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There appears to be little support for a Microsoft-owned Flickr, the photo sharing site that Yahoo acquired three years ago.

But Thomas Hawk, Zooomr's chief executive and "chief evangelist", believes that if the takeover goes through, "Flickr comes out a clear winner".

But only for Windows users, and Windows Vista users at that.

"More than just having more marketing muscle to push Flickr from an advertising perspective, Microsoft owns the desktop," Hawk says. "By creating easy and convenient ways to publish your photos to Flickr directly from the Vista OS, Microsoft would push Flickr from an earlier adopter photogeek sort of site into the mainstream.

"Vista already has introduced for the first time photo tagging to the masses, this would tailor well with Flickr whose photo site and especially photo search relies greatly on tagging."

Hawk seems little concerned that, in the words of Flickr protester Coen Remmelts, "when Microsoft buys Yahoo,

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flickr will become mac-unfriendly...".

Instead, the future promises Flickr integration into Windows Media Center, which he insists "is slowly but surely positioning itself to be the media delivery system of the home of the future". Hardly, but that is besides the point.

And it doesn't get much better. Microsoft will be in prime position to push its own file formats, notably HD Photo, while gaining ever greater control over the world's digital image collection.

"By combining mapping and geotagging, Microsoft could look to create new ways for collaboration to take place by merging Flickr photos together," Hawk says. This technology is still a bit of a ways off, but controlling the largest library of organised, tagged, and especially geotagged imagery on the internet, Microsoft could potentially do some pretty interesting things with these photos."

Hawk's thoughts are taken from his Digital Connection blog: What a Microsoft Acquisition of Yahoo Would Mean For Photos.

[image courtesy of Andrew the Photoshop Artist]