The Nostalgia for Flickr: A Call to Action for SmugMug's Future

As I sit down to write this article, I am filled with nostalgia for the good old days of Flickr. It was a platform that allowed us to share our passion for photography with others, and it played a significant role in shaping the online community into what it is today. I've been a pro member since 2005, and I still continue to support SmugMug, but I'm not sure if the subscription model is working effectively for most users.

The biggest question on everyone's mind right now is whether Flickr can be brought back from the brink of death. The platform has been around for over 15 years, and in that time, the internet landscape has changed significantly. People are no longer interested in high-res JPEGs and storage of images; they just want to share their photos with friends and family on Instagram or other social media platforms. But what about the photography community? That's where Flickr comes in.

The subscription model is a contentious issue among users. While I understand that it can be a lucrative way for companies to make money, I think SmugMug has hit a snag. The problem with subscription-based services is that they become competitive and overwhelming. When you subscribe to multiple services each month, it's easy to lose track of them all, and the value proposition becomes murky. In my case, I've been a pro member for years, but I barely use SmugMug for hosting photos; I just want to get them off the platform and move on.

The other issue with subscription-based services is that they often come with free tiers that are designed to entice new users to sign up. While these offers may seem appealing at first, they ultimately become a disincentive for loyal customers like myself who have been paying annual fees for years. I mean, why should I pay $60 a year when I can get the same service on other platforms for free or at a lower cost?

I do care about SmugMug and its importance to the photography community. As someone who participates in online forums and has a YouTube channel dedicated to photography, I know that having a reliable platform like Flickr is crucial. Instagram may be popular among photographers, but it's not exactly designed with their needs in mind. It's more geared towards casual users who just want to share their photos and connect with others.

So, what can SmugMug do to revitalize its platform? The answer lies in understanding the value proposition of Flickr for its users. What sets it apart from other platforms? Is it the community aspect? The storage space? The ability to showcase high-quality images? Whatever it is, SmugMug needs to identify that core benefit and run with it.

The Future of SmugMug: A Call to Action

As I close this article, I want to leave you with a question. What do you think about Flickr's future? Will it be revived, or will we say goodbye to the platform forever? The answer lies in the actions we take as users. If we continue to pay for SmugMug and show our support, perhaps the company will listen and make necessary changes to improve the platform.

In conclusion, I believe that Flickr has a unique value proposition that sets it apart from other platforms. It's not just about hosting photos; it's about creating a community of like-minded individuals who share a passion for photography. If SmugMug can tap into that sense of community and provide a service that truly meets the needs of photographers, then maybe we'll see a resurgence in user engagement.

