Yahoo-owned photo-sharing service Flickr is getting more flexible with regards to how users can sign in.  The site has started to support OpenID, and Google is its first partner in this endeavor.

"This feature will allow people to sign up for new Flickr accounts by using an existing Web account via OpenID, starting initially with Google as the first partner service.  Google users will be able to register by linking their accounts with Flickr and then will be able to use their Google ID every time they log-in to their Flickr account," a Flickr representative explained in an email to WebProNews.

And that’s plenty interesting.  Plenty smart, too, since it could convince a few more people to start playing with the site.  But there’s one other aspect of this development worth noting.

The representative added, "In 2008, Yahoo! became the largest provider of OpenIDs in the world when 100s of millions of Yahoo! users were first given the ability to use their trusted Yahoo! ID to log in to any site on the Web that accepted OpenIDs.  Now, with today’s announcement Yahoo! is for the first time becoming a ‘relying party’ . . ."

So it looks like Flickr and Yahoo are being accommodating in more ways than one.

Additional sign-in tweaks and improvements are supposed to be on the way, as well.