The upgrade represents the result of the photo-sharing startup following Flickr's take-over in March 2005. Flickr offers a complex management and sharing application for online photos that made it one of the top five most trafficked sites on the web.

Yahoo is to launch this week a limited beta version of Yahoo Photos. The new page will be user-oriented and many of the technical innovations developed by Flickr will be found integrated in Yahoo Photo's offer.

Among these is the tagging option pioneered by Flickr with new taxonomy tools to categorize photos. "Yahoo has taken the technical sophistication developed at Flickr to the mass market," said Brian Bowman, vice president of community at Yahoo.

Users will be able to upload multiple photos simultaneously by drag and drop and to arrange and re-arrange them with the aid of a simple interface. Yahoo Photo's members will also have available the option to upload and download high resolution pictures, and a menu offering easy access to other users' photo albums, as well as to their friends' ones.

Meanwhile, the new Yahoo Photos conceals up to 22% in losses of Yahoo stock price and a strong competition from rivals Google and News Corp.'s MySpace.com. This upgrade seems to indicate that Yahoo is under pressure to increase profit, profit that relies directly on the advertising attracted by the users' number, although Yahoo Photos ranks as number one most trafficked photo-sharing web site.