Well, there are drawbacks, but not enough to not do it. If you go with the free account you are limited to 20MB's of upload per month. I believe the limit is something like 2GB for the paid account, which is quite cheap (something like $25/year). My biggest gripe with Flickr is that they always show pictures in the opposite order that they are uploaded, so if you upload a set of pictures from a particular event, you either have to upload them in reverse order or you will be viewing them in reverse. This is very annoying especially when you consider that Flickr has the time and date stamps from that camera, so it knows that order they should be in. However, if you're just looking for a place to put the pictures to include in your blog, this won't be an issue. Overall, I love the services and highly recommend it.

I would not use the blog features of Flikr; instead I would just directly link to the image URLs from my own blog. So I think I can work around your points. The $2/month for substantially more bandwidth is what I'm really looking for - looks like a good deal.

I have similar concerns. I host my site out of my house, on my 3 Mbps line from SBC. With only 380k of upload speed, the images on my site don't load with the same lightning-quick speed that they would on an ISP or from Flikr. The upside is I have limitless flexibility and no cost. Keep me posted on your efforts. I'm always interested to hear how other people are doing things.