
Smugmug Acquires Flickr - uptown
https://smugmug.com/together
======
ayushgta
Sometime in early 2000s, I had a meeting with Chris. It was early days for
them and they were running out of their home. This was the time when Flickr
was a darling of the valley (and wasn't acquired by Yahoo yet).

Chris and I were talking, sitting around a dining table with a bench and some
chairs. I remember there was a lot of light and windows all around. Don (his
son) was going in and out of the house taking delivery of some
hardware/servers. Toni (his wife) was handling customer support from a room
upstairs. And there was a dog, I think. That's it!

It was a breath of fresh air for me! In a place that has a deep-rooted
infatuation with building products on raised capital, they were running their
company as a small business. They were going up against giants like Snapfish,
Shutterfly, Google, Yahoo and a bunch of others in a crowded space. Unlike
those giants, they were charging money for their service! And they had the
audacity of doing it under the name SmugMug. I recall Chris grinning about how
much some people hated the name SmugMug!

This was the only time I met them. I've thought back to that meeting many
times over the years. It was inspiring for me to see software/technology being
used build something for a niche need... with a clear focus on running it as a
small business. I found that to be uplifting then and I still do today.

Every couple of years I'd go to their site and see how they continued to grow.
And each time it would bring a smile to my face. That they ended up buying
Flickr is so darn sweet... I could not hoped for a better cherry-on-top to how
I personally view the SmugMug story.

~~~
foobaw
It's good to hear how much audacity it takes to succeed. I love stories where
hard work really pays off.

I'm a relatively late adopter (2009) but I really loved Smugmug from the
start. As someone into both technology and photography, Smugmug was the
perfect product! I remember really wanting to work for them as a college
student - everything about the company was extremely motivating. It still is.

~~~
wowtip
Heh I reported a problem to Smugmug with their payment service for my credit
card company which prevented me from purchasing a subscription.

Their response? "Yeah, we know, it doesn't work with Credit Card Company AAAA
yet, but thanks for telling us. Here, have a lifetime free pro account"

------
aaronbrethorst
This is exciting! I've long believed that Flickr should have doubled down on
their existing users instead of trying to become another Instagram.

Over on the USA Today article[0], there's this line:

 _A longtime fan of Flickr, MacAskill says before making any decisions, he
plans to collect feedback from employees and users._

Hey Don - I used to pay money for Flickr, and I'm happy to start paying again
if there is evidence of forward motion. I want to have a place to securely
store my RAW files in addition to my edited photographs, and I want to see a
focus on community again.

[0] [https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/04/20/smugmug-
buys-...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/04/20/smugmug-buys-flickr-
verizon-oath/537377002/)

~~~
onethumb
Don here, thanks so much for the vote of confidence. Big job ahead of us, but
the community is _the_ reason we did this. We want to invest, innovate and
grow there. We'll be working hard. But first I have a lot of learning to do.
Stay tuned.

~~~
audiometry
Don— I was a paying customer too. Then Flickr changed their login, forcing me
to get a yahoo account, which I then lost over time. So for years now, my
account, and all the photos of my 1-3yo kid are buried and locked behind the
“you need (login) and pay premium access to see all your photos”. All because
that stupid yahoo login integration. Unrecoverable.

~~~
onethumb
I will move heaven and earth to solve this for you. We're moving off of Yahoo
Auth as soon as we can, but can likely fix before that (which will take
awhile). Raising this up the flag pole.

~~~
1024core
> We're moving off of Yahoo Auth

So what will replace it? I've been a Flickr user for more than 10 years.

~~~
mc32
Maybe they'll return the Flickr logins to users?

~~~
happertiger
I would be very surprised if what they did wasn’t common sense. Their track
record has been fantastic.

------
salimmadjd
This is the best possible news for Flickr and its community.

I've known the SmugMug founders from the beginning.

First of all, they're one of the nicest people you can imagine. They're also
super committed to the photographers and the photography community. Everyone
there is not only a photo geek, but they're constantly helping, supporting and
promoting photographers. 4 of my photos are printed in large size (one is
wall-height) at their office along with many other photographers. That alone
just shows you how much they're into their community.

An interesting ironic story. In one of my old jobs, I signed a multiyear
partnership with them and our company. They had just started. Flicker was
couple of years old, but it was already surpassing the early photo sharing
site, Pbase.

