An online photo class by itself

For those who choose to subscribe to the service and post their images, Flickr offers free personal webpages with a 10 MB per month upload limit and a restricted feature set

This review will include a larger than usual number of "and's", "also's", and "in-addition's", because the website pursues a single goal with an exceptionally thorough approach.

While online photo sharing applications are commonplace on the web, and while Flickr, like the rest, will allow you to store a collection of photos onsite and link those images to offsite weblogs, it also does so much more that we might as well just designate a new category for this specific service.

After all, the easiest way to be in a class by yourself is to invent the class.

Created by Ludicorp, an online research and development company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Flickr claims to be ("almost certainly") the best online photo sharing and organisation application in the world, and it would be a difficult claim to dispute even without the qualification.

For a complete description of Flickr's current capabilities, you will have to drop by the site, but in the meantime we can cover most of the highlights available to members, as well as some functions of interest to casual browsers.

For those who choose to subscribe to the service and post their images online, Flickr offers free personal webpages with a 10 MB per month upload limit and a restricted feature set.

The keystone of each subscriber's webpage is the Photostream, which is simply a chronological collection of the most recently uploaded images running down the centre of the page.

If desired, Flickr can display a collection of albums - or Photosets - organised by whatever criteria the author desires on the left side of the page.

To the right are links to a personal profile, a calendar (showing on which days new images have been added), an album of Favourites collected from other members' pages, and an Archive.

There is also a keyword search window (because, like any self-respecting photo organisation software, Flickr allows members to add cataloguing Tag words to the images they store), and a link to your most common Tags.

Thanks to Tags, if someone visits your Flickr home page specifically to see the photos of that new kid you've been going on and on about, but doesn't care about the dog wearing the Santa hat, they can simply choose the appropriate keyword(s) and go straight to the shots in question.

And there's more. Individual images can accept visitor comments (like standard blog sites) as well as hold their own caption information in popup boxes - which provide a few extra details for the interested viewer - but don't interfere with the progress of the casual visitor.

Photosets also have the option of being viewed in a Slide Show format, which deserves its own share of praise for interface controls that disappear into the top of the frame until called for, and thumbnails that do the same at the bottom.

For those inclined towards collaboration, Group Pools can be created, where multiple members' photos of a shared interest can be gathered into a single set.

And if you would rather avoid having to send e-mails to your friends every time you add a few images, Flickr allows RSS feeds to each Photostream so your devoted fans can get automatic notification of any changes.

On the technical end, Flickr provides three methods for uploading images - e-mail, webpage, and a proprietary application (Mac and PC) which can be installed into your computer. (The e-mail option also allows subscribers to upload images directly from their cameraphones.)

As for downloading, if you are concerned about misappropriation of your images, there is the option of restricting download permissions for your collection, in a range that stretches from "Only Me" to "Anyone".

Viewing access to individual images can also be controlled - from the general public to designated groups of friends and family.

And, if you don't want - at least for the moment - to create your own account, but would like to poke around the site a little, Flickr can still provide some spectator-only entertainments.

Flickr can be found at http://www.flickr.com/.