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.
Chris was the founder of fatbrain which went the ”traditional way”. So I guess he learned a few things there.
What’s interesting about photo related business is that longevity really matters. It’s hard to imagine handing your family memories to a fast-pivot-exit-happy “startup”. There are many YC companies founded in this area but none had survived so far?
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.
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.
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.
Since you're here, may I voice a thing I really enjoyed about Flickr? Community and actual human communication.
Perhaps in the mobile era this isn't possible anymore since everyone is attention starved and tiny screens and keyboards aren't conducive to longform communication, but this was Flickr's strength.
You'd find a group where your photos were relevant and start conversations with strangers halfway around the world. The ability for groups to self-moderate is key because it kept groups on topic. I just poked around some communities I used to frequent like Hardcore Street Photography [0] and Guess Where SF [1], and they're surprisingly still habited.
Instead of trying to be another Instagram, I hope the future of Flickr will play to its strengths.
Back in 2006 or so when I last used Flickr, one of my biggest problems was spam and noise. One of the biggest annoyances was the constant comments from "award groups" that wanted you to join them, enticing you with some arbitrary "award", which consisted of some kind of gaudy badge.
To be honest, most of the Flickr groups seemed completely useless, full of HDR junk and asinine motivational stuff. Though I'm sure it's a bit like Reddit — the good communities are small and hidden.
Follower spam is another example of noise, and something Instagram is also rife with.
There are good dedicated groups with good curation. It takes a bit of lurking to find them. There are really good groups dedicated to specific genders of photography like Film only, or Documentary or Street Photography.
The good ones kept those gaudy things at arm's length. Some of these groups have a bit if an attitude at first, but as they get to know you and your dedication, they will warm up to you.
I like the idea of building a reputation system that accepts bots as first class citizens instead of imagining them as an inherent problem. Anyone who meaningfully contributes is good even if they are a bot, and anyone who doesn’t gets left behind. (Easier said than done but the approach to the problem is what’s fundamentally different.)
Reputation systems, if they try too hard, quickly reach a point where ambitious fakes are more successful at convincing the system than casual real users.
Case in point: Google visibility, if you are not Wikipedia no amount of quality content will get you above the link farms if you don't also follow the customary rites of pleasing the algorithm.
reddit (or some reddit users, it's hard to know) does this. There's a bot crawling around and whenever someone replies to a bot saying "good bot" or "bad bot" it updates a ranking.
Bots can definitely contribute meaningfully in many ways. Mostly through organization (suggesting labels & other metadata, album creation, etc), spam filtering & rule enforcement (like reddit's automoderator), and even automatic editing (like some of the stuff Google Photos offers, like rotation suggestions and various automatic filters).
Custom moderator automation would be a very valuable tool, bots are terrible at beating bespoke solutions. Is there some open source Amazon lambda clone that community platforms could easily make available to their power users? Funneling automaton onto a platform runtime could be extremely helpful in distinguishing between good and bad automation.
Awesome. In retrospect, apologies if my initial post was glaringly obvious. I think many of us here are nostalgic for a revival of Flickr and a community outside Facebook & Reddit.
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.
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.
Yeah I'm stuck in Yahoo purgatory too. I have a Flickr account pointing at a valid email address, and an existing desktop and mobile session for that Flickr account. However, I can't actually create a new session by logging in because Yahoo wants to do its 2FA thing with a defunct email address. I can't add a valid email address to the Yahoo account because I need to create a new session to do this. The defunct address itself is no longer associated with the Flickr account and Yahoo/Verizon support has formally abandoned account support.
I’m the same. Worst part is, I’m pretty sure I know the account. But eh aside from getting access to that account, I have all those photos, so less stress there :)
same. I tried connecting with yahoo support a few times and I can even see the public photos of one of my accounts but cannot login or download the originals, and they could not reconcile my yahoo login account with my flickr account.
I also allowed my Flickr pro-membership to lapse last month, simply because I couldn’t remember the Yahoo login that’d been forced on me a few years ago.
I received a reminder to my normal email address, but when I tried to reset the login, the secondary email was apparently something different and probably another arbitrary Yahoo address that I’d never ever used, so at that point I gave up trying to give them my money.
