A few years ago I created a flickr account like everyone else but saw it as more of a social focused photo site, and didn’t stick with it as a serious picture organizing tool.  Now, I moving back to flickr “for good” from Picasa (which I moved to from flickr, which I moved to from gallery hosted at fishbrains.com, which I moved to from …. sigh… ).

Paid for a pro account, 25 bucks for year for unlimited upload and storage… A deal for photo sharing AND backup tool.  My family has gotten to the point of storing email in the cloud only… I’m now trying to be comfortable with pictures in the cloud only.  I will still keep a memory card backup before uploading… but after my total import to flickr I won’t use a fat client to manage photos locally with a huge folder structure, and all that propitiatory metadata.  I got burned last year on Picasa (which is still a great photo mgmt app for a single PC) because it stores data like tags, groups, captions, etc in a local db that isn’t accessible across pc’s.  Now I’ve been using Windows Live Photo Gallery which stores data in the photo (I guess) but it’s not storing in it EXIF from what I can tell.  Multiple PC’s DO see the metadata.  So I’m using Windows Live Photo Gallery to upload to flickr, which yields a better experience then using the standard flickr uploader to bulk edit before import.

So far, I’ve found upload slow (I’ve got 2MB upload and it takes about 20 seconds per 6MP picture), but the flickr features are worth it.  The partner and software intergration list is awesome.