But until then, I'll continue to support SmugMug in my own way – by paying annually and sharing my thoughts on the platform with others. Who knows? Maybe one day, we'll see a renewed focus on Flickr that will bring it back from the brink of death.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso I want to do a quick video and I want to talk about this Flickr thing from yesterday afternoon I think this is important because at least for me it kind of affects the whole photography community if you don't know what I'm talking about yesterday afternoon Flickr sent an email out announcing their price increases effective immediately for all Pro accounts this is obviously a hot topic so before I jump into this I do want to clarify two things first of all SmugMug they are the current owner of Flickr they bought it from Verizon about two years ago I don't know anybody personally over at SmugMug but I've met some of the employees over the years at various trade shows everybody's always really nice they're enthusiastic it's a smaller company it's not a Verizon and I really believe they were the right people to buy Flickr and I'm really grateful that they did and to I want to say that I have a long history with Flickr I was on in the very early days have been a pro member since probably 2005 or so and I'm very passionate about it it's a platform that I always wanted to see succeed it was incredible in those early days and I've always wanted to see it come back but ever since the Yahoo purchase and then later acquisition by Verizon it just has fallen by the wayside so this price increase was actually hinted at about a month ago on December 19th when Don Miguel who is the owner at founder and CEO of SmugMug and now owner and CEO of Flickr wrote an open letter to the public explaining that when Flickr was purchased this was a website that was owned by Verizon and it was in a position where it was literally losing tens of millions of dollars a year that is a lot of money they had an opportunity to buy it and save it which they did and they felt that they were the right company and I agree to purchase it it's a smaller company it's not a Google or a Facebook that's interested in mining your data or selling it or do anything weird with it they actually wanted to have a website that was a big part of the photography community and the two years that they've owned it they have increased the performance of the site they've moved the entire platform over to Amazon Web Services which was a very good move and they've stabilized things they've redid the login so you don't have to log in with a yahoo account anymore and so these are some things that I think are a good start but he hinted in there that it's a site that still loses money and it's dependent on pro memberships to keep it afloat another comment that I think needs to be made to clarify SmugMug stance on this is most people don't realize that running a website at this scale is astronomically expensive Flickr is a big web like it gets an enormous amount of traffic and the collection of images that are in that site is around six billion images last I read so when you talk about a collection of six billion images and you look at what the costs are in funding that website most of us don't think about this because we use facebook for free we use Instagram for free we can watch YouTube for free but flickers a little bit different because it's not a big company that owns it so the costs around that are you obviously have to have IT staff to maintain the servers in the infrastructure you have to have developers to work on the code and anything that might break on the website you've got to maintain all that and then you have this collection of images and the two major costs around that are storage you have to have a place to put this and back it up and keep it redundant and consistent and the second thing is bandwidth and that's another thing that most people don't consider if I download an image or I view an image on Flickr and let's just say it's a two megabyte image I've just moved two megabytes of data that might cost less than a penny but when you scale that up to six billion images not to mention the fact that Flickr allows you to embed their images in your own website so these images are embedded in all kinds of places on the web and at that kind of scale it gets astronomically expensive and this is why Don was saying that when Verizon owned it it was literally hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars a year it's expensive so is that my responsibility or your responsibility to foot that bill well that's where it kind of becomes a little bit interesting and up for debate because the way that most of us interact with web sites or services online is they're free to use we're usually served ads or there's some kind of monetization model and those companies are also a bigger scale they're owned by corporations they have money to burn before they're able to actually make a profit so it's a little bit different flicker on the other hand in certainly with its current ownership and its first I wouldn't call the Yahoo here's this but it's smaller entities that don't have that money to burn they can't just sit there and float the site until one day it starts making money so it is a little bit different and I think the open letter was a plea to the community in a very personal way to communicate this but I think it's important also to kind of go back and talk about the early days of Flickr and how this all started so Flickr was launched in 2004 by a company called Lew decor who were based in Vancouver at the time it was owned by husband wife duo Stewart Butterfield and Caterina fake both of which were very active in the community and on the website Luda core is a parent company that was developing an online multiplayer game called game never-ending they took a lot of the tools that they were using to build this game and actually built this photo sharing website that started to develop a community around it and was quite successful I remember those early days of flicker like I said Stewart and Katarina were both very much involved in the community they would post their own images they were active in the groups and speaking of groups they had this great group feature where you could join groups of an interest and share images there was a pool of images you could have forum discussions you could share images in the discussion and it was a really successful website for this whole notion of photo sharing now remember this is early days and social media was not anywhere near as developed as it is today so we didn't have Facebook we didn't have Instagram we had my space which