I’m hoping Flickr will get some serious love now. I echo the calls to make it image-focused and inclusive. I agree with others about getting rid of the stupid, self-appointed ‘awards’ spam, and about speeding-up the site generally. I doubt it needs all of that browser-crashing, CPU-intensive javascript.
Me too! I used to be a paying customer (in 2005-2006 I think) and then when the login procedure changed to Yahoo, I could never figure out how it worked. I just stopped using it.
I never lost any image and I'm now a happy Smugmug user/customer (ha!), so I don't really care about that anymore -- but yes, the login process is important! Many users would rather change shop than put up with crazy login procedures.
I've been a Pro user of Flickr since 2005 or so. I actually thought for the first time this year that I would cancel it. My number-one complaint is speed. It's so slow. As a professional infrastructure guy, it just kills me and I wished I could buy the company myself and make it fast again. I really hope you will invest in revitalizing this service because I really don't want to go.
My life--from young skier/mountaineer guy--to Army soldier--to dating a girl--marriage--kids--it's all documented there. I look at my old photos all the time but it's just so unbearably slow.
On it. We were a pre-launch customer of AWS, so we've been building both modern and at scale for quite some time. Super-talented team at Flickr, I can't wait to see what we can do together.
Since you're here and talking about community, can you say what your approach is going to be to the copious content on Flickr that violates SmugMug's content policy (but not Flickr's)?
Flickr's approach in the past [0] has allowed most things as long as a content filter is applied to keep it from kids and those who don't want to see it. SmugMug's approach [1] is to very broadly ban anything "indecent" in any context whatsoever (even private backups).
I contacted support and the story right now is that SmugMug policy will apply and any Flickr content that violates it is up for removal. Are you sticking to that? If so, why? It seems like a very destructive thing to do to the community as your first act after acquisition.
Flickr has its own Privacy Policy [0] and Terms of Service [1], separate and different from SmugMug's. I actually think this represents a good opportunity to revisit, and possibly update, what is and isn't allowed on SmugMug as well, something we haven't done in ages. We'll see, still learning. :)
Greetings Don. Always had a place in my heart for Flickr. Would love to see if thrive again. My gut sez there's a pretty big space between (the disposalness of) Instagram and the (heavy handiness of) 500px.
Maybe you agree. I guess we'll find out. I wish y'all the best. Fun and competition is a positive for all.
I'm in heavy learning mode so I don't have these answers yet. I wish I did.
The way I run SmugMug is pretty simple: We love our customers, we listen to them, we build great experiences for them based on that feedback, then we do it all over again. We're going to apply that same approach to Flickr.
Simply migrating them into AWS, and getting off of Yahoo Auth, and the variety of other urgent issues, will take a lot of time, effort, energy, etc. But we're also very excited to get to work enhancing the existing experiences and building new ones.
So please be patient with me as I learn, come up to speed, and tackle some of the big obstacles in front of us. It'll be worth it. :)
I've been a Flickr pro user since 2007, and I still think it's the only site and community that is truly dedicated to serious photography. I think the site languished at the advent of the ubiquity of mobile browsing (be it app or even mobile site), and suffered from certain trends that yielded a strange mix of infinite scrolling and wonky pagination (I still have trouble finding my own photos).
I'm hoping for the best, and excited for new blood.
In terms of communities where you can get the most qualified person on a topic to reply, I think Quora would also qualify, and to a limited extent, Twitter.
Quora really seemed nice until they started publish everything I did there. I also think they had a real name policy. (At least thats how I remember it.)
They might have fixed that now but I feel it would take quite some effort for them to make them feel safe again.
Reddit has a tendency to gain so much momentum that companies can't ignore people that are having problems like this. In that case, you often see a rep from the company log in and start triageing the situation.
Don here is clearly much more on top of the situation than that, but my point is that any big social site ends up seeing this with enough outrage.
I don’t think that facebook facilitates this well. Since you have to go out of your way to find a discussion there. And there is no “right now” feeling if you do find a relevant discussion. But here I just visited the home page of what I consider a general newsfeed and we’re talking to their new owners.
Hi Don, I have been a pro member of Flickr since 2008. I love the product and I'm very excited by this acquisition.
