Yahoo! Sucks...

I recently opened up an account on flickr.com ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/mjdabney/sets/ ). It is an online photo album site which is pretty good. It allows users to upload photos and organize them quite well. There are user groups that you can join and share pictures. Viewers of your pictures can leave comments and tags. All in all, it's a convenient tool. I much prefer viewing and sharing digital photos with people via an online album rather than having dozens of attachments in an email. A link is so much easier to click on.

Here's my problem with Yahoo!. I started the online album at Yahoo! (http://photos.yahoo.com/mjdabney) about 5 years ago and recently started the flickr album. Flickr is run by Yahoo! but there is no method to transfer all of my pictures from the Yahoo! album to the flickr album. The only way to do it is to re-upload all of the pictures from my computer to the flickr site. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with it since flickr provides a pretty handy uploading tool, but I've noticed a couple of pictures that are on the Yahoo! album that I no longer have on my computer. Yahoo! only allows me to download a scaled down version of the pictures even though they store the full sized files on their server. They do that because they want you to order prints and other merchandise through Yahoo! and it's partners. I'm sure it's all perfectly legal and all. There's probably something in their user's policy that I didn't bother reading, but I still think it stinks.

The good news is that I did some searching and found a website with a program that some guy created that allows you to access the full sized files and download them.
http://bithive.net/page/yahoo_photo_ripper
It's a pretty easy process. All you have to do is enter the url for the album and it gives you a page with the thumbnails to all of the full sized files.

I don't really dislike Yahoo! all that much, after all I use their email services for most of my emailing. But I'm pretty dissappointed with their online picture album policy.