was starting to take off quite a bit we were coming out of the Friendster era so there was really nothing for photographers online and I think Flickr was really successful at this come 2005 they sold it to Yahoo and unfortunately that ends up being the kind of driving motivation or the business model for most startups and that is acquisition and they did acquire it and they made a lot of money on it and curiously they both stayed engaged and involved in the website for the next three years they didn't even leave till 2008 unfortunately the Yahoo acquisition was a little weird to most users the site started to blow up it got really big and that's good for Flickr it's good for Yahoo I'm not really sure what Yahoo's Direction was with the website it wasn't really defined but around 2013 they have a major redesign that they launched where everything was justified and went full with and the emphasis was on the photos it was a beautiful redesign but unfortunately because they were using banners at the top and that layout changed it started squishing down the visibility of what you would see in groups and that also fell by the wayside so there was less community involvement maybe some of that had to do with the fact that you have so many more people on the platform I don't know but two Yahoo's credit they did redesign the website at one point and they also built the mobile app which was supposed to compete with Instagram I think but never really took off in that direction so by the time of the Verizon acquisition this is actually years later of a site that has not been nurtured in a long time and I think that's where it's to fall off and most of the people that you'll talk to today I actually tweeted about this last night and a lot of people came out of the woodwork that I knew from the early days of Flickr was really cool to see I have people that are lifelong friends of mine that I made on Flickr we would get into discussions and groups it was a very troll free community it was a lot of fun and it was really cool to meet photographers in all parts of the country or even in other countries that you didn't know and all of a sudden you become friends you meet them one day at an event or something and it's it's really special it's really cool it's really hard to describe how special that time was and I know that probably I can speak for myself some of me lives in the past on that I support the site because I love that so much I want to see it come back one day and thrive so can Flickr even be brought back and that is the biggest question and I think this is the challenge that SmugMug are facing right now is it's more than just moving the platform over to a new server system that works better and it's more efficient and now we have new logins but what is the point of the website and that is where I kind of start to bring it into question because when you look at the landscape that we live in today a lot can happen in the tech world in a year things move very quickly and we're talking about a website that is now 15 16 years old the landscape of the Internet has changed considerably people use Instagram they don't care about high-res JPEGs and storage of images they just put stuff on there they share it with their friends you get likes you get comments you have a discussion you move on that's where that lives today so where it is Flickr and when you go to the homepage and you're not logged in it just says join the community what community but let's talk about the subscription model for a second because I'm kind of two minds about this first of all I don't think it's unusual to have a subscription-based model I think many people have that companies have pretty much figured out that they can make a lot more money charging your monthly than they do with a one-time fee even though it is a little bit higher the problem with that though is that the subscription model becomes competitive I subscribe to a lot of things I subscribe to cable I have a phone bill then I get Netflix I get HBO I've got some Apple stuff I pay for these are all subscription-based things Amazon Prime and I'm adding a website into this mix and it's one thing when you realize oh at the time this is like you know $3 $4 a month I'll subscribe to it or maybe it's six seven eight dollars a month it seems affordable then you realize you rack enough of those up and your in your account is actually leaving every month because you're subscribed to a lot of things so choice is one of those issues the other issue is value now I have been a pro member since 2005 I will still continue to support it I pay annually but I will be honest it's not a service I use very much I don't know what the value is of the drive to use it will be and of course I'm still willing to support them but for a lot of people you're thinking well if I'm gonna now part with 60 dollars a year what am I getting out of this nothing I'm hosting my photos there I need to get them off of there and move on to something else and that is the whole value proposition and the other thing that just sets me off just a little bit and this isn't just isolated to what Flickr doing cuz every subscription service does this they usually have some kind of a free tier I'm saying they and people who have subscription services so this could be blue apron this could be Netflix whatever that is and so you have this free tier and they're trying to entice you to go ahead and sign up so they'll offer a coupon you can get 25% if you sign up now and it's like well I don't get 25% off and I've been funding this thing for years I like I said I don't want to come down on SmugMug for this I really do think they have a right company to own it I think they seem very enthusiastic I think they're hungry I think it's something that they really wanted they didn't buy it to make a mass profit off of and I care about it because I care about the photography community I have a youtube channel I talk about photography I participate in that community and I think it's important for us as photographers to have something as a tool that is actually useful to us and I think that if you provide that value whatever that ends up being then I think that it becomes something that people don't mind paying a service for Instagram doesn't really fulfill that need to the photography community everyone's on Instagram it's not just photographers I think Instagram is great for what it is but I think you can do something different and you can pull it away so that is not the competing factor this is why I wanted to open up for discussion and I want to know what you guys think about this is Flickr something that you'll continue to pay for is it something that can