The founders of SmugMug had earlier started FatBrain online bookstore and had
a successful exit. But both my CEO and myself were photo geeks and we thought
of ourselves as consumer experts. So we kept nagging on SmugMug to change
their UI to resemble more like Flickr. Mind you, SmugMug now, looks very
different than it did back then. However, the founders were very focused
(obviously much smarter than we were) on what they thought should be their
main focus, building an online solution for pro photographers.

So, for me it's very ironic, that after all these years and us nagging on them
to be more like Flickr, that they now own Flickr.

I know some of you might be skeptical of mergers, and it remains to be seen.
However, knowing the SmugMug DNA, I couldn't have imagined a better custodian
for the Flickr and its community. Give the SmugMug guys a chance to prove
themselves to you.

~~~
balladeer
I think it will be very important how they deal with the Flickr UI. Whether
they will

\- change Flickr to look more like SmugMug (if at all the platforms are not
merged),

\- or leave it as it is today (the slow, heavy, and glossy Flickr),

\- or try to bring back something close to the blazing fast Flickr days when
it looked so clean and minimal and was not at all glossy.

Many of us are pining for the latter.

~~~
onethumb
Definitely not merging. Beyond that, I'm in learning mode while we figure out
what people want, what's healthy for the community, what sustains the
business. Then we'll go build that. :)

------
lkrubner
By the way, if you are a Flickr user, then you control what I see on my
television. By "television" I mean the screen and Apple TV, which is the only
television I have. And I went into the settings and set "Most Popular on
Flickr" as my screensaver. So I've often fallen asleep watching whatever
images you have upvoted.

The one feature I hope Smugmug adds is captions. I often see incredible nature
photos, and I've no idea where on the planet the image is.

Likewise, some images appear to be old, I would love it if these images had
years attached to them.

"Most Popular On Flickr" is the "show" that I watch more than any other, in
the sense that I if I am home at my apartment, I often leave the screen on all
day, so it is always there playing any time I look that way. A lot of the
photos are mediocre, but sometimes something catches my attention and I look
up and see something great.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
In a similar vein, I watch the Netflix screensaver quite a lot, or is it the
Amazon Firestick screensaver ... either way, it's not a thing I'd ever have
thought to install, but the images from around the world are beautiful and add
a sort of contemplative calm to the day.

------
throwawayad7d9f
On the one hand, I'm happy that Flickr will stay alive but on the other, I'm
worried about what Smugmug will do to it regarding policy.

Smugmug's Acceptable Use Policy [0] is rather puritan, forbidding things that
are "indecent", "lewd", "sexually suggestive" or anything else that "in the
sole judgment of SmugMug, is objectionable, harmful".

Flickr's [1] on the other hand is rather accepting: "If you would hesitate to
show your photos or videos to a child, your family, or a stranger on the
street, that means you need to set the appropriate content filter setting."

I really hope Smugmug doesn't force their ideals on Flickr. It'd be nice if
instead they used Flickr as an example of how to loosen content restrictions
on Smugmug.

[0]:
[https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms](https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms)

[1]:
[https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines](https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Is it ideals or is it market placement? If they're staying separate then I
imagine maximum market coverage means having a split where they maintain the
family friendly visage of SmugMug and they keep the wide gamut of photography
on Flickr.

~~~
throwawayad7d9f
Unfortunately I discovered this isn't the case. I contacted SmugMug support
and they've already decided all Flickr users will be subject to SmugMug's
policies as of May 25th. Existing Flickr content that satisfied Flickr's
policies can be removed for SmugMug policy violations.

This is destructive and makes me sad for Flickr's future.

I just hope they don't decide to mass delete everything with a content filter
applied, since in theory all that content violates their new policy.

------
rmason
Finally Flickr will no longer be the neglected stepchild of a corporate parent
and will receive some much needed love. Even though a lot of time has passed
I'm optimistic that Flickr has a real chance to reassert its domination of
online pictures.

