I'll admit I haven't jumped whole hog into the whole Flickr thing. I do have a Pro account, and yet most of my photos are still in my private gallery.

One of the main reasons, I think, is that, while I enjoy the whole idea of Flickr---a world of photographs naturally organized by keywords and shared (or not) between communities of like-minded people---a lot of the actual implementation kinda sucks. Oh sure, I was dazzled along with the rest when their AJAX-powered interface first came on the scene, with slick edit-in-place functionality and plenty of taggy goodness to explore. But whenever I actually want to do something with Flickr, the site quickly begins to get in my way.

I don't know if the people behind it are too busy keeping the site running under the strain of its own popularity, or if they just spend all day rolling in the piles of money that Yahoo! paid to buy them, but given the success of the site, it really hasn't seen much progress since its launch.

Tags? Cool! But Boolean searches on tags? Apparently that's too hard. I had an especially traumatic incidient today when I would have liked to exclude from my search for "guinea pig" photos those that were also tagged with "Peru". Flickr can't do that, and yet as a web developer I know that it would take almost no time at all to implement. I'll grant there may be performance issues to consider, such as cacheability of search results, etc., but c'mon! This is a no-brainer, people! If you organize photos by keywords, you need to be able to perform Boolean searches on them! Why was this not the first thing they implemented?

Creative Commons licensing? So naughties! But the ability to search by more than one license at a time? Now that's just being unreasonable. The photo at the top of my blog is a CC-licensed image from Flickr, but to find it I had to wade through the results of six separate searches for each of the six varieties of the Creative Commons license. Why can't I just tick off the licenses that suit my purposes and then work from there? Again, this would take any web developer worth his or her salt 30 minutes to implement.

Isn't the whole point of web applications from a development standpoint supposed to be that they're quicker to build and update because you only have to make it work on one system configuration and all your users benefit from each new version instantly? If so, why does it feel like my desktop applications are progressing every day while Flickr might as well be on an annual point release cycle?

There are other companies poised to snatch the crown from Flickr. At this point, I'm definitely not renewing my Pro membership. And if I have to look at one more deep-fried guinea pig, I'll be looking to switch.