be saved at this point I really want to know what other people think so leave your comment below I'll see you guys in the next video until then laterso I want to do a quick video and I want to talk about this Flickr thing from yesterday afternoon I think this is important because at least for me it kind of affects the whole photography community if you don't know what I'm talking about yesterday afternoon Flickr sent an email out announcing their price increases effective immediately for all Pro accounts this is obviously a hot topic so before I jump into this I do want to clarify two things first of all SmugMug they are the current owner of Flickr they bought it from Verizon about two years ago I don't know anybody personally over at SmugMug but I've met some of the employees over the years at various trade shows everybody's always really nice they're enthusiastic it's a smaller company it's not a Verizon and I really believe they were the right people to buy Flickr and I'm really grateful that they did and to I want to say that I have a long history with Flickr I was on in the very early days have been a pro member since probably 2005 or so and I'm very passionate about it it's a platform that I always wanted to see succeed it was incredible in those early days and I've always wanted to see it come back but ever since the Yahoo purchase and then later acquisition by Verizon it just has fallen by the wayside so this price increase was actually hinted at about a month ago on December 19th when Don Miguel who is the owner at founder and CEO of SmugMug and now owner and CEO of Flickr wrote an open letter to the public explaining that when Flickr was purchased this was a website that was owned by Verizon and it was in a position where it was literally losing tens of millions of dollars a year that is a lot of money they had an opportunity to buy it and save it which they did and they felt that they were the right company and I agree to purchase it it's a smaller company it's not a Google or a Facebook that's interested in mining your data or selling it or do anything weird with it they actually wanted to have a website that was a big part of the photography community and the two years that they've owned it they have increased the performance of the site they've moved the entire platform over to Amazon Web Services which was a very good move and they've stabilized things they've redid the login so you don't have to log in with a yahoo account anymore and so these are some things that I think are a good start but he hinted in there that it's a site that still loses money and it's dependent on pro memberships to keep it afloat another comment that I think needs to be made to clarify SmugMug stance on this is most people don't realize that running a website at this scale is astronomically expensive Flickr is a big web like it gets an enormous amount of traffic and the collection of images that are in that site is around six billion images last I read so when you talk about a collection of six billion images and you look at what the costs are in funding that website most of us don't think about this because we use facebook for free we use Instagram for free we can watch YouTube for free but flickers a little bit different because it's not a big company that owns it so the costs around that are you obviously have to have IT staff to maintain the servers in the infrastructure you have to have developers to work on the code and anything that might break on the website you've got to maintain all that and then you have this collection of images and the two major costs around that are storage you have to have a place to put this and back it up and keep it redundant and consistent and the second thing is bandwidth and that's another thing that most people don't consider if I download an image or I view an image on Flickr and let's just say it's a two megabyte image I've just moved two megabytes of data that might cost less than a penny but when you scale that up to six billion images not to mention the fact that Flickr allows you to embed their images in your own website so these images are embedded in all kinds of places on the web and at that kind of scale it gets astronomically expensive and this is why Don was saying that when Verizon owned it it was literally hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars a year it's expensive so is that my responsibility or your responsibility to foot that bill well that's where it kind of becomes a little bit interesting and up for debate because the way that most of us interact with web sites or services online is they're free to use we're usually served ads or there's some kind of monetization model and those companies are also a bigger scale they're owned by corporations they have money to burn before they're able to actually make a profit so it's a little bit different flicker on the other hand in certainly with its current ownership and its first I wouldn't call the Yahoo here's this but it's smaller entities that don't have that money to burn they can't just sit there and float the site until one day it starts making money so it is a little bit different and I think the open letter was a plea to the community in a very personal way to communicate this but I think it's important also to kind of go back and talk about the early days of Flickr and how this all started so Flickr was launched in 2004 by a company called Lew decor who were based in Vancouver at the time it was owned by husband wife duo Stewart Butterfield and Caterina fake both of which were very active in the community and on the website Luda core is a parent company that was developing an online multiplayer game called game never-ending they took a lot of the tools that they were using to build this game and actually built this photo sharing website that started to develop a community around it and was quite successful I remember those early days of flicker like I said Stewart and Katarina were both very much involved in the community they would post their own images they were active in the groups and speaking of groups they had this great group feature where you could join groups of an interest and share images there was a pool of images you could have forum discussions you could share images in the discussion and it was a really successful website for this whole notion of photo sharing now remember this is early days and social media was not anywhere near as developed as it is today so we didn't have Facebook we didn't have Instagram we had my space which was starting to take off quite a bit we were coming out of the Friendster era so there was really nothing for photographers online and I think Flickr was