… because Flickr is dead, i guess.
https://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/04/20/together-smugmug-flickr-faq/
Well it belonged to Yahoo did it not?
Yea, but “SmugMug” buying it is like Microsoft selling Windows to BestOSCompany III LLC LP. You’d have thought Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook or some second tier company would have picked it up. Its value must be close to 0 now.
SmugMug has been around forever as a 2nd-tier ‘boring’ photo storage site though, nothing ever web 2.0 sexy. It’s like uh PhotoBucket or SnapFish acquiring Flickr I guess.
Don MacAskill aka Onethumb was in the old timey quake scene and his family runs smugmug
https://www.bluesnews.com/guide/qe/who/whoall.htm
Onethumb:: Don MacAskill. (webmaster at ritual entertainment) finger
the “digitally challenged” onethumb runs
onethumb.net, and helps to keepbest.comrunning. worked for accolade, but joined ritual as a network administrator and web maintainer in jan 98. apparently does not like single ply toilet paper. see interviews
see
Second tier? When I was more seriously into photography about a dozen years ago until 5 years ago I was a SmugSmug customer. There was nothing second rate about the quality of their hosting, the way they allowed the user to present and even sell their pictures and their customer service was second to none I have experienced. Every issue was looked at promptly by a human being. I never got a canned response from them. Always an answer that directly answered my questions.
And, even on a fairly basic account, you could change the CSS of the site for a presentation of your pictures that Flickr never could match.
I was on Flickr to share random pictures and make connections. But I always linked to the better presentation on SmugSmug.
Why? What’s the point in picking it up if you’re them (especially Facebook, which already has Instagram). Its brand is basically worthless these days after a decade of Yahoo neglect. I can’t imagine it has any meaningful tech/patents that those guys don’t already have. The users? It’s not like any of those companies are short of them.
I meant second-tier in terms of market and mind-share I guess.
The CEO sounds pretty serious about their intentions for Flickr, which is good, evidenced here by his participation in the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16888876
Probably better at Smugmug than at a massive corporation where Flickr will literally just be a rounding error on the balance sheet, which means that it’s all that much easier to jettison when the business model changes every 6 months.
SmugMug would only fall in quotes among casual photo sharing customers.
Many professional photographers and hardcore hobbyists use SmugMug. Has really nice tools for pros, both for display and protection, plus private galleries, good organization, etc. It’s a respected site among core photographers.
But yeah, the selfie crowd and family photo sharing crowd probably isn’t familiar with it. I would assume that SmugMug will keep both properties, with Flickr as the consumer-oriented site.
Say what you will, I think this is the best thing that could happen to Flickr: Purchase by a company that knows photography, is run by photo enthusiasts, and for whom photo sharing is a core business. Look at how Flickr stagnated after Yahoo got over the initial excitement of buying them.
I don’t really know much about SmugMug, but as a Flickr user, I can’t imagine that they could do any worse than Yahoo. Flickr has really been neglected by Yahoo.
Yahoo had first mover advantage with Tumblr and did nothing there too.
I’ve got piles of pictures on Flickr which I need to download. I lost the originals with a failed hard drive a gazillion years ago. I plan to plop them into Google photos. Most of these old photos do not have any EXIF data but I did name the photos with the date as part of the name. Is there a tool that can bulk update the EXIF image date by reading the file name?
Interesting. I had literally never heard of it until the announcement. Plus the (tbh) pretty horrible name, i figured it was like being acquired by the Nairobi version on Tencent or something.
I’ve subscribed to SmugMug for years. They’re awesome, but a bit irrelevant now for me w/ only personal photographs, since the advent of Google Photos. I mostly keep it because I pointed a custom domain to my family gallery and it’s convenient for the grandparents. SmugMug has a Roku app so they can pull it up and look at recent pics on their TV’s once in a while.
cool story I looked up, and thought about buying smugmug the domain, but thought it was too dumb back in the day.
haha, that’s pretty good. Probably they would have just said, "smugmugs gone? Fawk. OK, go with smileymiley."
I was using Flickr for a few years, then discovered my account had been deleted. Apparently, Yahoo deletes accounts after a few years if you don’t log in (to Yahoo), and doesn’t consider logging into Flickr as logging into Yahoo proper. I had to create a new Yahoo account and Flickr account.