a thousand words. digital photography has changed everything. in the past, you had to conserve your film because it was expensive. in the past, you had to get your film developed, hoping that the seven bucks you paid resulted in five or six quality photos. in the past, taking pictures was a chore, and sharing them even worse. now, it's all different. you can take as many pictures as you want, review them immediately, and if they suck, you can re-pose. sharing pictures is efficient too. send a friend a link and voila, they see your pictures. but it's not a perfect photo world by any means. there are too many photo services out there. snapfish, ofoto, shutterfly, kodak, blah blah blah, the list goes on. i'm sick of it. we need to organize before we can effectively pictorialize (together).

i'm not asking for much. i just want a photo service that allows me to store my photos in perpetuity, easily group and organize albums, doesn't make other people log on to see my pictures, and most importantly, access to large versions of all of my images. i want full access to my pictures -- and yours.

i've been a loyal yahoo photos customer for three years and five albums, but no more. i'm sick of the small image size, the reduction in quality, the small storage space (they fixed this i think). while i do enjoy yahoo's ease of use and the ability to quickly and easily rearrange and edit the names on my photos, i need something better. hello flickr, the new photo site bought out recently by yahoo.

while i missed out on the flickr bandwagon when they were giving out unlimited pro accounts, i did sign up to flickr quite a while ago. i used the site mainly for large "good" images but not normal images because there was an upload limit per month, and it was a pain in the ass to upload pictures one by one, without an upload utility. flickr has an easy uploading program now, for both pcs and macs, erasing all my doubts.

free flickr accounts offer 20 megs of upload bandwidth a month (plenty by most normal people's standards), a semi-clean interface, some photo editing features, commenting functions, privacy settings, tagging of photos, and upload from emails or phones. plus it syncs nicely with blogs. best of all? flickr saves your photos forever (although it only displays your last 200 photos unless you have a pro account). flickr also resizes your images from thumbnail to original size, and all logged in flickr members can access the original image.

flickr pro nets you: 2 gigs of upload a month, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited photo sets, permanent archiving of photos, and ad-free browsing. all for the low low price of $24.95 a year. that's super cheap. i would do it immediately, except i don't have a credit card.

there are some cons of course. such as the tragically unwieldy organization system which seems to be a bit clunky and slow. also, there is a limited number of albums, or "sets," you can create using the free version. these caveats aside, flickr is pretty great. you can also make contacts, friends and family designations so you are linked to your friends' albums. this is something no other photo service offers (yet). no digging around in emails for your friend's photo links, just go to flickr and find them. it's a community! you can also make group photo groups, so for example, if you and all three of your friends just attended a wedding, you can share your pictures in a group wedding album.

what're you waiting for? get a flickr account so we can be friends and share pictures! do it now. this message is not (sadly) paid for or endorsed by flickr or yahoo in any way. i'm just really into nostalgia okay?