~~~
joshvm
Flickr has one really useful feature that I've used a lot: easy searching for
public domain imagery. It's great that you can dial in whichever level of CC
licensing you want and then grab some photos for marketing or wireframing.
Also handy for machine learning!

~~~
ghaff
I generally like flickr and have been a "pro" paid user for a long time. This
seems like a likely positive step as an uploader. That said. I also use flickr
a lot as a CC/PD source for presentations. My expectation is that there will
be changes that make this sort of thing decline or disappear.

------
roadbeats
I very actively use Flickr since 2006 and here is my feedback:

\- As a photographer, I enjoy photography on desktop computers rather than
mobile screens. This is why I prefer Flickr over Instagram.

\- Delete the Yahoo login please.

\- Bring back the community feeling. I used to check Flickr blog every week to
see what is going on in the Flickr community.

\- Simplify the product please. I think Flickr is great at organizing photos
but it's not ideal for following photographers.

\- Usernames are a mess. Let's say your username was "bob" when you registered
as a Flickr user. Later, Yahoo Flickr renamed usernames as "handle" and
introduced another username. Please unify usernames and handles and make it
simple again.

Best of luck. I hope Flickr's destiny won't be like Delicious.

------
rinze
As a longtime Flickr user (and sometimes paying member), anything that takes
them out of Yahoo!/Oath hands is good news. I just hope they break the Yahoo!
integration and I can finally close that spam account.

~~~
mwambua
I second that. I deleted my Flickr account after it became apparent that Yahoo
was in no way committed to security. I've planning to let go of Instagram
too... Tried Unsplash... But found that it didn't have the features that make
it easier for people on Flickr to build communities around different cameras,
lenses, film, locations... etc

------
bakli
1\. Pinboard charges money for their product and eventually buys former free-
product competitor Delicious.

2\. Smugmug charges money for their product and eventually buys free-product
competitor Flickr.

Charging customers for your service really does help you win in the long run.

Edit: Taken from this tweet -
[https://twitter.com/zachleat/status/987523973612298240](https://twitter.com/zachleat/status/987523973612298240)

~~~
vnglst
I’ve paid for a Flickr Pro account for several years, it wasn’t a free-product
to begin with.

------
abrowne
Fifteen years ago I would not have been surprised by the reverse.

~~~
gesman
+1

Solid consistent business model vs. mismanaged dyno

Win step for smugmug.

------
Clobbersmith
When I worked at Yahoo they never quite knew what to do with Flickr. I hope at
the very least Flickr gets resources to develop the site/app/other priorities
because they make some pretty neat stuff.

~~~
zokier
> at Yahoo they never quite knew what to do

Isn't that true for Yahoo in general? They kinda stumbled upon being internet
giant, and have been utterly confused on what to do next ever after.

~~~
Clobbersmith
For sure. Flickr wasn't the only company Yahoo mismanaged.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Some of the highest paid people ever, being handed incomes equivalent to a
developing world country. I'd have trashed Yahoo for half of that!

------
jiqiren
The text on a pic of a dumpster-fire: "A Place Where Perspective Is Shared Not
Forced."

Nice commentary on Yahoo!

~~~
hc91
I am surprised that I had to scroll for so long to find a comment about the
dumpster fire!

------
neom
Hopefully they're smart enough to ask Stewart Butterfield to sit on their
board. I remember when Flickr came out - pulled a lot away from the deviantART
community and caused me many sleepless nights. :)

------
redm
Great news, I enjoy seeing old sites like Flickr being saved from oblivion.
SmugMug is a great company too.

On a side note, this is a terrible announcement page when viewed on FireFox
59. It's barely usable. It works well on Chrome though.

Its either poor design by SmugMug, superior design by Google Chrome, or
leveraging some capability of chrome not available on FireFox. The cake flying
is delayed by 1+ second each scroll. Please do more cross-browser testing!

~~~
onethumb
We did a _ton_ of cross-browser testing, but it's possible we missed something
or had a regression. Checking. Thanks for letting me know!

~~~
foobarchu
I'm on Firefox ESR, and while the pages functioned just fine, the performance
is...lacking. I think the degraded experience mostly comes down to crappy
framerates on the parallax effect.

------
kornork
I have a Flickr account with several thousand curated photos in it. Several
years ago I let myself get convinced into turning on automatic photo upload.
Before I knew it, my photostream was filled with garbage screenshots and
photos of people blinking. It created 100s of tiny albums that cluttered my
page and made my Flickr page a mess that I could no longer use, and I mostly
abandoned photography.

I spent several days this year deleting all of those photos (because of course
there was no batch delete that I could find).

Hopefully Smugmug does something great!

~~~
tokyodude
I guess they need to make them more discoverable.

in any case click You->Organize. Drag photos into batch area and pick Edit
Photos->Delete

------
username223
Smugmug has a history of rescuing failed photo-sharing sites; see Picturelife:
[https://news.smugmug.com/smugmug-rescues-
nearly-200-million-...](https://news.smugmug.com/smugmug-rescues-
nearly-200-million-priceless-memories-from-picturelife-74a0f7b65dff)

This is just about the best thing that could happen to Flickr, far better than
being swallowed by GOOG/FB/DBX and then end-of-lifed.

