Yahoo to roll out new PhotoMail service

SAN FRANCISCO: Yahoo Inc. is introducing a test version of a new

service called PhotoMail that lets users insert up to 300 digital photographs

into the body of an e-mail and store unlimited numbers of photos on the Web

and media company's computers.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company said that users can

also add borders and captions to photos embedded in the body of e-mails and can

perform limited editing on them, such as rotating them or adjusting the size and

quality of the image.

"Photo sharing is enormously popular and thought by many to be too

complicated," said Andy Splane, vice president of Yahoo mail in an interview.

Other Web-based e-mail services require users to send photos as attachments

and there are often limits on how many attachments and how much data can be

attached to an individual e-mail.

Yahoo is the biggest Web-based e-mail service, with 64 million unique monthly

users, according to April 2005 figures from ComScore MediaMetrix. Trailing Yahoo

is Time Warner Inc.'s AOL Mail, with 49 million unique monthly users and

Microsoft's Hotmail service, with 43 million unique monthly users.

Yahoo's PhotoMail is the first such service to integrate and simplify its

e-mail offering, its online photo storage and editing service and its image

search function of more than 1.5 billion images, Splane said, noting that

senders simply drag and drop images that are stored anywhere on the computer's

hard disk drive.

The images in the PhotoMail e-mail are thumbnails. Users can see larger

images of the same picture in higher resolution by clicking on the image in the

e-mail. The bigger image is then served up by Yahoo's online photo service.

Yahoo also said that Yahoo e-mail is now available in six more languages and

localized sites in eastern Europe and southeast Asia, adding Poland, Turkey,

Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia.