The possibilities of these groups are limited only by your imagination. They can be wide-open collections of people and photos, or private, tiny, invite-only affairs. There are thousands of communities being built, and this social atmosphere lends itself well to this type of photo sharing.

Downsides
Even though flickr is a revolutionary service, it's not without some warts. First and foremost, flickr is still in beta over a year after its initial launch. This means there are more bugs and downtime than with more established services. Also, due to its overwhelming popularity, the membership has grown much quicker than Ludicorp had anticipated, and that sometimes leads to slow service or outages. The flickr folks have done their best to mitigate this with hardware and data center upgrades, but it's still something to be aware of.

Also, since the service is still in beta, the feature set changes frequently. This is both good and bad. Sometimes features that users have been clamoring for suddenly appear, and other times, features people have gotten used to change or move. This can cause confusion for some people, so be forewarned.

One of the most glaring omissions is, there's no ability to currently order prints from the site. This has been one of the most requested features however, so flickr is working on getting a partner in place that will facilitate photo orders. This is something flickr plans on having in place by launch, which should hopefully be by mid-year.

Lastly, flickr is not free. There is a yearly fee involved to get all of the benefits outlined above. The membership fee allows you to upload 1GB of photos per month. This isn't a storage limit, but rather a bandwidth upload limit. So, if you uploaded your maximum every month, at the end of a year you would have 12GB worth of photos on the service.

Some people will have a problem paying for a photo service when there are free alternatives, especially when the service you're paying for is still in beta. It's the old adage though, you tend to get what you pay for, and flickr is definitely worth the cash.

For those who just cannot afford to pay, flickr does offer a free account. But it only allows for 10MB of uploads per month, and doesn't give you access to your full resolution images. So if you're a cameraphone blogger, or if you simply want to look at other people's photos, you do have a free option.

Conclusion
Despite the cost and its current beta status, flickr is a groundbreaking service that should really revolutionize the way photo-sharing sites evolve, fully deserving a 4 out of 5 rating. There are currently no other sites that give the flexibility and breadth of choices that flickr does. If you're a digital photographer, you owe it to yourself to check them out.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5

John Roling is an avid digital photographer, blogger and all-around techno-geek. He can be found online at http://greyhawk68.dominohosting.biz, or emailed at jroling@gmail.com.