Today’s announcement of the purchase of Flickr by SmugMug raises the question: will your Flickr pics live on? Most likely, yes, but after you’ve done your personal curation, created albums and possibly had a little bit of community within the Flickr, you might be wondering. Apparently the 14 year old service, which was part of Yahoo, will retain its staff, its culture and style… for now. The SmugMug acquisition will potentially benefit Flickr users offering access to a wider community and new tools to empower more creative visual storytelling for the photography-based Flickr users.
Here’s the core report from their press release:
Together, SmugMug and Flickr represent the world’s most influential community of photographers, marrying SmugMug’s deep industry expertise and strong digital tools with Flickr’s global tribe of tens of millions of photographers. Following the close of the transaction, the brands will continue to operate as separate entities with the shared goal of providing photographers with both a place to fit in and a place to stand out. SmugMug and Flickr believe that all photographers—from the hobbyist to the prosumer to the professional—belong together.
“Since day one our passion has been empowering photographers to tell the stories they want to tell, the way they want to tell them, and our investment in Flickr reaffirms this commitment,” said Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug. “Uniting the SmugMug and Flickr brands will make the whole photography community stronger and better connected. The enduring quality of photography is so much more than clicks and likes—photography has the power to change the world. Together, we can preserve photography as the global language of storytelling.”
Editorial note: Dean Meyers has run a pro Flickr Account for many years, and content stored on Flickr has been posted in various articles on VizWorld. The change in services that may occur over time might cause broken links to visual reporting here.
