Photo sites and participative community integrations

I tried uploading some pictures to share with friends.

Yahoo Photos with their new AJAX view is cool. So I tried to upload a bunch of pictures. Was wondering, "hey its Yahoo, maybe if they integrate Yahoo groups to this and allow me to define groups of people who can access my pictures, I can dynamicaly change that list instead of separate permissions and adding user lists for each album".

Guess what? Yahoo picture upload tool is integrated with Yahoo toolbar and its bulky and takes time. I can understand the benefits for a user who wants the toolbar for everything else. But not me! Anyways, it didn't work for me for several technical combinations, which I'll skip here.

I like shuttefly for the quality of their prints and never use them for just sharing pictures.

I went to shutterfly, and when you click "add pictures', they seamlessly start installation of a plug-in and within seconds, I am ready to drag and drop pictures. Its clean UI and the mention at the bottom how long it will take for my type of connection speed, so I am off to write this blog in parrallel.

I am one of those spoilt web consumers, who assumes we've seen enough consumer sites over the years that its easy to understand seamless usability and expect companies to get those smart engineers who just take us through just the flow we want :-)

Now I wish shutterfly would build some community options that will allow people to share pictures and pay for selct viewers to order prints on their own choice. That way power photo users like myself can happily spend the dollars and not worry remembering everyone's mailing addresses or be forced to print everything for local pickup and old fashipn distribution in person.

I think if any photo site would think of the participative online community trend of today, we can see a whole lot of services which would be cool for us and worthy revenues for them.