
SmugMug emails subscribers with request to find more paying users - hellisothers
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/flickr-owner-smugmug-emails-subscribers-with-an-urgent-request-help-us-find-more-paying-users/
======
cyberjunkie
I have so many mixed feelings about this. I've always been a big Flickr fan. I
absolutely loved the Explore section.

It had a set of really nice photos that I would spend every evening after
working, browsing, sipping on a cup of tea and listening to music. I find some
fun groups, some people who click some great photos on some really impressive
gear which I don't own, but I would love to. The quality of Explore dropped
drastically, sometimes showing up weird, creepy things, or something just
random photos. It didn’t seem curated at all.

Fast-forward to recent times, I've seen Flickr bought and sold, schemes
changed and more. There have been times of instability on the site, the Yahoo!
login has been a pain. Performance has been erratic as a whole.

At a time where Instagram, Google Photos (and other cunning) services are the
only healthy (in terms of users), ‘social’ photo hosting services, Flickr to
my naive mind stands out so I don't want to see it go away. I started paying
for a Flickr Pro to support it, even backed up my entire photo base to it.
Now, I’m not sure if I need find alternatives

I feel the e-mail sounds more personal, than the usual two-faced PR spiel we
see from larger corporations. It's nice that Smugmug appears to have good
intentions, but it hasn't treated Flickr too well either. Logins have been
broken in the recent past, there have been several outages, terrible migration
attempts that almost speak of incompetence. Of late, it says I can't login
using Firefox. Once logged in (after setting a different User Agent), it works
perfectly fine.

So I really don't know what to feel.

~~~
techsupporter
I would have stayed with Flickr post-acquisition and likely even upgraded to a
Pro account out of a sense of support.

That all went out the window when SmugMug decided to force a mandatory binding
arbitration clause on its users, just like Verizon wanted to do to users who
remained with OATH/Yahoo. I clicked on every link and followed every process I
could to make sure my logins were closed out on either side and walked away.

I expect bullshit like that from companies like Verizon but not from "a
thriving, family-owned and -operated business that cares deeply about
photographers." Both companies should know better but I'm making the
(obviously incorrect) assumption that SmugMug values caring more about
respecting its users.

> Of late, it says I can't login using Firefox. Once logged in (after setting
> a different User Agent), it works perfectly fine.

This is icing on the crappy cupcake.

~~~
Hnrobert42
Haha. I thought I was the only one swimming upstream against binding
arbitration. Just last night, after reading the absurdly long Zynga ToS
update, I contacted them to opt out of binding arbitration. During the whole
thing, the devil on my shoulder was saying, “You’re an idiot. This doesn’t
matter. Let it go.”

------
Nrbelex
Only four months ago, the same CEO said here at HN:

>I hope you'll stick it out with us, because we're nearly done migrating one
of the largest web services on the planet, which means we get to focus on
building again instead of just copying. The future is bright.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649186)

I've been a Flickr user for 13 years, and I can't say I'm surprised it's back
in a precarious state. The sense that it could close up or drastically change
(for the worse) has always been one of its defining characteristics. This is
only the most recent in a string of disappointments following commitments to
reinvigoration by successive owners. I remember telling Marissa Mayer, in
person, thanks for investing in Flickr under Yahoo when they invited users to
their relaunch
[[https://www.flickr.com/photos/nrbelex/8766466511/in/album-72...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/nrbelex/8766466511/in/album-72157633572443128/)].
Almost immediately Yahoo lost interest. They made some minor UI changes, but
the service as a whole languished. They probably came to the same conclusion:
there's virtually no realistic path to profitability.

At this point, Flickr is simply too lumbering to become a competitor to
Instagram. That's probably for the best. If they'd tried to make Flickr an
Instagram clone, they'd probably have lost what few remaining dedicated users
exist. The platform emphasizes the photos, and the community, or at least
parts of it if you know where to look, really is focused on high quality
images.

It's a particular bummer because Flickr is one of those services that's
supposed to prove that a service can be primarily subscription-supported
rather than ad supported if the product is good enough. If Flickr can't pull
it off, even with a seemingly the best possible owner, what hope do other
online services have? Flickr can and has jacked up pro prices--which is fine,
frankly--but as this email makes clear, it probably won't be enough.

------
nstart
What I don't understand here is why SmugMug bought Flickr in the first place.
Smugmug is such a great example of how to build a profitable photo
storing/sharing-ish business, that to buy a service that is bleeding money
without a path to break even seems like such an odd choice.

~~~
xeromal
If you take their message at face value, they bought flickr just because they
thought they should save it.

If you can't believe that, feel free to come up with any conspiracy you want.

~~~
xwowsersx
I'm not sure what this adds. "They thought they should have it"? That just
begs the question...

~~~
anyfoo
Save it, not have it.

~~~
xwowsersx
OMG my bad. Thanks hahah

~~~
Hnrobert42
It’s so nice to see internet discussions resolved amicably. ️

------
kick
Why AWS? It'd doubtlessly be cheaper to throw Flickr onto dedicated servers
(by a _ton_ ). It would also probably help if they freed the source code of
Flickr, so others could contribute and make it lighter to run.

A site like Flickr is _exactly_ what you want to keep as far away from AWS as
possible.

