Do you remember Flickr’s tag line? It reads “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.” It was an epic humble brag, a momentously tongue in cheek understatement.

Because until three years ago, of course Flickr was the best photo sharing service in the world. Nothing else could touch it. If you cared about digital photography, or wanted to share photos with friends, you were on Flickr.

Yet today, that tagline simply sounds like delusional posturing. The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought.

I left Flickr months ago, and haven’t really missed it. And that’s the problem.

The beauty of it being cross platform to me is situations like this. Because Instagram is becoming the ubiquitous camera app, it’s a great point of comparison. (It’s something we would have used Flickr for in the past, but no one seems to use Flickr anymore — at least not in the same way.) As a result, we can see how much better an iPhone camera is than a top Android camera. A lot.

This exposes something that is otherwise hard to expose: it’s either a lack of attention to detail amongst Android OEMs or a lack of caring. “Good enough” will never be the best.

Android fragmentation rears its head once again with Instagram on Android, forcing the company to leave out features it could have otherwise shipped in order to support the wide array of OS versions and hardware out there. I know people like to pretend this isn’t a problem, but it is.

Instagram for Android is a great example of an iOS developer making a great translation of their app that manages to be similar on both platforms, while retaining a singular theme between them. If you’re an Android user that has been waiting, this is a faithful and mostly whole Instagram experience, enjoy.

Most iOS photo apps are all about applying rich, heavy-handed filters.

1-Bit Camera is an exception. The 99¢ app shoots in 1-bit mode, leaving just black and white dithered images. There are options to select high or low contrast, and to use either Atkinson and Bayer dithering algorithms. You an share via Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.

The best part? The UI is set in Chicago. The retro look and feel is outstanding, and really adds to the experience of using the app.

Previously, getting to the camera required a tap on the camera button, which only appeared after double-clicking the home button.

While that’s not that convoluted, in hindsight it clearly lacked the ease of discovery Apple usually ships features with.

The new gesture, with its ever-present icon is much easier to discover.

Apple’s even taken care of those of us trained for the old way of doing it — tapping the new button makes the screen jump, showing off the movement needed to now launch the camera.

Clever.

The new version adds basic video editing and playing, integrated maps that support GPS data, new content-aware auto-fix, more localized adjustment brushes, and integrate book creation tools. Upgraders from any previous version will only pay $79.

The full retail price is now $149.

I switched to Lightroom 3 about 4 months ago, after using Aperture for some time. I mainly did so because Lightroom allows users to keep their photos in simple folders in Finder, while Aperture (and iPhoto) put everything in to a database, making data portability (and possible corruption) a real issue.

Even on my Core i7 MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM, Aperture 3 was a dog. With a 100 GB database, it was almost unusable at points. Lightroom, however, never feels slow, with the same number of photos.

The first complaint people cite when talking about Lightroom is the lack of an easy way to export photos for iOS. However, since iTunes can sync photos from a folder (or set of folders, to be more accurate), syncing photos isn’t as hard as some people might claim.

In ~/Pictures, I keep a “For iOS” folder, with sub-folders for all by albums. You can unpack this .zip file to see screenshots of my export settings.

Lastly, Adobe offers fantastic RAW support. They’ve has led the way on this, in my opinion, for some time. While I don’t always shoot in RAW (especially as my iPhone 4S is my main camera these days), I know that when I do, I have full control of my files with Lightroom.

Update: Holy cow. It totally seems that Aperture doesn’t require users to store items in the database anymore. Thanks everyone who emailed me — I appreciate the information, but I still don’t think I’ll be switching back.