Today, Flickr launched Camera Finder, which lets people browse and track trends in camera usage on Flickr. In addition, they’ve linked in camera price comparison and shopping at Yahoo Shopping, which is a brilliant move.

Currently, the most popular camera on Flickr is the Canon Rebel XT.

When I’m in the market for a new camera, I typically peruse sites like Amazon and dpreview for specs and sample pictures. But, nothing beats looking at pictures taken with the camera from people like me. This is where Flickr’s Camera Finder comes in–they let people see the performance of the camera in the hands of the people. Amazon does this to an extent, by allowing people to upload sample pictures for products. But, their collection pales in comparison to the one that passionate Flickr users upload.

What Flickr should do is to allow sites like Amazon to get access to their photo collection for either a fee or revenue sharing. In the end, this could very well be one of the most lucrative moves Flickr has undertaken.

Everyday, we’re getting closer to the dream of the online OS. Like the days of the mainframe, the processing is increasingly pushed to the center. However, unlike those days, connectivity allows you to easily access your digital life from anywhere. At the rate of which online apps are being developed, the personal computer is converging to an online one. Preloadr, which recently launched, is another app to add to your online web applications toolbox. The service lets you instantly edit your Flickr photos online and in place.

Unlike rival PXN8, you won’t need to manually specify or upload photos. Preloadr logs into your Flickr account, and gives you full access to your photos. The idea is to cut out all the file renaming and uploading logistics by editing your photos in place and online, using Flickr as your hard drive.

The application is suprisingly feature-rich, providing visitors with a variety of image processing tools. You can do all the basic editing actions, like rotating, cropping, filtering, and resizing. Advanced users will be treated with features like layers, which allow you to manipulate multiple photos, each on a different layer. Preloadr even has histogram and luminosity functions.

Preloadr uses a combination of pop-up dialogs and graphical sliders for their interface, which is cleanly designed with the same look and feel as Flickr. The file menu up top lets you preview and save your edited photos. Remember, no more having to rename files!

PXN8 has some catching up to do, because Preloadr is head and shoulders above them, both on the feature set and the user interface.

As a Flickr user, I’ll definitely be considering Preloadr for image editing. The integration with Flickr is smooth, and should cut down on everyone’s photo editing time. I would imagine that for most broadband users, Preloadr has every tool needed for casual photos. As always, for serious photo editing, you should still stick with Photoshop. A nice feature for Preloadr to add is undo and non-destructive image editing. That way, users can always roll back to an older version of the image.