Flickr or Fade?

The coming of a new year and a new month for Flickr "pros" to upload their next two gigabytes of photos seems to be overwhelming the popular photo-sharing site. Just like many of the other new paid subscribers to the site, I have been frantically uploading, "tagging", and organizing my 3000+ photos. This tidal wave of new photos seems to be causing some problems on the Flickr servers, though, with frequent warnings of the site running "HOT". I'm sure the problems will be corrected soon, though. Everything else about the way Flickr works has been very impressive.

Well, I do have one other concern with Flickr: the way it handles security for private photos. Currently, Flickr allows you to mark a photo as private, but you can then make private photos available to family and friends. Unfortunately, for people to be considered either family or friends, they must sign up for a Flickr account of their own. I have a lot of photos marked as viewable by only friends or family, but I don't really want to force all my friends and family members to sign up for Flickr accounts just to see my photos! So I'm hoping that Flickr will add a new feature soon to allow us to password protect photo sets or to allow people to be recognized as family or friends without having to sign up for an account.

I have a lot of work to do on my photo sets on Flickr before I really want to announce them to everyone, though, so I'm not in a huge rush for the new security features. For now, even with servers running at a slow pace and un-friendly friends and family options, I'm still a happy Flickr pro. :-)