Yahoo! Photos Beta Announcement
It's amusing I suppose that I'm now finally able to talk about the project I've been working on since I started at Yahoo! and while I'm excited, now I feel like there's little left to say other than "go check out the site!" (and if you can't, at least see the videos below!) A limited beta is underway at time of writing (June, 2006,) with wider distribution to follow.
The site is designed to make organization and sharing of photos easier than before (and if I can have anything to do with it, hopefully more fun!) and is a complete redesign of the existing service. I think it's a huge upgrade, and my hope is that people will really enjoy it.
I have contributed a lot of personal ideas and unusually for a web developer, even added a lot of creative UI aspects such as animation patterns and effects to the new Yahoo! Photos. The project thus far has been the result of a team working closely together, and I doubt many of my ideas would have been implemented were it not for the acceptance and encouragement from the user experience/design group; I have never had such a chance to put creative ideas this "crazy" into a product this large, and the experience has been amazing. I credit it to the people I work with.
Blah blah blah, yadda yadda. Show me something cool!
I don't have a lot else to add, but here are a view bits and pieces of video from the release event held June 7th, 2006 in San Francisco. The audio is a bit low-end and the projection screen is kind of whited out, but you get the idea. ;)
The video is somewhat limited due to the quality of lighting and the site is really best experienced in person, especially when you're working with and managing your own photos. There is more than shown in the short clips here, which do not cover the entire presentation.
Side note: Quicktime will likely be required to watch these MP4-encoded videos.
- Introduction segment (feature summary, welcome page, large collections) - 27 MB
- Javascript-driven UI: drag and drop, selection model, tray, rearrange (my personal favourites, but I'm biased!) - 22 MB
- Hi-res photo download, inline user tutorials, closing - 17 MB
This has been the most fun, challenging and entertaining project I've worked on to date. I'd like to continue the trend.
Compliments to Carl "Doc Yes" Yestrau for lending me his space-age camera, capable of doing 30fps video at 848x480 or some such ridiculous thing.