to display more photos on a single page, though I've noticed some recent changes on Flickr that show movement in this direction — Flickr photostreams display as two columns now instead of one, and sets have more display options available. The usability of Yahoo Photos looks to be an improvement over Flickr, which is not to say that Flickr is difficult to use. Rather, Flickr might be too "techy" for some users, and Yahoo Photos looks to make things as easy as possible. Grandma won't have any difficulty ordering prints.
We've joined the beta (you can join, too — look for the "Join Beta" link underneath the search field on the Yahoo Photos homepage — just be aware that the transition over to the new Yahoo Photos is a one-way ticket) and we'll bring you a more in-depth, first-hand review as soon as we make it past the velvet rope.
[link via TechCrunch]
