Frank Gruber, AOL’s latest fresh, new, and exciting employee posted about the launch of AOL’s new Pictures service:
AOL Pictures Launches With New Features : Somewhat Frank
AOL Pictures also offers an Ajax interface an has introduced tags, comments and subscriptions, which are standard web 2.0 features but may be new to AOL users. AOL Pictures allows you to edit photos inline which I found extremely helpful as I currently have to use Preloadr to edit my Flickr photos outside of Flickr site itself.
While Frank mentions the inline photo editing (very cool) and touches on the AJAX interface that allows for easy sorting of photos, he left out what seems like the most impressive feature to me: AOL Pictures has no upload limits, no storage limits, doesn’t resize or compress your images, and is totally free. Or, as AOL puts it: “Free, unlimited storage of your photos in original resolution.”
That’s an impressive offer.
Additional features that stand out to me include Private Albums which seem to allow users to create groups of photos that have limited sharing to friends you choose. This is something sorely missing from Flickr that currently only allows privacy levels of private, family, friends, or public for each photo, so there is no way to allow only SOME of your friends to view a given photo.
Integration of AOL Pictures with AOL Mail is a nice touch. I imagine Yahoo will eventually do this with Flickr and Google with Picasa. Both have ways of doing this today, but not from within the mail platform as far as I can tell.
While AOL won’t get me to ditch Flickr based on the features outlined above, I could see this being very popular with typical AOL users. The mail integration, inline photo editing, and free unlimited storage of uncompressed or resized images is one heck of a great offer for AOL’s core audience.
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