FotoViewer is a Flex based application that allows you to easily create 3D photo galleries of your photos stores on Flickr or SmugMug.
Its super easy to set one up - you simply pick the style for your photo gallery, then enter in your username for Flickr or Smugmug. The system connects to those photo sites and pulls down your albums or collections. Pick the one you want and you're done.
Here's one that I made of some photos I took in Ottawa a few weeks ago:

FotoViewr - Create your 3D photo gallery

There are a number of different templates that you can use to create the gallery. The one above is the "Wall" layout - they've got 6 in total - Flow, Horizon, Carousel, Floor and Pile are the others.
Once you've created the gallery, there's embed code for you to take an embed in your blog or social networking page, or a link that you can use to email them to your friends. Check it out - its a nicely done Flex app.

As I've mentioned before, I'm getting into digital photography more and more, and recently I've been looking for a place to host my digital photos. Basically, I've got two sets of photos - personal photos of vacations and family (mostly taken using my Canon Digital Elph), and artistic photos that I take with my digital SLR (Canon Rebel XTi). The photos from my Elph are in iPhoto, organized into events and albums, and the SLR photos are taken in RAW format and processed using Lightroom.

I had signed up for .Mac and used that for posting my photos from iPhoto into my .Mac site. Then Apple introduced web galleries, and all of a sudden I had another place for photos to go. I'm also a member at Flickr, and was posting my "artsy" photos there. I had friends who were posting photos on Facebook as well, and I uploaded a few photos to Facebook. It was getting out of control. I had at least 4 places that my photos were online - obviously this wasn't working for me. I loved each solution for various reasons: .Mac allowed me to use my own domain name, integrated into iPhoto, and had great themes that I could use. Flickr allowed me to share my photos with others, and get comments on them (assuming that others could find my photos). Facebook allowed me to share them with friends.

Smugmug takes the best of those sites and packages it into one package. You can use your own domain name. You can customize the pages as much as you like. They have various themes you can apply to your photo pages. And when you upload them, you can add them to other communities automatically. Your photos are added to communities that you specify, but only links to your photos, bringing traffic to your photos. (Within a week of uploading my last set of photos I had received a comment on it from someone in the "Flower" community. Cool!) You can also password protect your family photos, so that only family and friends can see those ones.

Viewing the photos is done in a nicely implemented Ajax powered application. You can also export your photos from Smugmug to Fotoflot, a nice Flex based RIA for creating wall mounts of your photos.

There's even a Facebook application that links to your Smugmug photos.

If you're going to try it out, enter this code for the Referred By field, and you'll save $5 and I'll get some money too: rxFVWsxd9QzgA. Win win.

If I were in charge at Smugmug, I'd deepen the Facebook integration, and add the concept of groups for my photos. I'd love to be able to select a group of people, from Facebook friends and others with email addresses, and share my personal galleries with them. As it is, I have to set a password on each gallery separately - having an easier way to share a set of galleries would be great. I also don't like the fact that I can't set default settings for new albums that are different from theirs. They default to allowing people to buy your photos (without paying you) and not protecting them with right click "Save As" protection. I don't think that's right - especially since I'm paying them a yearly fee. Finally, I can't upload my DNG photos to them - they have to be exported as JPGs. This nice Lightroom plugin makes that easy, but still, I'd prefer to use them as a backup service, and I want to backup my RAW photos, not the JPG versions. (Even better would be backing up my Lightroom library to Smugmug!) However, even with these "problems", I still think this is the best solution for sharing digital photos.

Now my workflow is much easier. All the photos in Lightroom are uploaded to Smugmug using the Lightroom plugin, and the iPhoto photos are added to Smugmug using their Mac uploader. I haven't tried the iPhoto plugin yet, but will soon. All my photos go to one spot, and are added to communities on Smugmug automagically, and integrate into Facebook with their plugin. I can get rid of my .Mac membership as soon as I get an invite to DropBox for file syncing.

If you'd like to see my photos, you can head to my Smugmug page.

I really like it when a Flex application doesn't look like a Flex application. To me that shows that the developers have really put time and effort into the site - they've customized nearly every component available to make sure that the look and feel of the site is perfect. Kizoa is a perfect example of a site that does just that. Its a French photo site, allowing you to edit your photos, share your photos, and organize your photos all in a single Flex based interface.

Its a bit like Picnik and Flickr and Mixbook all mixed into one site. You can easily upload your photos (the site supports multiple file uploads at once through their Flex interface - nice work!), then organize them into albums. You can create slideshows or montages easily, with support for text, transitions, animations and more. Once you've got something you're proud of, you can easily share it with the world, or just your friends. Their site has a few samples of slideshows that they've created.

The entire site is in French, so if you can't read French then you're probably out of luck, but if you do, this is a pretty neat site to check out.

TechCrunch and Ryan Stewart have both covered this in the past few days, but I thought I would as well. Pikeo is a photosharing site that launched recently, built with Adobe Flex 2.

I haven't used it myself, but users seem to be excited about it, especially since Flickr isn't multi-lingual. (You'd think with the community behind them that they could create a site that allowed users to translate their interface into a number of languages, like Google does). Pikeo is initially available in English, French and Spanish.