Two giants in the world of photography – SmugMug and Flickr – have become one. In a surprise move announced Friday, SmugMug has bought Flickr from Yahoo (owned by Verizon) for an undisclosed amount. The two platforms do have obvious similarities, with both built around uploading and hosting your photos online. However, SmugMug is intended more for creating a personal photography website, while Flickr adds a strong element of social media and community to the mix. So, what does this acquisition mean for the future of both platforms?
Flickr is a huge name in the world of photography, but it also has driven down a bumpy road to its current position. After Yahoo acquired the company in 2005, users criticized its slow transition to the world of smartphones and social media. Other issues along the way, such as the prevalence of ads and the longstanding requirement that users must sign in with a Yahoo email account, alienated customers. Nonetheless, it has retained a steady audience over the years.
That’s where SmugMug comes in. For now, SmugMug has announced that its plans for Flickr are deliberately nonspecific. According to SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill’s own words, “I don’t know what the future holds. This is a new model for me.”
The company has announced that Flickr and SmugMug will remain separate entities for now, keeping their current courses relatively steady. SmugMug claims it is in a phase of learning about the top issues that users have had with Flickr, as well as things that are going right and should remain the same, before formulating a plan for the future.
None of this is completely out of the ordinary for a company to say after a new acquisition, but what has surprised me so far is the openness of MacAskill, the CEO. In the comments section of a post on Y Combinator, MacAskill personally responded to people’s comments about the issues and successes of Flickr in recent years. One user said that Yahoo’s email requirement for Flickr users had locked him out of a once-paying account, since he had forgotten his login, and the CEO of SmugMug responded: “I will move heaven and earth to solve this for you. We’re moving off of Yahoo [authentication] as soon as we can, but can likely fix before that… Raising this up the flag pole.”
Not bad.
I’ve been using SmugMug to host and design my personal website for several years now, and I have been impressed by the company’s general lack of messing anything up along the way. That sounds cynical, but the simple fact is that SmugMug seems to listen to user feedback and improve its product accordingly – not something that should be taken lightly. If that mindset shifts to Flickr, I am excited to see what changes it will bring.
It remains to be seen, of course, how much of SmugMug’s website-building DNA will shift over to Flickr – along with Flickr’s DNA to SmugMug – and how the overall company will change as a result. SmugMug has built its infrastructure on photo hosting and website building, and Flickr’s social media weight is a new area for the company to manage. Jumping into the deep end of social media so suddenly is a bold move for SmugMug, even if Flickr doesn’t currently have the reach of a true giant like Instagram. Hopefully, the company will prove up to the challenge, and existing users of both SmugMug and Flickr will see the benefits of this move in the long run.
Take a look at our review of SmugMug and our comparison of SmugMug and Zenfolio if you want to learn more about how it works for building a photography website. Also, let us know in the comments section below what you think about this move – is it good or bad for the photography community as a whole?
It would be nice if Smug Mug would make timely periodic announcements regarding Flickr’s future and their vision of future directions regarding the Flickr site. By doing so would ensure that members are informed regarding Flickr’s future and how it might expand to meet member needs. By exhibiting transparency regarding their plans for Flickr will help strengthen membership and allay any concerns/fears of current members. It just makes good business sense to promote Flickr and its future directions!
I love Flickr and have been a member since 2009. It is an enjoyable site for posting and storing images and interacting with like-minded photographers, groups, and forums. I will continue to use the site and am optimistic for a bright future with Smug Mug at the helm.
Thee once was a nice time when Apple’s Aperture directly showed my SmugMug account and I could manage my pictures directly from Aperture. And it still is working, although Aperture became an abandoned app. With some restrictions such as managing the webiste, layout and other stuff. I don’t use SmugMug’s possibilities to earn money by printing pictures – that’s a very outdated model and anyway only practical in U.S. In Europe are great printer services. What I like on SmugMug is simplicity and transparency – it doesn’t do things I don’t wnat it to do and the link services usuall are stable and quick. I hope they will not go the “finance by advertisement way” and I like to see something like a time string, “recent works” – this is currently not possible in SmugMug.
