SUNNYVALE, California, 27 May 2005 — Yahoo Inc. is testing an e-mail service that will let people share digital photos without the hassle of often cumbersome attachments that hog storage space and bandwidth.
The Sunnyvale-based company is touting the free service, available beginning yesterday at http://photomail.mail.yahoo.com, as a simple way to distribute photos to family and friends.
Thumbnails of up to 300 photos can be inserted into a single e-mail that can be sent to hundreds of recipients. Even if it contains 300 photos, an e-mail is unlikely to be rejected by inboxes with limitations on the size of a message because each thumbnail is just three to five kilobytes.
Yahoo designed the “PhotoMail” service so it can be opened and viewed no matter where an e-mail is addressed. All the photos inserted into the e-mails are stored on Yahoo computers, enabling recipients to see a full-resolution image by clicking on any thumbnail.
The photos can be inserted into an e-mail by dragging images stored on computer hard drives or websites. Using the test service requires a regular e-mail account and installing a small piece of software.