I know I'm late with this reply (hopefully not late enough to be accused of necroposting :)), but I wanted to add some information that may be useful if someone finds this thread through a search.
I've been looking for a while for a good Flickr alternative that doesn't suffer from Flickr's shortcomings (censorship, only 200 pictures visible for free accounts, etc.), and I've reached a conclusion: while feature-wise there are indeed good, even better, alternatives to Flickr, community-wise there are none.
So, if sharing your pics with as many people as possible and participating in active discussion groups and commenting other people's work is important to you, you'll just have to put up with Flickr.
BUT, if those aspects are not essential to you, there are some great alternative, both free and paid. In the "paid" category,
smugmug,
phanfare and a few other sites are reportedly very good, but I didn't research them exhaustively because I was looking for a free alternative to Flickr.
In the "free" category, there are quite a lot of websites. Unfortunately, most of them lack features present in Flickr and/or are almost inactive. Here's a non-exhaustive list of photo sharing website from wikipedia:
List of photo sharing websitesLet me quicky point out that I'm ignoring websites like Snapfish, Shutterfly, Webshots, etc. in this comparison because, although they are very popular, they have a different target audience.
Zooomr seemed to be a good site, but it looks like it's closed and won't reopen.
Ipernity, which was one of the websites evaluated by Tomos, is particularly good and would be one of my top 2 choices if it weren't for the fact that it seems to have been abandoned at some point during 2010. No new developments have been announced and
the developer team's blog has no new posts since September 2010.
There are some other alternatives, but I wouldn't like to make this post too long, so I'll just jump to what I consider the best free photo sharing website:
23Yes, that's the name: 23
It has basically all the features Flickr does, and probably some more (albums, slideshows, groups, tags, comments, calendar, etc.). The only restriction for free accounts is that you can only upload 30 pictures per month, but they allow you to upload 300 the first week after you sign up, so you can transfer your pics from somewhere else. Although it too doesn't seem to be in very active development, it looks in a better state than Ipernity and Zooomr.
In particular, I think it does fulfill Tomos' ideal requirements:
My ideal would be with:
[*]decent slideshow style view but where one moves manaully from one image to the next
[*]manually sortable display - i.e. move this foto up/down forwards/backwards in the display - all sites seem to sort only by upload
[/list]
-tomos
If you're looking for a good alternative to Flickr, 23 is definitely worth checking out.