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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.

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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!

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