Flickr offers a wide variety of organizational tools to help users make sense of their photo portfolios. One option is Sets, which allows you to group photos and set permissions for that group of photos. Creating sets for events, such as weddings, vacations, or trade shows are popular uses of this feature. Unfortunately, the filtering options available on Flickr are fairly limited, which makes what could be a very powerful tool tedious to use.

This seems like something Flickr will eventually address, but it may be far from Flickr's highest priority on their development to-do list.

Here is a personal example of why this needs to be improved: I have a set of private photos on Flickr I'd like to release to the public one by one. They reside in a set based on a tag they all have in common. Ideally, I'd like the unpublished photos to share a unique set so it's easy to sort through the unpublished photos to select a new one for publication. Privacy status is not available for set creating in Flickr's interface, however the data needed to build such a query clearly exists in their system (privacy status of photo and tags).

Fortunately, Flickr's API allows users to tackle problems like this by building custom tools. In this case, Eric Appel created a powerful Flickr Sets management interface called SmartSetr, creating access to many more photo variables for complex sets creation.

SmartSetr created sets require SmartSetr to modify, which makes sense considering Flickr doesn't directly support the types of set creations SmartSetr provides. If you use the site, be sure to bookmark it so you can modify sets at a later date.

For more information on SmartSetr, check out the SmartSetr Flickr Group where additional feature requests are being discussed.