Yahoo! to make picture swapping easier

Yahoo! is going to be testing new features in its free mail service to allow users to send and share digital photo’s.  This isn’t a surprise coming after the Flickr acquisition in March but the article on CNET News.com doesn’t mention Flickr at all:

Yahoo on Thursday is expected to begin testing improvements to its free e-mail service that let subscribers more easily send and share digital photos.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, which hosts the No. 1 Web-based e-mail service, has created a new beta program designed to scan the photos on a users’ hard drive, and if a user so chooses, drag and drop selections into an e-mail message, without adding cumbersome attachments. Its new service also scours photos in a user’s Yahoo storage locker or over its image database of 1.5 billion pictures.

It sounds like this is intended to compete with a combination of Google’s excellent Picasa and Hello software.  I’d like to see some kind of Flickr functionality added to Yahoo! Photos and an easy way to add the photo’s to Yahoo!’s webmail service.  That has been a bit of a hassle so far, not being able to easily add attachments from Briefcase or Photo’s.

(via CNET News.com)