Limitations

I'd been hearing some great things about Flickr, but then I looked at their FAQs and saw this:

On a free account, Flickr limits the number of photos displayed.

If you have fewer than 200 photos, we display them all. If you have more than 200 photos, only the most recent 200 are displayed.

Your photos are not removed from Flickr, only from the list of your photos. If you blogged a photo and it no longer appears in your list, it will still appear on your blog, and the photo's Flickr page will still work just fine.

If some of your photos aren't showing up, don't panic! Just upload some fresh ones.

I was thinking of getting my family into it, but...this seems kind of lame. If I go beyond 200 pictures in a free account, I'll no longer be able to access the first ones? Kind of defeats the purpose of having an album. Obviously, you can join the subscription account.

But it seems to me that if Youtube can have no limits on the videos that get uploaded there, Flickr has very little excuse for this kind of thing. I'm going to start looking around for a website that makes equivalent use of tags but doesn't require a subscription for going beyond a certain point.

UPDATE: Well, that was easy.

A Google search for "Flickr competitor" gave me this old Slashdot post, introducing me to Zooomr. Which, I have to say, lacks an obvious FAQ or help section. Fortunately, I have Wikipedia. There, I learned that "Zooomr has no limits on uploading, storing and archiving photos", and lookie here, they even cited their source.

They also have neat features like Geotags, which allows you to tag your picture with the map location it was taken at. Maybe not the greatest idea for private photos, but for sharing information on events that took place, or say...where government atrocities were committed? There are any number of situations in which Geotags might be useful.

Flickr does offer one thing that I don't think Zooomr does:

You may also have the right to add tags to your friends' photos, if you friends set that option in the privacy settings for their photos.

As far as I can tell no such option exists in Zooomr. But for a free account, it seems to me that you get a lot more from it than you do from Flickr.