------
Tomte
I have an account, but never really used it.

Give me this and I sign up for a paid account:

* RAW storage for Fuji cameras

* ad-free

* no shenanigans where you try to own or sell my photos

* privacy

* acceptable price (hobbyist range, not pro photog)

I‘m indifferent about:

* video storage

* a store to sell my photos

* a service to print my photos

I‘d consider a huge selling point:

* some kind of ECC for photos, to fight bit-rot

~~~
tecleandor
Out of curiosity...

Why Fuji? Is there any specific thing about those RAW files or just your use
case?

~~~
Tomte
Yes, it‘s my use case. Some services only cater to Nikon and Canon as the two
dominant players and their RAW format.

------
eveningcoffee
I hope that they do not kill or maim it some way. Flickr is a treasure.

~~~
garyrichardson
As a long time smug mug customer, my perception is this is the best possible
home for Flickr. Smugmug is the online photo site we all want.

------
theDoug
I remember an April Fools joke to this effect a decade ago, and it's great to
see it come to life now.

In the height of my pro-photo life, Smugmug was the only place to care about
durability, presentation, and maintaining reasonable margins. While dozens of
competitors faded off over time from ignoring one or the other. Glad to see
the good ones win.

------
ryandrake
As an early beta tester and long time user of SmugMug I’ve been impressed with
its ability to do the thing it’s supposed to do really well. Too many services
have tried to hang all sorts of junk off their main service, changing things
to the point where their core function suffers. The founder had shown an
attribute we don’t normally associate with good companies/services: restraint.

SmugMug could have diluted itself by bolting on a chat app, or it could have
gotten bogged down in endless site re-designs, or chased the suicidal “growth
at any cost” goal. Remarkable that Don had the vision to _not_ do these insane
things. I wish these guys the best of luck with this new “turnaround“ project!

------
yannovitch
Dear Don @onethumb,

Thanks a lot for taking on the big task on reviving Flickr ! I think SmuMug is
a good fit for this task =). If I can help in any way to help you do that,
please email me ! I live in Europe so maybe if you need a rep there ahhahaha

Some suggestions : \- I am still a Pro Flickr subscriber amd I use Flickr
mostly as my "photo hardrive in the cloud" and to share pictures in high
quality for weddings & cie.

\- However it's unbearably slow to organize your pictures on Flickr when you
have 40.000+/10+ years of pictures. I even tried to use Flickr-Fuse, mounted
as filesystem on my computer, to try to reorganize my content, but no help on
that point.

\- And I tended to use Flickr less as a "cloud photo backup harddrive" these
last years because it has became quite slow and unreliable to upload pictures
on Flickr.

\- Please simplify and improve the API too, so we can have cool tools again to
go with Flickr/SmugMug (FlickMug? Smugkr ? hahaha )

\- RAW format upload/download would be a big differentiator from Instagram &
cie.

All the best to you in this new big adventure ! Y

------
vzaliva
I am also a longtime Flickr user. I stopped paying after I realized that the
site is going nowhere. I was just contemplating closing the account, but in
view of this news, I will give it another chance.

There are hundreds of sites where people can dump their unprocessed vacation
photos from their iPhones. My main interest in Flickr was as a place to share
and discover high-quality photo works. That means good support for high-
resolution images, professionally looking albums, flexible sharing options
(private groups, etc).

~~~
onethumb
Thanks for the vote of confidence and trust. We'll work hard to earn it and
live up to a high bar.

------
mp3geek
For a brief moment I read "Samsung".

~~~
O_H_E
Yeah, quite tricky

------
technion
I'm intrigued at how the existing Flickr was kept alive. This thread notes
most previously paying members - no longer are. I've never heard a marketing
person talking about "advertising on Flickr". So income is low.

Meanwhile, storage and bandwidth are two of the more expensive things around.

Turning things around could as this thread suggests could greatly improve the
income. But again, I feel surprised there was a Flickr still around to
acquire.

------
stevenicr
I have always loved flickr, and always worrried investor or wall street
pressure would ruin it by causing it to censor more.

Flickr has been able to keep naughty pics and groups and made mini social
network groups that don't require real names. It's a little known bastion of
the old net in some ways.

Now that oauth is pushing these logging / sharing terms updates, I am glad
they are getting rid of flickr. I just hope they don't start censoring more
and become ruined by investors who push mainstream ad revenue acceptance over
having less censored sharing.

I understand they have ways to download your pics in batches to move
elsewhere, however for me it's the groups of people who share similar things,
comments using aliases, community from around the world, others sharing pics
from events I'll likely never be able to visit, and easily creative commons
narrow searches by type of license.

There is no way to download all of that... wonder how as much as possible
could be ported from and to scuttlebutts groups, buddypress systems and the
like.

It was sad watching tumblr and so many others get ruined by greedy overlords,
I hope this great portal does not end the same way, and smugmug will let me
continue as is.

