Two photo sharing communities are teaming up. SmugMug is buying Flickr from Verizon subsidiary Oath.
Flickr was founded in 2004 and a year later sold to Yahoo. Verizon acquired Yahoo. SmugMug has now bought Flickr from Verizon.
As for right now both services will operate as before and will remain two separate entities. I am excited about this merger as I was thinking about changing from Flickr to SmugMug. Now I will just wait out and see what happens. In 2007 I started to use Flickr and upload my pictures there to share them. During that time, Flickr seemed the most logical choice for that.
But after Yahoo started to struggle you could see the results also on Flickr. Not a lot of improvements were made. Now in recent years, Flickr tried to come back as what it once was. A great service to share and showcase your photos. SmugMug is another great service especially aimed for photographers to share and sell their photos.
Let’s see what this brings for the future. Maybe SmugMug will merge Flickr into their system. I hope to see some updates and improvements soon on the Flickr website and some new features from SmugMug integrated into Flickr.
If you are a Flickr user and don’t want your data transferred to SmugMug, you have until May 25, 2018, to delete your account. Don’t forget to download all your photos before you do that. You can find the updated privacy terms here.
SmugMug created an FAQ page for your questions and if you don’t find answers there, look at the bottom of the page and you can send an email to them. Let’s see what the future holds for that combined community and maybe they can create a competitor for Instagram. As too many services are now owned by Facebook and with the latest data leak scandal, this is not always a good idea.
What is your take on that?
[Photo courtesy of SmugMug]
Peter is an award-winning photographer who travels all over the world to capture the beauty of our planet as well as the achievements of humanity. Follow Peter on his travel blog Gate to Adventures for more amazing places to go and explore.