AOL Pictures Itself In Photo Sharing

Yahoo’s Flickr gets some extra competition from AOL today, as the Time Warner portal relaunches its photo sharing presence online.

Looks like its photo-sharing news day online. The other news today, besides Google’s possible acquisition of face-recognition firm Riya, has AOL painting itself into the image sharing picture.

The company has renamed its free You’ve Got Pictures service to AOL Pictures. To celebrate and put users in a holiday mood, AOL is offering 100 free 4×6 prints, in glossy or matte finish, for a limited time.

AOL said the service, which originally launched in 1998, has more than 6 million monthly visitors and 300 million photos stored. Among the features touted in the service will be drag and drop functionality in the uploader tool, image editing, and mobile phone access to photos.

I asked AOL if the new service would build upon the company’s X-drive purchase earlier this year, for storage, but was told it would be based upon the existing infrastructure already in place and not X-drive.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.