Flickr

Getting started with Flickr is relatively easy. If you already have a Yahoo ! ID, then you can log in to Flickr to set up an account immediately. Otherwise, it’s a simple matter of registering for a Yahoo ! ID and then you’re good to go.

More than any of the other photo services tested for this review, Flickr is all about the online community, with its massive user base and special interest groups. Flickr has some local uploading tools, such as the Flickr Uploadr (for Windows XP/Vista) and even an Windows XP file explorer system shell that enables you to publish photos to Flickr direct from your file system. It does not, however, have a totally offline client for viewing and editing photos.

Flickr provides more detailed data on pictures, and the ability for users to provide more additional details than any of the other services tested. The picture details screen includes full EXIF data, which shows every technical setting that the digital camera saved when it captured the image.

From a user’s point of view, you can also identify where in the world the picture was taken on a map, which is an extremely useful feature. (How many times have you gone on a trip, shown a picture to a friend, and spent most of your time trying to explain where the picture was taken ?)

The greatest strengths of Flickr are likely its tagging and sharing features. While the other services provide the ability to simply describe or "tag" an image as a favourite, Flickr provides for Web 2.0 style tags that are common on blogs. The tags (if you open your pictures up for sharing) make it incredibly easy to search for and find other photos from a similar event or locale. The Flickr community itself is massive and without peer in terms of the volume and diversity of pictures and locales it contains.

If your pictures are listed as public in Flickr then anyone can see your pictures, not just Flickr members. If you mark them as private, you can share the picture with what Flickr calls a "Guest Pass". According to Flickr, a Guest Pass is actually just that URL. This means that whoever sees that URL can access the set and all the photos inside it.

In practice, though, it’s not quite easy as it should be to share your non-public photos. The default "send to a friend" email apparently is not directly connected with the Guest Pass functionality. In one test we did, we clicked the "send via email" link on a picture page where the picture had been set to private. The Flickr system did not issue any warning about changing permissions. What resulted was an email sent out with a link that did not allow access to any photos. It is up to the photo’s owner to change the privacy settings first before clicking "send via email" in order to generate the Guest Pass URL.

The Guest Pass URL in no way prevents the intended recipient from simply sharing that URL with someone else, so the link (and the photos) cannot be considered to be secure in that sense.

Flickr has two levels of account : Free and Pro, with Pro costing US$24.95 a year. The principal difference between the two is the storage allocation ; with free it’s a 100 MB monthly upload limit, while it’s unlimited with the Pro account. The free account enables users to download images in sizes 1024x768 and smaller, while Pro adds additional higher resolution options.

Both Free and Pro accounts have a print ordering service that lets users order pictures for delivery by email, and perhaps more interestingly, to pick up from a local Target store.