I love my recreational photography and enjoy sharing photos on the Ozscrapers forum of cityscapes, architecture and more.
Until recently, I had been using Imageshack but had found for instance that you could not organize photos effectively with a 100 photo limit per album nor your edits with the images would be recognized. I found I would rotate an image and then the photo was "out of service" with the change or edit not accepted.
I enjoy the relative freedom that Flickr gives you in terms of editing your images and organizing them into sets. There is no limit to how many photos can be placed in a set for instance and hundreds of photos can be viewable on the one page. Few clicks are needed to reach your image.
The 1TB of storage space (and its free) should serve me well for a long time. My ten years of photography has only taken 100GB of my hard drive unless I opt for bigger photos. Even if you are not an active photographer, the 1TB is extremely generous compared to your rivals. You could easily fit a lifetime of photos within the 1TB.
Another big advantage is the fact that it allows for third party apps that allow you to control how you use flickr and even let you use the desktop to do so. The options are completely endless. The apps also allow you to be creative with the images. You can make albums, create effects and mosaics. For those like me who have many photos, desktop managers allow the albums to be managed on the desktop and are automatically synchronized. Upload managers allow you to upload a countless number of photos, much more effectively than the website upload feature (200 photos max per upload).
As a classroom resource, I would highly recommend it for photo hosting or to host any visual files that might support ones learning. I think the fact that the user can have a lot of control and flexibility allows it to be use effectively as well,
I'm obviously continuing to learn about its features and obviously if anything of interest pops up, I'll comment on them.
A few links of interest are included if you are interested in downloading apps to support the Flickr experience. However you may find that some are no longer available for download.
The App Garden (Flickr hosted)
Hongkiat.com
"Flickr Toolbox"