really successful at this come 2005 they sold it to Yahoo and unfortunately that ends up being the kind of driving motivation or the business model for most startups and that is acquisition and they did acquire it and they made a lot of money on it and curiously they both stayed engaged and involved in the website for the next three years they didn't even leave till 2008 unfortunately the Yahoo acquisition was a little weird to most users the site started to blow up it got really big and that's good for Flickr it's good for Yahoo I'm not really sure what Yahoo's Direction was with the website it wasn't really defined but around 2013 they have a major redesign that they launched where everything was justified and went full with and the emphasis was on the photos it was a beautiful redesign but unfortunately because they were using banners at the top and that layout changed it started squishing down the visibility of what you would see in groups and that also fell by the wayside so there was less community involvement maybe some of that had to do with the fact that you have so many more people on the platform I don't know but two Yahoo's credit they did redesign the website at one point and they also built the mobile app which was supposed to compete with Instagram I think but never really took off in that direction so by the time of the Verizon acquisition this is actually years later of a site that has not been nurtured in a long time and I think that's where it's to fall off and most of the people that you'll talk to today I actually tweeted about this last night and a lot of people came out of the woodwork that I knew from the early days of Flickr was really cool to see I have people that are lifelong friends of mine that I made on Flickr we would get into discussions and groups it was a very troll free community it was a lot of fun and it was really cool to meet photographers in all parts of the country or even in other countries that you didn't know and all of a sudden you become friends you meet them one day at an event or something and it's it's really special it's really cool it's really hard to describe how special that time was and I know that probably I can speak for myself some of me lives in the past on that I support the site because I love that so much I want to see it come back one day and thrive so can Flickr even be brought back and that is the biggest question and I think this is the challenge that SmugMug are facing right now is it's more than just moving the platform over to a new server system that works better and it's more efficient and now we have new logins but what is the point of the website and that is where I kind of start to bring it into question because when you look at the landscape that we live in today a lot can happen in the tech world in a year things move very quickly and we're talking about a website that is now 15 16 years old the landscape of the Internet has changed considerably people use Instagram they don't care about high-res JPEGs and storage of images they just put stuff on there they share it with their friends you get likes you get comments you have a discussion you move on that's where that lives today so where it is Flickr and when you go to the homepage and you're not logged in it just says join the community what community but let's talk about the subscription model for a second because I'm kind of two minds about this first of all I don't think it's unusual to have a subscription-based model I think many people have that companies have pretty much figured out that they can make a lot more money charging your monthly than they do with a one-time fee even though it is a little bit higher the problem with that though is that the subscription model becomes competitive I subscribe to a lot of things I subscribe to cable I have a phone bill then I get Netflix I get HBO I've got some Apple stuff I pay for these are all subscription-based things Amazon Prime and I'm adding a website into this mix and it's one thing when you realize oh at the time this is like you know $3 $4 a month I'll subscribe to it or maybe it's six seven eight dollars a month it seems affordable then you realize you rack enough of those up and your in your account is actually leaving every month because you're subscribed to a lot of things so choice is one of those issues the other issue is value now I have been a pro member since 2005 I will still continue to support it I pay annually but I will be honest it's not a service I use very much I don't know what the value is of the drive to use it will be and of course I'm still willing to support them but for a lot of people you're thinking well if I'm gonna now part with 60 dollars a year what am I getting out of this nothing I'm hosting my photos there I need to get them off of there and move on to something else and that is the whole value proposition and the other thing that just sets me off just a little bit and this isn't just isolated to what Flickr doing cuz every subscription service does this they usually have some kind of a free tier I'm saying they and people who have subscription services so this could be blue apron this could be Netflix whatever that is and so you have this free tier and they're trying to entice you to go ahead and sign up so they'll offer a coupon you can get 25% if you sign up now and it's like well I don't get 25% off and I've been funding this thing for years I like I said I don't want to come down on SmugMug for this I really do think they have a right company to own it I think they seem very enthusiastic I think they're hungry I think it's something that they really wanted they didn't buy it to make a mass profit off of and I care about it because I care about the photography community I have a youtube channel I talk about photography I participate in that community and I think it's important for us as photographers to have something as a tool that is actually useful to us and I think that if you provide that value whatever that ends up being then I think that it becomes something that people don't mind paying a service for Instagram doesn't really fulfill that need to the photography community everyone's on Instagram it's not just photographers I think Instagram is great for what it is but I think you can do something different and you can pull it away so that is not the competing factor this is why I wanted to open up for discussion and I want to know what you guys think about this is Flickr something that you'll continue to pay for is it something that can be saved at this point I really want to know what other people think so leave your comment below I'll see you guys in the next video until then later\n"