What I really would like to see in Flickr is a reliable upload application. When I'm back from a trip, I usually have a few gigabytes of photos. Regular applications can handle small (hundreds megabytes) batches but when you are talking about gigabytes they start crashing, or stopping in the middle, and cannot continue where they stopped reliably. I would like an application that uploads to Flickr, with retries, status, and with checksum verification on the client and in the server.
The same is true for download. Flickr handle well individual downloads and small batches of download. But when trying to download large albums they simple cannot handle it.
I have been writing my own applications and scripts to handle my photos on Flickr, so it's absolutely important to keep the current API open.
@silveira would any of your applications work on linux and if so would you be willing to share? I've been trying to download my Flickr photographs and so far only single image download works for me.
Hey Don, I have been on flickr since 2010 and I have been subscribed to Flickr's "Pro" service for several years.
I rely a lot on those statistics to generate more views and contacts
I would also like an expansion and more detailed analysis
Why can't I know WHICH picture was found through Google
(You don't, you say there were X finds through Google, but we can't see which picture)?
Why don't you show the Google Search URL?
Looking at SmugMug price plans you are MUCH more expensive than Flickr,
are you going to be raising PRO costs? And if you do, are you going to pull
the PR stunt of saying it is needed to "To Grow and Improve" and"We think the services offered are at the best price point, there is always free" ? Because Free is not a middle ground.
Because you acquired Flickr, you knew what was coming with it, IE, customers, there is no way to pass raising Tariffs without upsetting your New user base which has never asked for you and is tired of being thrown around from one company to another.and saying you have "no plans for the immediate future" it really does seem that you care more about your increased bourse instead of offering your clients an increased experience?
Are you going to include website hosting services to flickr users within the PRO price and go after 500px, or will you Keep the two Services very clear of each other for a different experience?
If you are keeping the two Services Separate, then aren't you really just here to collect a bigger check? If Yahoo / Verizon / Oath was not willing to spend money to upgrade our services and gain more users and you are, wouldn't this mean our subscription fees will increase?
Why should we remain here instead of going to 500px which offers a similar service to you but for much cheaper?
I had a quick look over their pricing plans, and they actually seem pretty fair to me. $48 per year to store all of your photos on the basic paid tier, and all the other tiers seemed aimed at people that are either enthusiasts or professionals, eg people who want to have their own domain.
The old adage of "you kind of get what you pay for" seems to apply.
I suspect that using your own domain for large volumes of photos still adds significant indirect time and energy cost of fiddling around with separate front end and mass storage backend. A bunch of time spent tweaking to keep full images and smaller versions organized and quick while not paying a premium for storage is a cost, and those hours have value.
Hi Don, great to hear. Paying Flickr customer for many years. One thing we lost recently was the ability to post a Tweet directly from the Flickr mobile app. I think the way Apple/Twitter interacts changed with an iOS upgrade.
I really don’t want to use another platform for storing my photos, even Twitter stream photos, and having Flickr, where I am in control was always my preferred choice.
Looking forward to keep using Flickr where the owners actually care.
I don't know yet, I'm still learning and coming up to speed. That being said, 1TB free is definitely a massive outlier on the Internet. We'll see.
SmugMug has offered unlimited storage for more than 15 years, so we know a lot about the space. I'm excited to see what we can do with and for the community.
I still have an account. If there was a reasonably priced, full featured Flickr I would resubscribe.
I have a smugmug account. Is there going to be a way to marry the two??? I have 11 years of photos on Flickr and would hate to have to move them (your sys people would hate it too I’m sure).
We know we don't want to merge the two. They're both super valuable, offer two different & great experiences, etc.
But logically, it makes sense that connecting them somehow makes a lot of sense. SmugMug has consumed the Flickr API for awhile, so some of the plumbing is already in place.
Stay tuned while we learn from our customers what they'd like and then build it. My hunch is better connectivity between the two services is going to be high on the list, but I'm going to let our customers drive that decision.
Hi Don, been paying for Flickr and looking lustfully at SmugMug for a long time, user back when Game Neverending was still mixed in. Bought accounts for all my family too. Looking forward to work.