I’m always puzzled by the “must have a Yahoo account” complaint, since I don’t think it’s been true for a while. My personal account is older and has a yahoo-tied account, but I started a separate project account a year ago or so based on a gmail account.
I suppose it’s a case of an old pain which drove some people crazy, but they never knew it was resolved. Which perhaps might cover a number of the Flickr problems, really.
I trust this move will not interfere with existing links between Adobe site LR and PS…the simplicity to edit in adobe and upload directly to Flickr is well worth saving and possibly enhancing.
As a long-term flickr pro user it will be interesting to see if the two applications will merge to provide the ultimate in photo dedicated platforms’
This doesn’t affect me at all, in contrast to everyone else here, as I don’t use either service. I wish Smugmug the best, though. I prefer 500px.
This is a good opportunity for Flickr if they can avoid messing it up more than Yahoo did. But I won’t trust any direction in the short term. I’ll check in after 6 months once the dust settles. Another factor is they need to clean that site up. Too too many “questionable” things got hosted there.
One of the many things I like about Smugmug is the ability to lock down your photos and not have some be able to right-click and copy your pics. Not sure if Flickr has addressed this issue, but it’s been several years since I had an account there and you were still able to right click on anyone’s photo and copy it.
I believe Flickr had that as well. Although no mechanism exists to thwart someone who really wants the image. It’s quite easy to get to it via a number of different ways.
Yes, Flickr has anti-right click measures too, which I helped to campaign for, in the form of a layer of transparent GIFs on top of all rights reserved photos. As Turtle says there are ways around it, including I believe: one click Firefox apps (yes, see below), looking in the page source for the image jpg link, looking in your browser cache for the image you have already downloaded, or using a screen capture to get the image, but all the same I think it does make photo theft a little less likely since there are so many photos that are not protected at all. That said, I don’t use the functionality myself.
I have just downloaded Flickr Size Pickr which gives me a right click option to download all the sizes of flickr photos.
But no, Flickr Size Pickr does not allow me to download protected images such as the great ones by Peter Juerges (below). I just right clicked to check. I am fine with that. I only wanted to test and to download my own photos. It is quicker than the option provided by Flickr.
I am a Pro Flickr user for the past 10 years or so. Flickr Pro is 20USD a year I think. I doubt I use the free limit but at that price I wanted to sponsor them.
Even so, post Yahoo, they got rid of white space, improved nothing that I noticed, and reduced the threads into which ones photos appeared.
Now, if you are at a photo page as a result of a search, then you could in the past see the threads of that photo, so that one could see photos in the same groups, the same sets, and in the same photostream but now I can only see the search results thread.
Another problem is that the Android Yahoo/Flickr app is not available in Japan. I have been using a 3rd part app that is not so good. I presume that this is related to the fact that Yahoo Japan is a separate company from Yahoo USA. I hope that now that Flickr has joined Smugmug we will get a good app.
On the other hand I am worried by
1) The silly video that Smugmug showed us when we click on implications of smugmug takeover, closing with “Together is where photographers belong.” What?
2) The potential price hike. Apparently Smugmug is about twice the price. I am not sure I want to pay 40 USD a year.
Timothy, new annual pro subscriptions on Flickr cost 50 dollars, about the same as basic subscription on SmugMug. Old Flickr pro users (so-called grandfathered accounts) pay $25 per year.
Ah. Thank you Marcin. I am grandfathered and pay $25 (not 2$0) per year. I hope SmugMug grandfathers old flickr pros too. Not that I need the extra space but I would rather avoid adds, I think.
Bye, bye freee 1 tb storage! Flickr wasn’t perfect and yes they was some glicth, but for the price I was paying (free), it did an excellent job. I didn’t have any problem creating album, just some glitch when I was uploading pictures.
I’m very happy with this news, Flickr is great but has clearly suffered from insufficient funding, which manifested in frequent downtimes (nicknamed “bad pandas”), spam attacks, upload glitches, slow stuff response etc. With new resources and personnel from Smugmug, which is committed to give Flickr their full support, things should really improve. As a business model, I suspect Smugmug will introduce photo sales to Flickr. However, I’m worried that the cost of my Flickr “pro” account subscription will go up, until now I’ve had a “grandfathered” one, so each year I paid half the current regular price.