With my new camera I’m going to take and post a lot of pictures. I’ll share them with friends, but it’d be cool if strangers stumbled upon them too. Is Flickr the biggest/best of the photo sharing/social sites? Is there anything else I should look into?
I find it worth it: I have about 6,700 pictures on Flickr here, and I enjoy having strangers finding my pictures and commenting on them. You can use Flickr without paying for it, but that limits the number of pictures you can havde there.
I’ve been using Smugmug for several years. They offer a free trial, no CC required.
It really depends on how many pictures you plan to upload. For me, the only reason I went pro was that I wanted to upload more pictures than the free version would allow. I went on a vacation this spring and had something like 800 pictures I wanted to post - if I had the free version only, it would have taken me months to get there and I wouldn’t be able to post anything in the meantime. Instead, I subscribe so I can upload however many I want whenever I see fit. Here is my Flickr photostream for completely self-promotional purposes 
Yeah, I’m willing to pay the fee to have the freedom to post more and bigger pictures. I guess I should’ve phrased it more along the lines of … if I’m willing to commit to one photo site, is flickr the way to go? Alternately, if there’s a free version of some other site that’s better, I could go that route too.
Flickr offers a variety of ways to share photos apart from just putting them up in your own sets and collections. It has “groups”, in which Flickr members can post pictures and take part in discussions, and it has “galleries”, where you can gather pictures taken by other Flickr members. You can comment on pictures posted to Flickr by others, and you can “favorite” them (which is a way of saying that you like a picture, and of creating a link so that you can easily find it again).
Google’s picasa web albums is pretty good. And, if you link a Google+ account to your picasa account you get unlimited storage on images under 2048x2048. On images larger the limit is 1 gig. I think you can pay for more. Anyway, I think that is another good option. I have both. And, Flickr is good, but hasn’t changed much for years. While, Picasa has improved over the years.
That makes me worry a little about about Flickr’s long term future.
Flickr says one of the benefits of pro is that you get stats about your pictures - or rather people that view your pictures, I assume. What sort of extra information do you get?
Here are some screenshots of my stats to give you an idea of what they provide.
This one is a summary of views over time and which pictures have been viewed today and yesterday.
If you click on any of the pictures that have been viewed today, it brings up a page that looks like this.
And finally, this one shows more information about today and yesterday’s views along with overall account stats.
I love my flickr, but I’ll be cross posting to picasa since it’s attached to google+ now. But although the google+ app for iPhone allows you to upload stuff to the mobile pics album, there doesn’t seem to be any way to control the other albums and pictures. There are a bunch of random picasa apps with varying functionality but I can’t seem to find an ‘official’ one. Any recommendations? Also, any official or good extension for uploading from iPhoto?
As far as Flickr, unless you really really gotta have the stats, might as well put off Pro until you find your self needing the extra storage allowance.