This is the very best thing that could have happened to Flickr. The only other long term option would have been a mausoleum at archive.org or Archive Team.
Hi Don, I hope you are able to see my post, I think I became a bit invisible here, but I just want to take the opportunity to thank you for all those ZFS filer reviews, back in the day. This had a profound utility for us, which I will date to mention, now shuttered fifteen years ago due to the sudden death of my co-founder and best friend, we were so struck by what you guys were doing that we spent ten man years on a competitor... Ahm, no, no we didn't actually intend to compete, that would have been unable to pass my late co-founder's stringent "is it any good?" test, where I had to convince him as nauseam we had no negative motivation..but we thought we saw a higher end need for photo hosting, in the advertising world, where we saw that a readily available search and lightbox app, like you see at Corbis, or Getty, plus of course actually reliable storage, would be in immediate demand from photographers who liaise with ADs, everywhere. We had nifty features like rendering photos for the display capability, and were planning to hook up deals where the AD could subscribe to get so many 10 by 8 or larger proofs bikes to them, potentially from the nearest photographer who upheld a minimum process standard. This had ambition to take on digital advertising delivery. We thought smugmug was the game changer able to bring credibility to our dream of expanding access to lucrative agency work, to normal photographers. So we set about making the tools... even the dot com is long lost during my life's upheavals that followed from personal loss in large part, I grew up knowing my co-founder, but I think we've still got the unused Twitter handle. It was to be called PhotoAlta. Or PA (short for Photo Agency, which we thought was cute) . This is still a dream about opening the industry in ways that can make advertising affordable to small businesses, which is simply not at all the case now. In 03/04/05, we didn't see the hockey stick of the cloud, not at all clearly anyhow, but we knew that rather than bike proofs about, we'd rather provide on demand runtimes of proofing software, fronted by preconfiguration and parameter checks for avoiding waste. There's a realm of incredibly expensive software loosely categorised as pre press, that we desperately wanted to democratize. This expense was the hurdle to starting out business almost a decade earlier, and I've never been far from my work for opening the advertising industry economy, so random as this is, shame faced and also humbly if you are at all interested in what I'm on about here, I'd simply be delighted to pass on, unreservedly, to where it may do some good.
> long believed that Flickr should have doubled down on their existing users instead of trying to become another Instagram.
I don’t really remember Flickr trying to become another Instagram, but much of the founding team had left Flickr before Instagram was a thing and the more of the Flickr founding team in the early years of Instagram.
These article writers miss the mark (IMHO) by comparing Flickr to Facebook and Instagram. Those instant gratification platforms ruin photos by sub-sampling uploads. When I share my photos on Flickr (pro account), they’re available in full resolution.
Yes FB and Insta compete with Flickr for eyeballs, but for real photography sharing, there is no competition there. Flickr wins.
If anything, SmugMug is (was) competing with Flickr.
Yes I was confused when I recently started uploading to Instagram that I couldn't find a way to view photos at 100%.
But in a way that's clever; I think reflects their intention to capture spontaneous moments, regardless of technical merit. You can't zoom-in to be wowed by 50MP of detail and thus it puts everyone on the same level, regardless of tools, and focuses them on composition and timing.
is there really a need to force everybody to the same level? I don’t think that it is a competition, people just share their moments. why equalize everybody’s photos to same crappy quality?
Because the types of moments or compositions that Instagram chooses to focus on are low resolution. 50mp is great for a large print, and Hasselblad sharpness, and 10 lights. But Instagram chooses to offer noise and color filter to everyone with a smartphone, so they can make their salad or dog look cool. I have lots of lenses and I love instagram, because I don't have to worry about pixel peepers and get genuine feedback.
I think the focus on community is paramount. Make it into a Photographer's go-to watering hole.
Serious groups like organizing shows, workshops, quality book printing, blogging (for news and events), and better ways to organize and display photos of interest [group a series of photos regardless of member [so long as the photo was public] --like the group pool stream but allow to showcase photos from sources other then "this group" or "my stream".
I currently pay for Dropbox solely to store RAW files.
If you're under 1TB (on a personal/professional account), you might also test whether Onedrive would work for you - particularly if you're on Windows 10 where Files On-demand is now integrated into the OS.