~~~
sansnomme
Stackexchange is probably one of the only companies that's doing hardware
efficiently.

[https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-
ar...](https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-
architecture-2016-edition/)

Everyone else is more than happy to give more money to cloud hosting
companies.

~~~
kick
Somewhere on codinghorror.com, Jeff Atwood has a really good post on this.

~~~
vladd
Are you talking about "The Cloud is Just Someone Else's Computer"?

If so, it's available at [https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-
someone-else...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-
elses-computer/)

------
sdan
Where are former customer going? Where are people looking to host photos going
nowadays? Just want to survey HN.

Personally, although I am relatively hardcore on privacy, I go with Google
Photos on an anonymous account (I know that since it's Google, nothing is
truly anonymous, but from the steps I've taken hopefully it's a bit more
sanitized) because their AI can filter and organize my photos is ways that I
simply don't have the time to do.

~~~
mceachen
I got sick of site after site closing down along with my albums, or, worse,
using my metadata to feed the panopticon, so I quit my job to build an
alternative. It's early days still, but ML auto tagging is on the horizon.
Runs on desktops, servers, and within docker. Details in my profile.

~~~
lonelappde
Join up with this person
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21842347](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21842347)

We don't need more half-attempts.

~~~
mceachen
Thanks for your suggestion.

PhotoStructure already has the best metadata inference and asset de-
duplicating system that I'm aware of.

It scales to millions of asset files, works cross-platform, handles JPG, RAW,
and transcodes videos to web-browsable formats automatically.

I haven't used an open-source project yet that didn't fall over after the
first several thousand imports, and none de-dupe (not just the same SHA, mind
you, but the semantically equivalent image, based on both metadata and
rotation-invariant image content). They also tend to be abandoned when the
original author moves on due personal reasons, toxic comments, or the "v2
rewrite" effort collapses under it's own weight.

------
chewz
Personal Photo Management powered by Go and Google TensorFlow -
[https://demo.photoprism.org/](https://demo.photoprism.org/)

[]
[https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism](https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism)

~~~
pritambarhate
That demo works quite fast. Can you please let us know what kind of hardware
are you using to deploy this? Any secret sauce to make it load fast?

------
outime
It’d be very sad to see Flickr die. I started amateur photography many years
ago and immediately signed up and even paid pro account for years. After I got
busy with other stuff I stopped paying it, but still is my main place for
photos and even sold a few just because of the exposure.

I guess it’s getting a bit desperate if they have to ask for subscriptions via
email. Also the fact that they moved to AWS for a service that depends so much
on data transfer makes me think it’ll get even tougher to survive. I hope I’m
wrong.

------
Oras
I have received the email yesterday, been a Flickr user for 10 years. I had
mixed feelings as I really like Flickr but at the same time how would the
subscription save the company? The email didn't mention numbers of pro
accounts required to break even or reduce the loss. At the same time, I
thought we they didn't put some adverts for non-Pro memebers to test if this
would help to provide a new income stream which might worth more than a Pro
subscription.

------
bepvte
[https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Flickr](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Flickr)

------
aaronbrethorst
I renewed my Flickr Pro subscription for the first time in a few years after
SmugMug's acquisition, but I barely ended up using the site, and let it lapse
a month or so ago. It bums me out to say it, but I think photography might
have moved on from Flickr. I know mine has, at least.

~~~
rpastuszak
But, where? I’m genuinely curious about alternatives.

Insta is a like driven mess, with almost no possibility for constructive
feedback, thoughtful discussions about photography, critique.

500px had a decent UX, incl. galleries, comments, but quickly became a
formula-driven, Instagram-like monster.

Reddit... has decent communities, but it’s features are limited, the right UX
just isn’t there.

Is this a niche that can be filled easily (community vs. black magic/algo-
driven discovery, archiving and photo critique)? Or, is this just a really
hard problem to solve in a sustainable (financially) way?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
None of the above. I found a local darkroom and a group of likeminded
photographers with whom I have regular critique sessions. I don’t find online
critique to be useful for the directions in which I’ve been taking my work
over the past couple years.

More casual stuff gets posted on IG.

~~~
rpastuszak
Thanks, I'm wondering if online critique is just hard in general or if the
issue stems mostly from poor UX and/or algo driven discovery promoting content
that appeals to the majority whilst sacrificing more risky, unusual work.

Also, care to share a portfolio/IG?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
My portfolio, sadly out of date, is here:
[http://www.aaronbrethorstphotography.com](http://www.aaronbrethorstphotography.com)

My Flickr page is here:
[https://flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst](https://flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst)

Instagram:
[https://www.instagram.com/aaronbrethorst/](https://www.instagram.com/aaronbrethorst/)

------
olliej
How much of the running costs of Flickr are from hosting the free portion? How
much does the paid portion cost?

Mostly I’m wondering, is there any value to having the free portion anymore?

~~~
lathiat
In most cases it's a valuable gateway to getting new users

They already removed all but 1000 photos from free accounts, which given
they're now paying AWS per byte for storage makes sense I guess.

~~~
olliej
It’s more what is the functional cost of acquisition, and is it less than the
per user revenue of the paid acccounts?

