Russian web giant Yandex has added a handy new feature to its cloud storage facility, Yandex.Disk – the Dropbox and Google Drive competitor now has the ability to import photos from Facebook and local player VK.com.
What’s more, users can download not only photos that they themselves took and uploaded to the social networks, but also other people’s photos in which they are tagged. The tool also comes with photo-enhancing features.
Much as they can do with rivals like Dropbox, users can also share photos stored on Yandex.Disk on the social networks. Yandex is hoping that the API it uses for this purpose will become more important in the future, as a spokesman told me:
“The idea is to knock on, say, photo stock and printing services’ doors and to offer them to do the same integration using their tech platform. This will let, for example, my mom who is not experienced in online services use, but who uses iPhone to make a photo, to save her photostream at her Yandex.Disk (one click in the Yandex.Disk iOS app), and then send all of them or selected to her photo-stock account or to a printing service just in several clicks.”
Right now these photo-slurping/re-sharing features are only available on the desktop, but Yandex’s spokesman told me the company is working on enabling the same through its mobile apps. There may be quite a few takers – Yandex.Disk has 19 million registered users in Russia alone, and another 5 million elsewhere.
Yandex has had a mixed history with Facebook, having been forced by the U.S. firm to kill an app that gave users an overview of their contacts’ Facebook activities. However, the firms made nice in January, agreeing to let Yandex index publicly posted content from users in its region.
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