Flickr Convert

I signed up for a flickr account shortly after it launched. Back then I was interested in browsing through the service to look at possibilities for data import/export (as FOAF) and so never actually played with the photo management and sharing features (duh).
Prompted by Christopher Schmidt’s recent Flickr and RDF posting which gave a glowing report of flickr’s facilities, API, and importantly the wallet-friendly price, I had a proper play with it last night. Like Christopher I’ve been interested in a photo annotation and management application for a while, but have been too lazy to actually do more than think about.
So I spent my entire months guest account bandwidth on uploading some photos and can see that I’m already very impressed. I’ve not even dug into the API yet, just the fact that the uploading was so easy, the tagging straight-forward, that it automatically extracted the photo datas (and camera model) from the images, and that there’s plenty of ways to slice up and annotate the data are enough to get me hooked.
I don’t often pay for software/services, but this one is slick enough to get my shilling. My only grumble was that at 8-9pm GMT the site had noticeably slowed down, hopefully they’re going to be deal with that before the final launch.
It did also slightly creep me out that a photo of my wife and kid were already someone’s “favourite”, so I suspect I’ll be making use of the privacy feature for some material.
(This posting in my grand tradition of discovering high-profile, “everyone’s talking about it”, absolutely essential websites 6 months after ones else)