Yahoo upgrades its photo album service

New Yahoo photo service to help users make smart albums.

SAN FRANCISCO: Yahoo! has upgraded its online picture-sharing service, the internet giant announced. This follows the revamp of Yahoo's home page, which is considered to be the most extensive revamp Yahoo has carried out in a decade.

The firm said the album service upgrade was aimed at creating a venue "for the masses" to share digital images.

Yahoo has put up a beta version of revamped Yahoo Photos online to enable fine-tuning for a few weeks, Yahoo product manager Tim Anderson said.
The upgradation comes in the backdrop of its intense battle for dedicated surfers online, with rivals like search behemoth Google and Microsoft.

The past few months have seen internet majors unveiling a slew of online products with a view to grabbing a major chunk of dedicated online surfers. Google has recently introduced excel type spreadsheet, in an apparent bid to take on Microsoft, the world's largest software maker.

Yahoo said its photo service would enable surfers to make smart albums with restricted access, a key feature of the revamp. Anderson said Yahoo's users were "wired moms and dads who want to share pictures of their children, but don't want them in the public domain." The revamped version of Yahoo's Photo service has tools for editing and organising pictures built into the site, which helps people categorize images uploaded to Yahoo servers. This concept was made popular by Flickr, a picture sharing service which was bought by Yahoo in 2005.

Analysts said this is the first time that Yahoo was using Flickr's technology. Yahoo is also incorporating technologies from Oddpost, another start-up venture which the company bought in 2005.Yahoo photos also have the "Web 2.0" feature that allows users to "drag-and-drop" pictures. Yahoo's photo service has stored an estimated two billion photos.

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