Thursday, June 08, 2006

Yahoo! Photos: Relaunching

People talk of the Yahoo! Flickr acquisition, butYahoo! Photos has many, many more users. So, it is about time to see it get a face lift, which Yahoo! has done, and is rolling out a limited beta release.

Product highlights include:

  • Drag-and-drop functionality for easy organization and photo sharing
  • Photo tagging—or labeling—for easy viewing and searching
  • Enhanced interaction with friends and family with ability to share comments and provide instantaneous access to photos
  • Point-and-click tag and caption editing
  • Smart Albums that detect newly tagged photos and automatically add tagged photos to albums
  • Open APIs to encourage third-party use and collaboration
  • Integration with leading Yahoo! services, including Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Mobile and 360
  • Downloadable high-resolution photos

Max Kiesler has just gotten back from the launch event and seems impressed:

Two features of note were the infinite scroll and the drag and drop functionality. I know what you’re saying, “not another web app with slow unusable drag and drop”. This drag and drop was very smooth and had some unique functionality. The ability to multiple select images by clicking your mouse and dragging your highlight (just like on your desktop) was one of my favorite features. You can also multiple select by control clicking as many photos as you like. From a design standpoint what happens to the photos during the drag process was rather cool. After you multiple select photos they shrink to tiny thumbnails and cluster around the mouse, then you can drag them into a well at the top of the page. As you start the drag process the well appears at the top of the page no matter how far down the page you are then it disappears. This is a very nice answer to the drag and drop well issue that many of us have had to design for recently.

The other item of note was the infinite scroll. While this is not an entirely new concept it is a great feature for a photo site. For those of you who have not seen this yet, it basically lets you add data, in this case photos to the page asynchronously as you scroll down the page. So even if you have 10,000 photos they can all be reached from one page very quickly.