~~~
fencepost
I believe elsewhere in the thread someone stated that SmugMug's terms
(including on content) would also apply to Flickr starting in late May, so
that's something to look into.

~~~
stevenicr
thanks for pointing this out, took me a bit to find the terms. There is this
gem "obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, sexually suggestive, hateful,
harassing, threatening, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, abusive,
inflammatory, fraudulent or otherwise objectionable or harmful, including
without limitation: Photos, Videos or other User Content containing nudity
that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit;"

Looks like they are ruining flickr right out the gate.

thankfully it is quite easy to start a flickr clone these days. buddypress
with rtmedia or mediapress and bam it's done.

I was going to start podcasting with anchor fm, but reading over their terms
it would be trivial for one group to to get another banned easily and vice
versa, so there is no staying power / ownership of data there.

Seeing the loss of data when an account is deactivated at tumblr, fbk, gplus,
or other portals, it's not worth creating a community or group within these
digital sharecropping portals.

~~~
onethumb
Flickr has its own Privacy Policy [0] and Terms of Service [1].

[0] [https://www.smugmug.com/about/privacy-
flickr](https://www.smugmug.com/about/privacy-flickr)

[1] [https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms-
flickr](https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms-flickr)

------
dloprinzi
Hi Don - I'm a long time Flickr user & fan - a "power user" as we're sometimes
called. I also bought a SmugMug Business account about 6 months ago (switched
from Zenfolio), and I must say - I love your service. Your customer service
team is top tier!

I understand you're going to listen to your customers for a while to learn
what they want. So where will you be doing this? Is there a forum you have
lined up where we can discuss? I'd love to join in the conversation!

By the way, you'd be a welcome voice in the Flickr Help Forum if you're so
inclined :-) [https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-
us/72157692729336502/](https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-
us/72157692729336502/)

Thanks for answering our questions - this is going to be really great - very
happy to be along for the ride!

-Darren

------
DEFCON28
Flickr used to be great. Now it's unsuitably bad.

I was a premium Flickr user for years, and then they broke sharing in a big
way. I could no longer send "private" links to people I knew of my photo
albums and expect them to be able to view the photos without signing up for an
account.

I now share simple photo albums with Microsoft Sway.

~~~
anyfoo
Seems like they unbroke it eventually, at least I've been using those private
share links pretty often in the past few months alone.

In fact, the link is the very first thing you get when you click the "Share"
button, no need to click anything else. That feature is actually one of the
primary reasons I'm still a Pro user after all those years, so I'm glad they
seem to still care about it.

EDIT: I think I do vaguely remember that it was broken (or at least
undiscoverable) for a while, so I'm not challenging you, I just wanted to
inform you that it's back better than ever.

------
Groxx
Sounds like fantastic news... though that landing page makes me concerned
about the web perf of smugmug in general :\ _abysmal_ scrolling on chrome and
firefox. Flickr has generally been stable on things like that, at least from
what I've experienced.

I assume the app / site are generally better than this?

------
wpietri
Here's a more detailed article:
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/04/20/smugmug-
buys-...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/04/20/smugmug-buys-flickr-
verizon-oath/537377002/)

