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This is extremely biased. A lot of people, myself included, find it easy and pleasant to use. Honestly, I'm not aware of a single alternative with a better UI/UX -- 500px maybe?

As for programmatic access -- Flickr has a good API interface.

I'm not aware of a single alternative with a better UI/UX

I don't use it anymore, but SmugMug.

SmugMug is great! It's a little bit different from Flickr though -- SmugMug is more of a personal photo hosting/portfolio website, while Flickr is more about photographers community. I believe the social aspects of Flickr are much more important than it's actual photo storage capabilities!

It's funny, since Flickr was at the beginning the best of them. Google's PicasaWeb was comparatively bad.

Yahoo really let themselves get leapfrogged on that one.

My trouble with the UX is that it is slow, slow, slow. I live in Frontier country and I have DSL, but there are many photo web sites that are faster than flickr.

I hardly upload anything to flickr anymore because the interface for that is so slow.