If nothing else, the bulk storage cost of Onedrive is somewhere around half the cost of Dropbox.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Agreed. I’ve had some of my CC photos used, with attribution, by company websites and blogs. And been notified politely as to their use. I’m sure some have been used without my knowledge, but I’m ok with that.
I’ve also been a pro subscriber since 2008. And even though Flickr has been languishing on simmer since, well, its inception, I keep my pro sub active, and upload new content (although not at the feverish pace of T Hawk!) :-O
Smug: looking forward to Flickr's future.
"It's great that you can dial in whichever level of CC licensing you want and then grab some photos for marketing or wireframing."
A friend used a site that had those sorts of free use licenses, and then got hit by the Getty lawyers: It turned out that someone was just taking stock images and posting them on their own account with a gratis license, which of course does nothing to excuse the people trusting it in faith.
I just used Flickr this last month after a LONG hiatus for a new reason. Wanted a site to make a shareable link to otherwise private photos for friends and family to see our in-progress trip. I hate Facebook and would be a hypocrite to post the pics to Instagram.
Worked really well to upload photos from phone to a private repo. Captions, and a link in the SHARE TO camera library.
Not everyone wants a travel blog. Current Flickr worked well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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. :)
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!
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.
Yah I'm on a 2016 15" MBP running 10.13.4 and Safari 11.1 and the site is almost unusable for me. If you want more specific information or would like me to test fixes you can email me at my user name @ gmail.com
The <div class="top-shadow"> covers the scroll bar at the top of the browser window (in Firefox) effectively rendering the scroll bar disabled for the top 1/3 of the window. Additionally, page down and space keys are disabled for navigation. I'm not sure its possible to scroll using any key on the keyboard.
I didn't even notice there was animation, I scrolled past too quickly. Visiting it again you have to wait a large number of seconds (for something to download presumably) before the animation starts.
On chrome I cannot use the scrollbar by scrolling whilst the youtube is in eyeshot, but I can use the scrollbar by clicking above/below the slider. Weird. They need to simplify.
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).
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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?)
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.
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.
+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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
Flickr doesn't really do videos though. Yea, you can upload them but playback is limited to just 3 minutes and it doesn't really have tools to work with videos.
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.
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.
They've finally secured enough capital to buy a vowel and call it http://flicker.com -- but just to be backwards compatible they also got http://smugmg.com .
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.
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.
What’s interesting about photo related business is that longevity really matters. It’s hard to imagine handing your family memories to a fast-pivot-exit-happy “startup”. There are many YC companies founded in this area but none had survived so far?
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.
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"
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-...
Since you're here, may I voice a thing I really enjoyed about Flickr? Community and actual human communication.
Perhaps in the mobile era this isn't possible anymore since everyone is attention starved and tiny screens and keyboards aren't conducive to longform communication, but this was Flickr's strength.
You'd find a group where your photos were relevant and start conversations with strangers halfway around the world. The ability for groups to self-moderate is key because it kept groups on topic. I just poked around some communities I used to frequent like Hardcore Street Photography [0] and Guess Where SF [1], and they're surprisingly still habited.
Instead of trying to be another Instagram, I hope the future of Flickr will play to its strengths.
[0] https://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/
[1] https://www.flickr.com/groups/guesswheresf
To be honest, most of the Flickr groups seemed completely useless, full of HDR junk and asinine motivational stuff. Though I'm sure it's a bit like Reddit — the good communities are small and hidden.
Follower spam is another example of noise, and something Instagram is also rife with.
The good ones kept those gaudy things at arm's length. Some of these groups have a bit if an attitude at first, but as they get to know you and your dedication, they will warm up to you.
Social media does have tough challenges ahead, especially as bots/spam become more and more prevalent.
I would love to work on a bot-prevention team somewhere, but my background isn't in ML.
Case in point: Google visibility, if you are not Wikipedia no amount of quality content will get you above the link farms if you don't also follow the customary rites of pleasing the algorithm.
