I love Flickr's photo service in many ways, including the easy ability to upload nearly unlimited photos, easy photo sharing, and the incredible community the site has created around pictures. However, I have a few gripes with the service as it currently exists and thought I'd share. None have been deal breakers for me, but some could be over time if they aren't eventually addressed.

1. Limited Photo Permissions: Photos can be set to display to the public, your friends, family, or private. That's great, but there is no way to share photos with only a select group of friends. Some incriminating photos deserve to be shared but only selectively, such as bachelor party photos, or whatever happened in college that you can't remember without photos.

2. No photo editing. Right now, photo editing is limited to resizing photos at upload and rotating photos 90 degrees. Online photo editing has been possible for years, keeps getting better, but hasn't made it into Flickr yet. Yahoo offers some photo editing in Yahoo Photos, so maybe that will get integrated into Flickr? For now, sites like PXN8 offer online photo editing and integrate with Flickr, so you can upload a photo first to PXN8.com, then push it to Flickr once you're satisfied with the edits. By the way, I'd love to hear about other online photo editors like PXN8 in the comments.

3. Marginal Search. This one has already been getting better, but has a way to go before it's great. Searches using more than one word are often disappointing since they miss content that's tagged with a Flickr-style conjunction tag. For example, here is a search for the term [minnehaha falls] (a waterfall near my home in Minneapolis). It found a lot of results, but missed results that didn't use a space between the two words, like this: [minnehahafalls]. I think this requires people to know more about Flickr's search engine than they should have to in order to find relevant photos. Of course, the even bigger challenge is getting people to add tags, titles, or descriptions to their photos so Flickr has more copy to work with to help index the photos properly.

4. Small Slide Show Photos. Once I find a set of photos on a given topic or from a photographer I like, I really want to see them. Unfortunately, it's very cumbersome to see LARGE versions of photos in a slide show format. I have a broadband connection and I'm willing to wait, so give me big beautiful photos of things I've proven I really want to see by clicking to view slide shows.

What did I miss? Do you have additional Flickr peeves? What enhancements are in the pipeline at Flickr?