However, hopefully the following Table of Contents help you grasp whether this is worth your time. It is preferably read in one piece, as one chapter builds on the other. Note that this is a very lengthy article. I’ll be spending the rest of this article explaining why. My opinion is to make a case for the long term preservation of Flickr. I’m just an amateur photographer with an opinion. Today, I’m not even an active user of either service. Why? Because I care about photography, photographers, healthy communities and the preservation of valuable content.įor the sake of transparency: I have no personal stake in either SmugMug or Flickr. In this article, I want to voice my opinion on Flickr’s history, rescue operation and future, as well as comment on competing services and modern challenges of today’s photographers. I get annoyed about 50 times per day on the internet, but this time too many injustice buttons were pushed. Which may make the situation worse, not better. A lot of harsh conclusions were dropped on this move that lacked context or fairness. Watching this new outrage unfold, I could not help but feel annoyed. This week’s outrage is the CEO of SmugMug publicly asking people for help to boost the Pro (paid) subscription, as the current state of Flickr still is not financially sustainable, despite the earlier measures. Such as the decision made on November 1, 2018, where free tier users would be limited to a 1,000 photo maximum, any surplus deleted, unless the user upgrades to a Pro account. Taming this beast will inevitably require some unpopular decisions. Imagine being a small company and inheriting tens of billions of photos, a hundred million users, tens of millions in yearly loss, and surely, some ancient legacy code base. Above all, it shows the dire state Flickr was in.įor a company like SmugMug to take on the rescue of one of the largest photography communities on the planet, is a monumental task. Years earlier, it would be unthinkable for a giant like Flickr to be a acquired by the relatively small and little known SmugMug. It was a rescue operation.Ī titanic rescue operation. My understanding is that it was a do-or-die deal, had they not acquired it, Flickr would be shutdown by now. To sum up some recent events: on April 2018, SmugMug acquired Flickr for an undisclosed amount. The rise, fall and resurrection of Flickr IntroductionĮarlier this week, a new chapter was added to the rocky history of Flickr, one that quickly escalated out of control, as per usual on ragenet.

Flickr account cost