Bots can definitely contribute meaningfully in many ways. Mostly through organization (suggesting labels & other metadata, album creation, etc), spam filtering & rule enforcement (like reddit's automoderator), and even automatic editing (like some of the stuff Google Photos offers, like rotation suggestions and various automatic filters).
vOv
So what will replace it? I've been a Flickr user for more than 10 years.
I never lost any image and I'm now a happy Smugmug user/customer (ha!), so I don't really care about that anymore -- but yes, the login process is important! Many users would rather change shop than put up with crazy login procedures.
I've been a Pro user of Flickr since 2005 or so. I actually thought for the first time this year that I would cancel it. My number-one complaint is speed. It's so slow. As a professional infrastructure guy, it just kills me and I wished I could buy the company myself and make it fast again. I really hope you will invest in revitalizing this service because I really don't want to go.
My life--from young skier/mountaineer guy--to Army soldier--to dating a girl--marriage--kids--it's all documented there. I look at my old photos all the time but it's just so unbearably slow.
Chris aka https://flickr.com/photos/Defender90
Since you're here and talking about community, can you say what your approach is going to be to the copious content on Flickr that violates SmugMug's content policy (but not Flickr's)?
Flickr's approach in the past [0] has allowed most things as long as a content filter is applied to keep it from kids and those who don't want to see it. SmugMug's approach [1] is to very broadly ban anything "indecent" in any context whatsoever (even private backups).
I contacted support and the story right now is that SmugMug policy will apply and any Flickr content that violates it is up for removal. Are you sticking to that? If so, why? It seems like a very destructive thing to do to the community as your first act after acquisition.
[0] https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines
[1] https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms
[0] https://www.smugmug.com/about/privacy-flickr
[1] https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms-flickr
Maybe you agree. I guess we'll find out. I wish y'all the best. Fun and competition is a positive for all.
Some questions: 1. Are you going to keep the 1TB free space for everyone?
2. Do you think you'll have a desktop uploader available for non-paying users?
3. What about open-source integration (digiKam, etc)? Last time I tried, I couldn't get it to work with Yahoo authentication.
Thanks, and looking forward to the new life :)
The way I run SmugMug is pretty simple: We love our customers, we listen to them, we build great experiences for them based on that feedback, then we do it all over again. We're going to apply that same approach to Flickr.
Simply migrating them into AWS, and getting off of Yahoo Auth, and the variety of other urgent issues, will take a lot of time, effort, energy, etc. But we're also very excited to get to work enhancing the existing experiences and building new ones.
So please be patient with me as I learn, come up to speed, and tackle some of the big obstacles in front of us. It'll be worth it. :)
I'm hoping for the best, and excited for new blood.
They might have fixed that now but I feel it would take quite some effort for them to make them feel safe again.
Don here is clearly much more on top of the situation than that, but my point is that any big social site ends up seeing this with enough outrage.
And when something is big enough news, it makes it to the top-10 news thing on the right-hand side of Facebook.
What I really would like to see in Flickr is a reliable upload application. When I'm back from a trip, I usually have a few gigabytes of photos. Regular applications can handle small (hundreds megabytes) batches but when you are talking about gigabytes they start crashing, or stopping in the middle, and cannot continue where they stopped reliably. I would like an application that uploads to Flickr, with retries, status, and with checksum verification on the client and in the server.
The same is true for download. Flickr handle well individual downloads and small batches of download. But when trying to download large albums they simple cannot handle it.
I have been writing my own applications and scripts to handle my photos on Flickr, so it's absolutely important to keep the current API open.
I rely a lot on those statistics to generate more views and contacts I would also like an expansion and more detailed analysis Why can't I know WHICH picture was found through Google (You don't, you say there were X finds through Google, but we can't see which picture)? Why don't you show the Google Search URL?
Looking at SmugMug price plans you are MUCH more expensive than Flickr, are you going to be raising PRO costs? And if you do, are you going to pull the PR stunt of saying it is needed to "To Grow and Improve" and"We think the services offered are at the best price point, there is always free" ? Because Free is not a middle ground.
Because you acquired Flickr, you knew what was coming with it, IE, customers, there is no way to pass raising Tariffs without upsetting your New user base which has never asked for you and is tired of being thrown around from one company to another.and saying you have "no plans for the immediate future" it really does seem that you care more about your increased bourse instead of offering your clients an increased experience?
