I got myself a pro account last night. Partly due to frustration, partly in haste. According to my quick arithmetic:

The webspace on my site is only 60mb. But I pay $3/pm on a quarterly basis and I don't need more than 60mb unless I plan to upload lot of snaps. If I go for an upgrade, I need to shell out at least $9/pm for up to 1 gig and bandwidth restrictions. Now 1 gig is a LOT of web space, but according  to my estimations, most of the images in my galleries (the older ones) are just sitting there. I don't think they have too many hits. Now why should I be paying $9 just to 'store' images that really don't do much?

Enter Flickr. I get unlimited uploads and bandwidth. I don't have to code anything. It's got some nifty tools too. Only thing I don't like is the layout. So I am hoping to use Flickr as my primary image storage space, and maintain albums on my website by using Simpleviewer for display. I stumbled upon Flickrviewer which seems to be the way to go to achieve this. Need to investigate further to see if this is the right tool for the job. Nevertheless, at $24.95/yr, Flickr Pro is a cheaper proposition than buying more webspace. But I have to learn to live with the lousy interface of Flickr. 

Update: There are a lot of plugins that help integrate WP and Flickr. Unfortunately, I just realized that Flickr is blocked in most offices here in Bangalore. And almost everyone I know use the net at their workplaces for general browsing. Not a good thing. 

Update 2: The discussion happening here is exactly what I am cribbing about Flickr too.