It seems that every autumn, Flickr continues to pass over yet another landmark in image hosting. While in November 2007, it reached the 2 billion photo mark and in the month of November 2008 it reached the next milestone, 3 billion, the company got ahead of itself with one month and reached the 4 billion mark a few days ago.

The photo can be viewed here and was immediately noticed as the lucky image upload by one of Flickr's users. This comes to no surprise to industry experts who share a general opinion that Flickr will be hard to take down as the top image hosting service by any of its competition. This includes Wikimedia Commons, PhotoBucket or ImageShack.

And if some of those industry experts don't agree with their colleagues, a “Flickr is Hiring” blog post published a month ago should convince them that the service is clearly in an expansion period. Checking the Jobs Page on Flickr, we found out that the jobs are still opened “for a few talented geeks to join […] (a) panda-wrangling, daily-deploying, shard-juggling squad, based in downtown San Francisco.”

Capitalizing on its huge success, Yahoo also jumped on the Flickr bandwagon, recently adding its logo to the Flickr service. Even if it owned Flickr for a long-time now (March 2005), this was the first time it publicly displayed its logo on Flickr's page. Users were quick to jump at criticizing Yahoo for its lack of marketing effort all these years, only to pop its trademark when things got really good.

The main core of the Yahoo criticism is rooted in the days of 2007, when many Yahoo! Photos users where forced to migrate to another image hosting company, mainly Flickr (options for Multiply, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Photobucket were added later), being informed that Yahoo! Photos would shut down and the photos deleted.

In the beginning, not many of those users were informed that Flickr was owned by Yahoo at that time, so a big number of them still think that Yahoo had abandoned them a couple of years ago, and now comes in to force its logo inside a service that they had not fully recognized or marketed as an entire Yahoo product all these years.