>to make Flickr a garbage dump of whatever you export from your digicam.
Sounds like a potential (massive) advantage to me. Having your service be ground zero for export from your cam and contain all your content? That can be exploited to good effect.
Even better, work with camera and phone manufacturers to build Flickr into the camera. Take a picture, a copy goes to Flickr automatically. Make it a natural part of the photo-taking process -- one that you'd miss when using a device where it wasn't present. ("I have to do what to share my photo? Open an app? Connect a USB cable? Ugh.")
This is one of the few areas where Flickr/Yahoo could still conceivably compete with Facebook; since FB doesn't have a "Facebook phone" yet, they'd both be in the same competitive position of needing to get camera and phone OEMs to buy in.
You just described the level of integration G+/Picasa has with my Android phone: every photo I take is automatically uploaded to a (private) folder on there.
For many of us, Flickr's appeal is that it's (self-)curated: you've picked your best stuff to upload. Features like "explore" reward this; popular content is highlighted, while those who just upload every photo they take tend to not get any attention at all. They've effectively trained the userbase to share good content (insofar as the userbase is capable of producing, anyway).
It's the reason a lot of Flickr users, particularly the ones who produce good content, are interested in 500px: quality counts.
That dynamic would change quickly if everyone were encouraged to dump everything they take onto Flickr. It would devalue the service for many of us: nobody wants to see fifteen different perspectives of the same "moss on a rock", taken in rapid succession, but that's what your contact stream would end up filled with. You can only remove people as contacts for so long, before you decide it's no longer worth the trouble and jump ship.
Flickr isn't Photobucket or Picasa, and that's a good thing.
Sounds like a potential (massive) advantage to me. Having your service be ground zero for export from your cam and contain all your content? That can be exploited to good effect.