Flickr has long been a good photo hosting solution for me. It is easy to use, easy to search, tag, and connect with other users. I’ve been using Flickr for a couple of years at least. Recently, I’ve been doing a better job of uploading more photos so I can show them off on this blog.

Suddenly, I reached a limit unbeknownst to me—a maximum of 200 photos. The only limits I knew that Flickr had on photo hosting was the monthly bandwidth limit and a maximum of 3 sets. Neither one of those limits have ever affected me. I never came close to hitting the max bandwidth for a given month, and if I did it wouldn’t be a big deal because the bandwidth would reset the next month. More photos sets would have been nice feature, but I worked around this limit by using tags to accomplish a set-like organization.

The 200 photo limit is just a cap on the number of photos that you can have uploaded at once. It doesn’t stop me from uploading more new photos, but the oldest ones will be replaced to keep the maximum number of photos at 200. This doesn’t sound like a big deal until you realize that I’ve linked to several of the old photos on my blog. If I replace them, then all of my images links will be broken. I could of course go back to all of my image links and host those photos myself, but that is a lot of trouble. Plus, I would still lose the Flickr slideshows I linked to.

The optimal solution would be to spend the $25 a year to upgrade a pro account without the limitations of my free account. However, to be honest I’m a bit on the cheap side, especially since I’m going to be getting married. I don’t need to spend $25 to host some photos when there are other solutions available.

I know I could host the photos my self and create my own gallery with slideshows, etc. by using one of the many popular open source solutions, but at the moment I don’t have the time to configure all of that and integrate it into my blog. Right now, I”m looking trying to determine if Picasa Web Albums is going to be a good (maybe short-term) solution.

So, I’m up a creek without a paddle with Flickr. So, I’m left searching for a better way to host photos! Any ideas???