Pagination is often overlooked as a minor detail. Good pagination gives the user a sense of how many pages of content, e.g. search results or gallery pages, are available to view and makes it obvious how to navigate those pages. It indicates the current page, provides link targets to advance or go backward, provides a shortcuts to jump to the start of the list, and indicates how many pages are left in the list, and possibly how many items are found in the pages. Flickr is one of the sites that meets all of these requirements and displays these controls very clearly and without any fuss.
Personally, I dislike most attempts at simplifying pagination because they often end up over-simplifying.
I think that the basic pagination structure works quite well, that is, providing links to some nearby pages (like Flickr does well), but also providing a jump to any page or section in the entire page list. This is usually accomplished by having a dropdown, e.g. "jump to page: " with individual page numbers or groups like 20-29, 30-39, etc..
I personally find it frustrating when I need to get to page 150 and I have to keep clicking forward 7 pages at a time.
So while your comments are correct, they are indeed missing one more piece of the puzzle, a jump-to option. One may argue that in Flickr's case, it isn't necessary, but who's to say what people are looking for? I don't think it hurts to leave it in, even as a partially hidden option (e.g. "jump to..." with javascript popup).
My contention is that jumping anywhere arbitrarily in pagination is an edge case for most applications. But when there is a use case that demands it, having an input should suffice. I can see it in a list where an arbitrary number might provide a sensible target, say when you're in an alpha list and there are hundreds of "A" entries or something and you know you want to get to "An...". But still, that use case would provide something other than numeric pagination to be useful. It would be more like "Ab Ac Ad Ae Af Ag" or something like that.
I'd like to hear more about the use case where jumping to a point in the pagination list is useful.
An example of a use case where jumping to a point in the list is an individual who does not group his/her photos into sets (albums), and posts directly to his photostream (a raw feed of all his photos).
The user may wish to find a photo he posted 3 months ago, for whatever reason, and may have 75 pages worth of photos.
Or, imagine a user wishes to jump to page 8, but only the first 7 are showed in the list. Page 8 is now two pages away.
Regardless of how often users will need to use a feature that allows them to jump to any point in the list, if said functionality can be implemented without impeding the navigation of users who are not using the feature, it should be implemented. I think that, as I first pointed out, a simple icon or "jump to" link with pop-out dropdown would solve the problem while retaining overall aesthetics and ease of use.
To add to what I wrote:
We should not, as designers, ever obtain the attitude that the audience must change their way of doing things to suit our designs.
Certainly, there are a number of exceptions to this rule (for example, designing websites at 960px wide because only 5% of users - and dropping - have 800x600 screens).
However, neglecting minorities or ignoring the needs of the few for the sake of "keeping it simple" is a step in the wrong direction. Again, this applies as long as the needs of the majority are not neglected in addressing the needs of the minority.
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