There has been some big news in the last few days in the world of social and I am not talking about Privacy.
No I am talking about Flickr, the forgotten social network for images, that was created more than 14 years ago, which was quickly sold to the juggernaut Yahoo – remember them? After that the platform did rather well and was always mentioned as the social photography platform of choice until about six years ago when others started to join the party and to overtake it.
It has been bought by a competitor SmugMug – the two platforms are fairly similar except the fact that Flickr offers a free 1TB of storage, which isn’t to be sniffed at. As with all of the other photography platforms you can assign albums, but you can also add usage rights to them. You can also take advantage of its mobile app which can be pretty useful.
I have been informed this morning that nothing will change immedi
atley with regard to your Flickr account which is good. We will all still have access through our current logins and will receive the same experience as we have done for now.
A statement from the company read:
We think you are going to love Flickr under SmugMug ownership, but you can choose to not have your Flickr account and data transferred to SmugMug until May 25, 2018. If you want to keep your Flickr account and data from being transferred, you must go to your Flickr account to download the photos and videos you want to keep, then delete your account from your Account Settings by May 25, 2018. If you do not delete your account by May 25, 2018, your Flickr account and data will transfer to SmugMug and will be governed by SmugMug’s Terms and Privacy Policy.
SmugMug doesn’t offer a free option and starts at $3.99, so whether this is the first move towards removing the free option who knows but it looks like the holding company for Yahoo is cleaning up its house and Flickr was the fall guy.
SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill commented:
SmugMug and Flickr represent the world’s most influential community of photographers, and there is strength in numbers. We want to provide photographers with both inspiration and the tools they need to tell their stories. We want to bring excitement and energy to inspire more photographers to share their perspective. And we want to be a welcome place for all photographers: hobbyist to archivist to professional.
So we are entering a new phase for Flickr – it still has more than 90 million active users but this is far less than the other big boys. Flickr does still have a use though for proper photography enthusiasts and I still feel the 1TB of free storage is surely worth something – so let’s hope this is it’s second coming and this partnership is going to use these increased numbers to create an even better social network.
