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I've been using Flickr for three or four years and more seriously in the last few months.
Flickr has Groups by subject type like "Sunset", "Flowers", "Travel", "BMW", "Macro Flowers", "Archetecture", "Portraits", "Landscapes", etc., etc. So you post in your own "Photostream" and then join Groups and additionally post in those groups and sometimes Comment on the works of others.
If you chose Flickr be sure to activate "Statistics" so that you have real time and historical statistics about how many have looked at your pictures, or Downloaded, Commented or chosen as a Favorite. It's really informative to see what people like and don't like. Giving each picture a title and using Tags helps people find them.
Think about copyright. Flickr talks about the different licenses that you can grant. People and companies actually "mine" Flickr for images. I've licensed a couple of mine to companies good enough to ask permission. Consider imbedding a copyright mark on your images.
Set up your Photostream by topic in groupings called "Sets" and be self-critical and don't just throw everything up and hope something sticks. Show your best work. Occasionally you may want to post a lot of pictures for some affinity group, such as a BMW club. That's ok. If people see that you normally post sets of 3 to 10 images and there's a Set with 200, they'll avoid the one with 200.
Some friends use Picasa. As a visitor it seems to be easy to navigate and quick to load, but I don't know how it is from the user point of view.
Oh, with Flickr, the separate image downloader is faster and more reliable than the one imbedded in the site, so use that. Also, Resize down to something like 1200 on the longest side. You CAN post original files and Flickr automatically makes display sizes, BUT the downloads will be painfully slow.
Dave
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