Are you going to include website hosting services to flickr users within the PRO price and go after 500px, or will you Keep the two Services very clear of each other for a different experience?
If you are keeping the two Services Separate, then aren't you really just here to collect a bigger check? If Yahoo / Verizon / Oath was not willing to spend money to upgrade our services and gain more users and you are, wouldn't this mean our subscription fees will increase?
Why should we remain here instead of going to 500px which offers a similar service to you but for much cheaper?
The old adage of "you kind of get what you pay for" seems to apply.
I really don’t want to use another platform for storing my photos, even Twitter stream photos, and having Flickr, where I am in control was always my preferred choice.
Looking forward to keep using Flickr where the owners actually care.
Will you keep the current 1 TB free storage tier as is?
SmugMug has offered unlimited storage for more than 15 years, so we know a lot about the space. I'm excited to see what we can do with and for the community.
I have a smugmug account. Is there going to be a way to marry the two??? I have 11 years of photos on Flickr and would hate to have to move them (your sys people would hate it too I’m sure).
But logically, it makes sense that connecting them somehow makes a lot of sense. SmugMug has consumed the Flickr API for awhile, so some of the plumbing is already in place.
Stay tuned while we learn from our customers what they'd like and then build it. My hunch is better connectivity between the two services is going to be high on the list, but I'm going to let our customers drive that decision.
Much good luck!
I don’t really remember Flickr trying to become another Instagram, but much of the founding team had left Flickr before Instagram was a thing and the more of the Flickr founding team in the early years of Instagram.
I just reread Mat Honan’s April 2012 article “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet”. It still stands out as an insightful article on what went wrong at Yahoo!’s Flickr https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost...
But in a way that's clever; I think reflects their intention to capture spontaneous moments, regardless of technical merit. You can't zoom-in to be wowed by 50MP of detail and thus it puts everyone on the same level, regardless of tools, and focuses them on composition and timing.
Serious groups like organizing shows, workshops, quality book printing, blogging (for news and events), and better ways to organize and display photos of interest [group a series of photos regardless of member [so long as the photo was public] --like the group pool stream but allow to showcase photos from sources other then "this group" or "my stream".
If you're under 1TB (on a personal/professional account), you might also test whether Onedrive would work for you - particularly if you're on Windows 10 where Files On-demand is now integrated into the OS.
If nothing else, the bulk storage cost of Onedrive is somewhere around half the cost of Dropbox.
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.
This is going to be far from easy, but I think it will be fun, exciting and rewarding. We're excited to thrill photographers all over the world.
- 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.
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.
A friend used a site that had those sorts of free use licenses, and then got hit by the Getty lawyers: It turned out that someone was just taking stock images and posting them on their own account with a gratis license, which of course does nothing to excuse the people trusting it in faith.
Not sure how to solve that problem.
Worked really well to upload photos from phone to a private repo. Captions, and a link in the SHARE TO camera library.
Not everyone wants a travel blog. Current Flickr worked well.
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
[1]: https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines
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.
- 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.
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
Solid consistent business model vs. mismanaged dyno
Win step for smugmug.
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.
Nice commentary on Yahoo!
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!
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!
in any case click You->Organize. Drag photos into batch area and pick Edit Photos->Delete
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.
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
Why Fuji? Is there any specific thing about those RAW files or just your use case?
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.smugmug.com/about/privacy-flickr
[1] https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms-flickr
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
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/
Thanks for answering our questions - this is going to be really great - very happy to be along for the ride!
-Darren
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.
I assume the app / site are generally better than this?
[1]https://news.smugmug.com/smugmug-rescues-nearly-200-million-...
[2] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/71-the-picture-taker
It would be wonderful to add to this foundational dataset.
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.
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?
Here’s hoping SmugMug doesn’t languish or get bloated while they take on Flickr!
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?)
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.
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!
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
Still probably better than getting killed off in a month under Oath.
Will these continue, and expand?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16890797
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.
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.
Smugmug's ubiquity is up there with B&H, KEH, FredMiranda and KenRockwell.
Has 4 of the same letters, the same pattern X123123 and the different letters are C->S and G->H