New Yahoo! Photos now open to US users
The new Yahoo! Photos user interface is being made available to US users. The migration of accounts began tonight and is expected to take a while. It become available in a limited beta back in June and has now completed that phase.
The new version boasts of drag-and-drop features, tagging, dynamic albums, sharing, commenting and enhanced searching. Also included is the ability to download full-size photos without needing to be a premium services subscriber as it was before.
There are two features from the previous version which I feel are sorely lacking from the new. If I want to grant access to my photos to a friend, then I must send them an email explicitly sharing the photos or album with them. Before, I merely indicated which Y! IDs could see photos in an album. This could be a deal breaker for me and cause me to give Flickr another look. Secondly, the frame choices are cheesy at best and lack the feathering options (frosting the edges to create a soft edge instead of a hard edge to the photo). I used the feathering frame types many times and rarely used the other frames at all.
All-in-all, this is a tremendous jump forward for the Y! Photos property. Kudos to the team!
