Yahoo Photos Beta - First Impressions

June 29, 2006

I got my Yahoo Photos Beta invite in my inbox tonight and immediately began to play. The first thing I noticed was all the “stale” albums listed from my early days of using Yahoo Photos. I immediately deleted this stuff and jumped right into uploading:

Right from the onset, Yahoo detected my Firefox browser and redirected me to instructions on installing an extension specifically for Yahoo Photos. Nifty. Installation went smooth, but interrupted my workflow since one has to restart Firefox for plugins to activate. No matter, I restarted my upload adventure. I was happy to see a drag and drop interface which worked well on Macbook Pro. To my surprise, I was able to queue up multiple uploads by dragging and dropping more photos after initiating my first upload. I don’t think this feature was intended as I got an error after trying to do such:

After I uploaded a couple of pictures, I began to check out some of the other features of the new Yahoo Photos. On the single photo pages, you can tell where Yahoo got their Flickr influences. There are plenty of Ajaxy (is that a word?) controls such as Ratings, Permissions and Tags. One of my favorite features of the new Yahoo Photos is their “photo well”. The best way I can explain it is that you drag and drop a photo or multiple photos into this “well” and have multiple options on what to do with them. For instance, to delete photos, you drag and drop them into the well, go up to the edit menu and select delete. I found this to be a nice feature which sort of reminds me of Flickr’s Organizer, but more streamlined:

Another nice feature of Yahoo Photos is Smart Albums. This reminds me of a feature in iPhoto where you can create albums based on their rating. It essentially is the same thing but web based.

I was disappointed to see the lack of sharing features with Yahoo Photo. Unlike Flickr, you are limited to seeing your “friends” photos and vice versa. I suppose it makes sense not to recreate Flickr under the Yahoo Photos name. They’re doing something right as they are the #1 photos site on the web. Overall, I think Yahoo Photos Beta meets expectations. It has the look and feel of Yahoo’s wonderful webmail beta client, and is very clean. There were very few bugs or annoyances that I could find. Will I switch to Yahoo Photos Beta from Flickr? I seriously doubt it. They seem to cater to two different kinds of photo users. Flickr is a more social experience whereas Yahoo Photos is a traditional approach. Both are winners in my book. Good job Yahoo!

For more screenshots, please visit my Yahoo Photos photoset at Flickr.