Flickr Pro Account, an Awesome Value

Flickr is one of the most popular photo-sharing websites online, and it's with good reason. Flickr offers an intuitive interface to help users upload digital photos, and then organize them into sets, by date, or even by the location they were taken at.

A free Flickr account is free for anyone, but it comes with its limitations. Users are restricted to 100mb of uploads per month, and with modern digital cameras that could be as little as 10 photos. These images are also automatically resized, meaning a free Flickr account is not the best option for online back up.

Seeking to remedy these concerns, Flickr also offers a professional account for $24.95 a year, or $47.99 for two years. Should users upgrade their basic Flickr accounts? Absolutely.

What's so great about being a Flickr pro?
Flickr offers pro users unlimited storage, unlimited uploads, unlimited sets, and permanent archiving of original images. This means that for less than $25 a year, a photographer's entire collection can be saved and organized online. This is an incredible value, far beyond what any other site offers. It's easy for even amateur photographers to quickly generate a collection of 30-40 gigabytes worth of files. Buying a separate hard drive to store or backup these photos will cost just as upgrading a Flickr account. Plus, there's peace of mind involved. Nothing's more frustrating than losing years of photos because of a hard drive crash. With Flickr, everything is kept online.

For the vain, pro Flickr accounts get a special little icon on the site as well. It's not much, but it's something, especially for those involved in Flickr's forums and groups.

What's the downside?
Flickr has yet to release an effective tool to help pro users upload large amounts of photos to the Flickr site. Right now, the Uploadr tool is the best that is available, and it is clunky and slow.