New Yahoo Photos: Now Live

...and here's another bit of happy news from the world of Web services: The nifty new version of Yahoo Photos that's been in beta for awhile is now open to all.

It's the most ambitious Web-based photo sharing/organizing/editing service yet--clearly inspired by the Yahoo-owned Flickr service, but different, aimed at a broader audience, and more feature-rich. And in many ways, it's a sterling example of how sophisticated and powerful browser-based services have gotten, since it feels a lot like desktop-based tools, sports elegant drag-and-drop functionality, and offers unlimited online storage for your photos at full resolution. The sharing features, which let you share or restrict pictures on an album or photo-by-photo basis, are cool, too.

The folks at Yahoo have told me that they hope that people will use Yahoo Photos as a primary photo management and repository tool. I'm not ready to go there for two reasons: The editing features remain very, very basic, and performance--at least with my particular DSL account--is sometimes Webbishly (is that a word?) sluggish, not desktop-like in speed. But if you're using an online photo service, you need to check this one out.

Yahoo Photos, incidentally, segued from closed beta to public service in just a few weeks--which leaves me wondering why the impressive Yahoo Mail beta is still in private beta eleven months after it first went online...