Yahoo! Mail Unveils New Photo Sharing Tool

There’s an overabundance of ways to share and organize your photos these days. From Flickr and 500px, to Facebook and Shutterfly, you can store and share your photos in many places. But according to Yahoo!, many people still use good ol’ fashioned e-mail. Yahoo!’s senior director of product management Dave McDowell said that over 500-million photos are sent through Yahoo! Mail every day, and so in an attempt to streamline that process and better cater to the needs of their 300-million users, Yahoo! has released a new photo sharing tool made just for Yahoo! Mail.

The app, which can be found in the Yahoo! Mail sidebar, will pull the photos from all of your e-mails and organize them into an easy to navigate gallery. This gallery can then be sorted by sender, file size, file type as well as year sent, allowing you to navigate your emails from your photos, rather than trying to find a photo by digging through your email.

Here’s a video introduction to the app:

Some see this move as another attempt by Yahoo! to compete with Google’s growing e-mail presence, but McDowell tells a different story:

We’re looking at our users and how Yahoo Mail users are using Yahoo Mail, and we know how important photos and photo sharing are to them, and how many photos are shared via email — as opposed to a competitive move against Gmail or Hotmail.

Whatever the motivation, it’s a creative idea, and offers a glimpse into the future of email. A future that will have to deal with a much higher volume of photos being shared than ever before.

(via CNet)

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