~~~
wpietri
And I'll add that I'm excited by this. I have a lot of photos on Flickr, but
fell off using it as Yahoo neglected it. I still don't feel like photos are a
solved problem for me. Hopefully this will at least shake things up, but I'd
love to see them turn again into my favorite tool for managing and sharing my
photos.

~~~
jlarocco
I don't know your use cases, but FWIW I've been really happy with SmugMug.

Browsing and discovering other people's photos is easier on Flickr, but
SmugMug is miles ahead when it comes to hosting, printing, presenting,
tracking, and organizing. Then again, I pay for it, so I'm sure that's part of
it.

I would love if SmugMug kept their existing interface (which I'm sure they
will because a lot of pro-photographers use it and want it the way it is), but
also gave an option to show SmugMug photos on Flickr.

------
fma
Think they'll keep the free 1TB per user? It's what I use to backup and share
photos from my phone.

------
thisone
Interesting, the first thing I ever knew about smugmug was their purchase/data
save of Picturelife[1], and the story on the Reply-All podcast[2] about the
problems Picurelife users were having (err, before the purchase, not after.
The discussion of how things went bad for Picturelife is worth the listen).

[1][https://news.smugmug.com/smugmug-rescues-
nearly-200-million-...](https://news.smugmug.com/smugmug-rescues-
nearly-200-million-priceless-memories-from-picturelife-74a0f7b65dff)

[2] [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/71-the-picture-
taker](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/71-the-picture-taker)

------
promeus
1.Force users out of Yahoo mail accounts. Its a hellish experience. 2.Dont
touch anything related to user groups. 3.Optimize Flickr design with slow
accurate steps. 4.Dont unify design of two services quick. Test hard before
trying to mix features. 5.If you this right, you will be the only place for
professionals and amateurs. The potential is huge, but the risks are there and
in the process if you make really wrong decision.... 6.Focus of this service
must be professional only. And don't touch free service, because flickr is
actually free first pay for more features second. Wish you luck.

------
maxpert
Anything that takes them away from curse of Yahoo! is a blessing for the users
and Flickr.

------
lsb
Imagenet, the dataset upon which many DNNs have trained, has half its images
from Flickr, and it was last updated in 2011. Most of the images from Flickr
have still not been taken down.

It would be wonderful to add to this foundational dataset.

------
geuis
What a terrible design on that page. Just a bunch of stuff moving around on
mobile.

~~~
djsumdog
I agree. I have not heard of Smugmug before now; although I did use to have a
paid Flickr account at one time and I hope they do better with it than Yahoo.

But yes, that announcement page is god awful. The scrolling is slow, over done
and a crazy bandwidth hog. That weird scroll hijacking shit needs to die in a
fire. Some are cute if done right, but lately they're just super over done and
useless.

------
jlarocco
I wonder if they'll put something in place to link accounts for people who
have them with both services. Funny thing is that I used to have a paid Flickr
account, but at some point they downgraded me and stopped taking my money; I
think around the time they bumped up free storage to 1 Tb.

Not a huge deal either way because I haven't uploaded anything to Flickr in
ages, and I imported everything into SmugMug when I signed up, but it'd be
nice to have them unified.

It's also very weird that one of the promo scenes is a dumpster fire. Wouldn't
have been my first choice, but what do I know?

------
Brendinooo
Big fan of SmugMug, and I’ve been thrilled to see the iOS app get better and
better over time. I’ve loved the laser-like focus of the site too.

Here’s hoping SmugMug doesn’t languish or get bloated while they take on
Flickr!

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philipps
Great news. Happy to become a paying Flickr customer again. There still isn’t
a good place to store and share photos where it doesn’t feel like someone else
owns them. Good integration with mobile and reasonably priced storage would be
at the top of my list. And I agree with the overall tenor that then community
is what made Flickr amazing. Happy to contribute to the efforts of bringing
that back. Lots of challenges ahead, but this feels like a good thing for the
internet.

~~~
geerlingguy
Agreed. Definitely would love to pay again now that it’s out of Yahoo’s hands.
I still post batches of event photos, but have stopped participating in many
of the formerly-amazing camera, regional, lens, and hobby-based communities
that endeared me to Flickr at first.

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turbospudnik
PhotoALBM Launches Ultimate Flickr Replacement Service. It is a truly photo-
centric platform for professional photographers and photography enthusiasts
where users upload photos to show off their work while enjoying the work of
others. Think of it as YouTube for photographers.

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aquihire
Soon to be featured on
[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

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eecc
I remember a time when Flickr tried an in-browser photo editor tool. Is it
still there? If so, burn it with fire. Such featuritis, wasting time and
effort to ape functionalities of well established native applications.

I’d suggest integration with native desktop applications, automated tagging
with area crop (trivial these days), doubling down on IRL communities (Meetup
wasn’t ever awarded a patent for that, no?)

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petre
This is great news. Flicks has become infested with ads after the Yahoo
acquisition to such an extent that it made me delete all my photos and close
the account.

I used to post in the street photography groups, had a heavily curated one of
our own. Now I tend to use it more for looking at bicycle mod photos but the
ads in between are so annoying. The only way Flickr could do worse would be
being Pinterest.

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ntompson
Great to see that Flickr is finally getting some love. I’ve hung in there
until now with my pro account - but only just... I’d love to see Explore
fixed. It’s a great concept for enthusiastic amateurs to get noticed, but
these days the bots fill it with garbage by some inscrutable algorithm that
makes the whole thing pointless. Would love to see it fixed.

------
kiwijamo
Great news as a ex-Flickr user who migrated to iPhoto and recently has
recently migrated again to Smugbug! Only downside I've found so far is they
don't support HIEF/RAW/DMG uploads so I had to convert these files to JPEG but
other than that all seems to work as expected. So shouldn't be too many
surprises for those used to Flickr/iPhoto.

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acdha
This is so much better than I’d feared. Closing my Flickr account was one of
those nagging to-do items and I’m really happy to drop it.

