The 300 MB/month limit is their free product. For $25/(Correction - not month, but year!) you get their pro package which includes: (from their upgrade option link):

  o Unlimited uploads (up to 50MB per photo)
  o Unlimited viewing of your entire photo library
  o Post photos in up to 60 groups
  o Download your original, high-resolution photos – whenever you need them
  o Upload and play unlimited HD videos
  o Browse Flickr completely ad-free
  o View stats on your account

I can't begin to explain how ridiculous the Flickr value proposition is for $25/year - and, indeed, there are some photographers with upwards of 100,000 pictures on the site.

[Edit - I was inspired to go try out Flickr just because of the hoofrah and this cool tool that let me move my instagram pictures - Wow - great Batch Editting, Set Collection, Image management. You can see the advantage of a tool with a decades worth of work into it. Signed up for a pro account]

We use flickr at our lab as a photo dump for an eyefi, and absolutely adore it in every single way. I seriously cannot say how valuable that is to us.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hslphotosync/

correction: $25/year (first line)

The limits only apply to the free plan. For $25/year all limits (and ads) are removed: http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#28. And you're less likely to see dubious changes to the ToS when you are the paying customer.

These limits only apply if you don't value their service enough to pay for their product (which is especially true given that Flickr does not commonly show ads for random products, certainly not intrusive ones; at worst you see "sponsoring groups" in some contexts).

It really all depends on your preference. One of the great things about Flickr was always their ability to handle the full resolution and large photos, and the ability to keep the angles and crops you wanted, whereas Instagram resizes them to down and crops them all for you, losing the original photo.

With Flickr's lack of mobile support, they've always had somewhat separate target audiences. I'm guessing that in the future, these targets will become more aligned with the way both companies are moving.

It needs to be said that one of the original value propositions to flickr was their API and famous "you show me yours, i'll show you mine" policy -- basically letting users take all their photos and data, including porting them to any service that also allowed full export.

This includes full resolution, EXIF data, etc. (though it did/does not AFAIK include comments inside the community, which are subject to user TOS with other users, thus this makes sense in several ways)

Well, and I never understood what is so great about Instagram.

If it wasn't for it being mentioned all the time in HN, I would never had heard of it.