Flickr is also pretty horrible if you're into photography. There's no systematic way to find good photos (e.g. top average rating). Both Flickr and Facebook are huge garbage dumps of photos. Facebook has absolutely no way to find great photos. Flick has some very limited functionality for it, but it could've been so much better. Neither were build to suit artists. They were designed to be garbage dumps.
Actually, I'm an amateur photographer, and Flickr is pretty sweet for me.
First of all, they are doing rating, though it may not be obvious how -- which I think is better than some dumb rating widget that can be abused -- and if Facebook would be able to show you pictures by rating, all you'd ever see are pictures of teenage girls in tight miniskirts, which get dozens of times better ratings then the pictures uploaded by my artistic-friends ;)
Then, there is no cheaper alternative for keeping a backup in the cloud. A Pro account is $2 per month, with unlimited uploads. I know people that have over 50000 pictures uploaded using the original size (that's over 150 GB of data btw). And I actually wanted to upload my photos to S3 or to Google's Blogstore or to Dropbox, but it's gets much more expensive for such a volume (and currently I'm uploading 2 GB / month -- my baby boy is growing up :)).
Also, on Flickr you can access the EXIF headers of a picture -- and if you type your camera's model in their search box, you get thousands of photos for which you can access details like exposure, aperture and focal length, thus you can get better by examining the work of other people.
Also, it does feature a "share on facebook" button, with which you can publish a link + a thumbnail on Facebook.
Yes it sucks, but it is better than any alternative I ever tried. Pretty tired of hearing "if Facebook does this or that" too -- I'll be happy if they do, but they haven't and they aren't interested in art -- they are more interested in tight miniskirts of teenagers that get massive upvotes ;)
Also consider that this does MORE than what photo.net's form you gave me does -- as Flickr doesn't have a rigid taxonomy, but a user-defined and very dynamic folksonomy, and they do need to do a full-text search for this.
keep in mind that Flickr gets thousands times
more traffic and number of photos uploaded
Precisely -- Flickr cannot do dumb sorting based on metrics collected from a dumb rating widget so easily, because (a) they are bigger and (b) they have more noise, which follows from (a).
Ratings suck for differentiating items on a website. "5 stars" and "1 star" have some meaning, but everything else is worthless. For this and a few other good reasons, Flickr just collapses ratings into "favorites".
Flickr has an algorithm called "interestingness" which tries to guess which photos are worthwhile by looking at social activity and other such metrics. However, I agree that it isn't nearly good enough, if you are a real lover of photography. Flickr Explore tends to be filled with cliche photographic beauty. That said, if you expect a machine to tell you what good art is, you're going to wait a long time.
