On August 18 of this month, I selectively uploaded a few photos from one of the two CDs I had waiting to be Flickr-ized. "You have used 98% of your upload capacity for this month," the notice read. I couldn't even manage 10 more, even though the next weekend I took a dozen rolls at the Hood-to-Coast relay.

"Sorry," I told my friends, "I'll have to wait until September 1 to show you the photos." I emailed Flickr, I surfed the forums; there was no answer to the question, "can't you just waive the 2 GB uploading limit for Pro accounts for one month?" (Update: Flickr finally emailed me to say I couldn't upload anything more. Sorry!)

I complained to Brad Hill, Weblogs editorial director, who's been telling me for months that Flickr sucks. "Yahoo should eliminate all limits on pro and non-pro accounts, grab the entire marketplace. Few things are bigger drivers than photo sharing," he told me. "Or Google will eat its lunch."

So here's my message to Yahoo!: change Flickr, or get out of the way.

You need a revenue model, it's true, and the Pro account has worked for you thus far. I'm sure you have a million or more customers paying the $24.95 a year; and I'm one of them. $24 million, $50 million even in revenue. Oh that's so great, Caterina!

But please. Yahoo! makes $1.5 billion in revenue every quarter; that makes the Pro accounts from Flickr only a eight-tenths-of-one-percent drop in the bucket. Flickr, let's remember, has no other revenue stream. No ads. No printing revenue. Nothing.

Flickr is clearly a social play for Yahoo!, and indeed, Flickr's addictive. There's a reason I didn't simply open another Flickr account, or run over to Snapfish or Ofoto to put my photos there. I want the comments, the ability to add notes, the tags, the association with the rest of my growing photo empire (2,786 photos on Flickr and counting... once September starts). I love that I'm active in many Flickr groups, even having started several of my own to modest acclaim, and I feel oh-so-artsy by my Flickr socializing. It legitimizes me, for instance, that JPG Magazine founder Derek Powazek "favorited" one of my photos. Ooh, I get shivers just thinking about it.

Use this addiction to your own benefit, Yahoo! -- change Flickr. Remove the Pro uploading limit, greatly extend the free one. Let us go crazy, sharing photos with one another and -- here's an idea -- printing them. Snapfish has Walgreen's, maybe you can make a partnership with Rite-Aid, or Safeway, or Wolf Camera. Anyone. Just let us print our photos. Let us share our photos. And by God. Let us upload them!