~~~
jmcphers
+1. After a couple of years of Yahoo (now Verizon) ownership I knew I needed
to get off the sinking ship, but now I can stay on a little longer. I hope
Smugmug is a better steward.

~~~
acdha
We have a lot of family photos thanks to the permissions model. I was not
looking forward to having to migrate every relative.

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downer68
Jesus christ, that fucking name, though.

    
    
      "smugmug"
    

Can they drop that, and retain flickr, please. _Please?_

~~~
djsumdog
I agree. I had never heard of Smugmug until just now. I want to call it "Smug
hug" or "Smug hub" .. no one is going to remember that name correctly. It's
awful.

~~~
balls187
> I had never heard of Smugmug until just now.

Smugmug's ubiquity is up there with B&H, KEH, FredMiranda and KenRockwell.

------
jarnix
I didn't even know what Smugmug was before today, it does not happen a lot
when a company buys a big player like Flickr!

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Istribitel
I hope that they might consider incorporating some of what made PhotoSIG so
enjoyable. One thing in particular was the ability to search for community
photos by lens type, camera type, film type, location, etc. I know you can do
this with search engines and to some extent in flicker, but I like the way it
was implemented there.

------
grumblepeet
Long term Flickr user here, since the start and a paying customer. In the
groups that I’m active in there is a thriving community and it would be a
shame if that was compromised. I know people here are happy that it is out
from the yoke of Yahoo, but over the years I’ve seen so many products that I
use get bought up, enthusiastically changed, and then ruined or closed down by
the new owners. Please don’t ruin it with arbitrary rules and attempting to
make it “social” like Yahoo did. Despite what I’ve seen in some threads on
here not every feels that a product has got to somehow keep adding features to
be usable or feel alive as a community. It’s the photography that’s important,
not the product and its features.

I guess what I’m sayimg is I’m kind of burned out by products that I love
getting acquired and ruined. I love Flickr and I couldn’t bear to see it go
the same way.

One last thing, I put a lot of artwork there too, drawings and stuff as well
as my photos. Are we going to be penalised for content such as this that
doesn’t fall into what you would call a photo?

Edit: I just read my comment and it sounded negative towards Smugmug. That’s
not my intention. If Flickr had to go somewhere, then I’m glad it’s with the
Smugmug guys. I’ve heard good things about you over the years!

~~~
onethumb
We'll work very hard to not ruin Flickr. After successfully not ruining it,
we'll work even hard to make it better than its already awesome self. ;)

------
Rjevski
Does this mean Flickr is no longer part of the Yahoo/Oath (I have to give them
kudos for having the courage to call themselves "Oath" despite what they do)
privacy nightmare? I've been looking for am Instagram alternative that
respects my privacy and I'm happy to pay good money for it.

------
Markoff
i use flickr as 1TB backup alternative to google photos, bit their app is next
to useless so can't really use it actively for organizing photos as on desktop

so any idea what will happen with free 1TB plan and the app? Google photos is
the only reason i still keep gapps on my phone, it would be great to be able
to rid off it

------
kwhitefoot
As announcements go that's a masterpiece of uselessness. It tells me nothing
about what it means to me as a Flickr user. It doesn't bode well for the
future when there is nothing immediately visible to reassure users that
important features such as 1 TB free storage will remain, etc.

------
mratzloff
I'm a longtime paid Flickr user, but I mostly continue to use it out of
inertia. I'd probably prefer to move to Smugmug at this point—so if Smugmug
wants to save me the effort by migrating my photos themselves, I wouldn't
object...

