Yesterday evening I purchased an account with Flickr, which describes itself as: "a fancy photo sharing thing".

Most of you will have heard of flickr as it seems to be booming with new members and loads of bloggers seem to be using flickr to host pictures for their blog.

I signed up for a free account a few weeks ago and had been browsing through the content and trying to assess the usefulness of having an account (having 3Gb of server space and another Gb backup has meant my space needs have always been more than satisfied) and how it differed from the PHP Gallery I had been using.

After just a few hours playing around with flickr I had decided that it was much better than the Gallery I had, so I thought I would use it to upload pics from now on. The only problem with this is you can only upload 10Mb of pictures per month, although this is a fair enough figure, and most of the time I wouldn't ever generate 10Mb of pictures. However there are some times when I manage to rack up an obscene number of pictures at one (parties, ends of term - which is ever nearing, and so forth) and 10Mb (hell 50Mb) wouldn't cut it.

So I had a look around the site to see how much a full account was, currently due to flickr still being in its beta stage the sign up fee is only $41.77 (which works out just over £20 at this time) for a year, what the hell, it's only £20.

So I signed up to flickr pro which offers:

• 1Gb monthly upload (10Mb in free version)
• Unlimited storage capacity (only last 100 photos are user accessible in the free version)
• Unlimited bandwidth (dunno what this is for the free version)
• Unlimited photosets (limited to 3 in the free version)
• Full size images archived (smaller ones are archived in the free version)

I am sitting at the moment uploading aall my photos to flickr and am nearly finished. So far I have been able to use around 20% of the monthly limit. I fully intend to start taking more photos and try to at least put a dent in the limit each month. There has been many times this year when walking around I have thought that something would make a great picture, but have never had my camera with me, hopefully I'll start carrying it around and taking some oportunist shots to post.

Another thing about flickr is that it seems to tie in quite nicely with both my PowerBook and PC. On my PB I can export photos to flickr using an iPhoto plugin, on WindowsXP I have a desktop uploader. flickr also allows you to post photo blog posts to many types of blog (including WordPress blogs).

Anyway, you should try it out!
- Chris