Flickr has been acquired by SmugMug. What now?
Just yesterday, I was uploading blog photos into Flickr like I normally do. Today, I visited the site and the homepage was an announcement they were being acquired by SmugMug, a photography platform.
I also got an email from Flickr tonight.
Flickr may be excited about being acquired by SmugMug but I’m still iffy. I’m more concerned about the fact that, to save on space on my blogs, a lot of my blog photos are hosted by Flickr. Thankfully, since I moved some blogs a few years ago from a free domain to a hosted one, my old photos were exported over to the new blogs. Only the last couple of years of blog photos are on Flickr plus some really, really old photos I kept from the first time I enrolled. I did a quick count of photos in my albums and I came up with a little over 700 photos in Flickr. Not so bad. Other bloggers possibly have a lot more. Still…
SmugMug says nothing will change but will it NOT, really? Many such acquisitions are often just transition periods so users don’t get upset and leave. I have had to move all my data from one notebook app to another because mine was acquired and eventually closed. Recently, I also got word that Xmarks (a bookmark syncing app that I love and use a lot) is being shut down this May 1 by LastPass — after the latter acquired it some years ago. Oftentimes, the acquiring company has a holdover period so users continue to stay. But the end goal is oftentimes to get people to keep using the product and later, once users are even more invested in it, the acquiring company says they have decided it is not aligned with their vision so they will retire it but hey, here is OUR OTHER product as an alternative. Question is…will it still be free? I did have a Flickr Pro some years ago but stopped it when they offered 1TB storage for free.
If you’re on the fence on whether to stay or leave, here is an article I just found and it seems the author is familiar with both Flickr and SmugMug. It just may give you some comfort that, at least from his point of view, Flickr is here to stay. What may happen is that Flickr will come in free and paid versions, with what we are enjoying now moving into Pro. I won’t be surprised if that happens. I was on Flickr Pro before but stopped paying when they offered 1TB free. Frankly, I doubted the sustainability of that decision.
It still will be a pain for so many of us, bloggers, especially since we only have till May 25 to decide whether to move out or stay. I think some will stay on, assured by Flickr and SmugMug that nothing will change. But for those who think it is just a matter of time before Flickr is phased out, it means biting the bullet now, physically exporting all photos, and placing them somewhere else. The bigger effort though, for those moving to another app or placing photos directly on their blogs, will be changing the URLs of photos in blog posts ONE BY ONE since they point to Flickr.
My plan for now is to store future photos directly on my blogs, but for good measure, I will back up what photos I already have on Flickr, in case they do shut it down in future. The next few weeks will entail a lot of decision making and effort from bloggers. Good luck to all of us.
Are you one of those affected by this Flickr acquisition? What do you plan to do? Are you looking at any other photo storage apps?