------
rapathak
I know nothing about the specifics here but I know Don and his respect for
photographers and their creativity. I have 100% confidence that he and the
SmugMug team will do the right thing for the Flickr community. Flickr+SmugMug
FTW!

------
jjwiseman
When has an acquisition like this resulted in the acquired site getting
better?

~~~
Reedx
Not often... But in this case I would bet on it being better than when it was
acquired by Yahoo.

------
lifty
I received the Flickr announcement email 11 times. Am I the only one?

~~~
Vinnl
I'm at 60 now. Looks like something went wrong there...

------
thinkingemote
Flickr Commons is a wonderful free resource for the Internet - free
photography from institutions, libraries and museums. It seemed to go into a
haitus a few years ago.

Will these continue, and expand?

------
ryeguy_24
My favorite use case for Flickr is the iPhone app Auto Upload feature to
backup all my mobile photos. Just an FYI in case you (Smugmug) change or merge
features.

------
cJ0th
Cool with me as long as they keep their humans.txt
[https://flickr.com/humans.txt](https://flickr.com/humans.txt)

------
scottybowl
As stupid as it sounds, I stopped using Flickr because I was forced to use a
Yahoo account. I just wanted to login, not have another useless email account.

~~~
dloprinzi
Actually I don't think you're alone. Seems to have been a nagging issue for
quite some tome, but the good news is the Yahoo login mechanism will soon be
gone.

------
ant6n
I was expecting some press release, but this website is just moving colors or
something. I can't visually parse it. Is there a plain-text version?

------
yardie
So what will happen to users who have a smugmug and Flickr account? Will they
do an almost merge ala Google and YouTube?

~~~
onethumb
We're not planning on merging the products, but we realize there are customers
with both that might like them to be even easier to use together. I don't know
what shape that'll look like yet, or when you might expect it, but I'm excited
to dig in and find out.

~~~
NJHeart2Heart
I'm a longtime Flickr paid user (still am, as others have said, mostly from
inertia). I am curious, if Flickr and Smugmug will stay separate, what
differences between the two will be highlighted/ upgraded? What does the new
owner envision will be their respective "expertise". For now I'll stick with
Flickr, but I'd love to learn more about how Flickr and Smugmug will be
similar and more importantly, different. There are so many photographers out
there - differing quality, attention span, interests, and purposes.. so time
will tell if/what niches these two entities will be touted to meet best.

------
thefifthsetpin
That page is crazy. Are they trying to emulate fixed positioning with js
updates of some other positioning?

------
orasis
Holy crap, congrats guys! I remember meeting you guys at Foo Camp waay back in
the day. Way to stay after it!

------
kjgkjhfkjf
The design of this site is simultaneously awesome and exhausting. I closed the
tab halfway down the page.

------
justinph
Makes me kind of regret deleting my account when they got sold to Verizon as
part of the Yahoo! deal.

------
hexenhammer
SmugMug is fantastic. I can’t say it enough, I am truly thrilled about this.

------
CNJ7654
...Or as I've recently taken to calling it, Smugmug plus Flickr.

------
himom
I take it Verizon (Oath) is breaking up, selling, absorbing and dissolving
Yahoo properties. AOL mail isn’t long for this world, although I’m sure an
email hosting company would love to buy that user-base of elders and tech
luddites.

------
icc97
There's a similarity to pinboard buying delicious.

------
ghostcluster
how _confident_ of them to use YouTube for this announcement rather than
flickr's own video hosting service.

~~~
onethumb
Best tool for the job. SmugMug does video, too, but there's no-one in the
world that does video as well as YouTube for this sort of thing. That's ok -
we're way better at photos than YouTube is. :)

------
abledon
Oh how the mighty have fallen!

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455
it's googke or alphabet

~~~
455
oh yeah the fonts there, couuld they be searching for hrc video using ml...

------
himom
When I heard Flickr, I don’t know why I immediately thought of Chad Hurley of
Youtube, Hlaska and Delicious (not Flickr). Hurley is super awesome btw.

------
marc104
I am pro paying user of flickr since more than 10 years With over 140 millions
views and 15000 followers I am doing mostly artistic nudes and sharing ideas
and experience with other photographers in the same domain. flickr was one of
the only place i found where i could share this content with adequate curation
If smugmug policy is applied , it will delete 90% of my content and 10 years
of effort in buidling a network around my work

