[heatherslightbox]

Has anybody migrated from Smugmug to Flickr?
If so, what was your experience like?

I really like the social aspect of Flickr, but downloading hundreds of pics from Smugmug and uploading them to Flickr will be a daunting task. I currently have the free account there and don’t want to have to pay annual subscriptions for both sites.

Any words of wisdom would be much appreciated.

[dcpropilot]

I pay only for Smugmug, and have a free Flickr account, but keep it below the photo limit. You can place may or all of your photos in one gallery and then do a batch download from Smugmug, rather than downloading them individually.

[UncleVanya]

Please note Smugmug sent out a letter to pro users of Flickr saying that while it was losing less money than before they took over it is still losing money...

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/94-pentax-price-watch/399974-i-got-email...-discount.html

There is an implication there that Flickr may not survive or may have modified future cost structures.

[WillWeaverRVA]

Please note Smugmug sent out a letter to pro users of Flickr saying that while it was losing less money than before they took over it is still losing money...

I got an email: Opportunity to support Flickr.com with a discount - PentaxForums.com

There is an implication there that Flickr may not survive or may have modified future cost structures.

The email they sent to non-Pro users is even more pessimistic. If I were trying to decide whether to use Flickr as a permanent image host, this email would really lead me to think twice about it.

Dear friends,
Flickr—the world’s most-beloved, money-losing business—needs your help.

Two years ago, Flickr was losing tens of millions of dollars a year. Our company, SmugMug, stepped in to rescue it from being shut down and to save tens of billions of your precious photos from being erased.

Why? We’ve spent 17 years lovingly building our company into a thriving, family-owned and -operated business that cares deeply about photographers. SmugMug has always been the place for photographers to showcase their photography, and we’ve long admired how Flickr has been the community where they connect with each other. We couldn’t stand by and watch Flickr vanish.

So we took a big risk, stepped in, and saved Flickr. Together, we created the world’s largest photographer-focused community: a place where photographers can stand out and fit in.

We’ve been hard at work improving Flickr. We hired an excellent, large staff of Support Heroes who now deliver support with an average customer satisfaction rating of above 90%. We got rid of Yahoo’s login. We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again.

Our work is never done, but we’ve made tremendous progress.

Now Flickr needs your help. It’s still losing money. Hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members stepped up and joined Flickr Pro, for which we are eternally grateful. It’s losing a lot less money than it was. But it’s not yet making enough.

We need more Flickr Pro members if we want to keep the Flickr dream alive.

We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow. Unlike platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers, we love photography, and we believe Flickr deserves not only to live on but thrive. We think the world agrees; and we think the Flickr community does, too. But we cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve been doing.

Flickr is the world’s largest photographer-focused community. It’s the world’s best way to find great photography and connect with amazing photographers. Flickr hosts some of the world’s most iconic, most priceless photos, freely available to the entire world. This community is home to more than 100 million accounts and tens of billions of photos. It serves billions of photos every single day. It’s huge. It’s a priceless treasure for the whole world. And it costs money to operate. Lots of money.

Flickr is not a charity, and we’re not asking you for a donation. Flickr is the best value in photo sharing anywhere in the world. Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and their visitors, advanced stats, unlimited full-quality storage for all their photos, plus premium features and access to the world’s largest photographer-focused community for less than $5 per month.

You likely pay services such as Netflix and Spotify at least $9 per month. I love services like these, and I’m a happy paying customer, but they don’t keep your priceless photos safe and let you share them with the most important people in your world. Flickr does, and a Flickr Pro membership costs less than $1 per week.

Please, help us make Flickr thrive. Help us ensure it has a bright future. Every Flickr Pro subscription goes directly to keeping Flickr alive and creating great new experiences for photographers like you. We are building lots of great things for the Flickr community, but we need your help. We can do this together.

We’re launching our end-of-year Pro subscription campaign on Thursday, December 26, but I want to invite you to subscribe to Flickr Pro today for the same 25% discount.

We’ve gone to great lengths to optimize Flickr for cost savings wherever possible, but the increasing cost of operating this enormous community and continuing to invest in its future will require a small price increase early in the new year, so this is truly the very best time to upgrade your membership to Pro.

If you value Flickr finally being independent, built for photographers and by photographers, we ask you to join us, and to share this offer with those who share your love of photography and community.

With gratitude,

Don MacAskill
Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek
SmugMug + Flickr

Use and share coupon code 25in2019 to get 25% off Flickr Pro now.

[RGlasel]

There is an implication there that Flickr may not survive or may have modified future cost structures.

I think the free accounts are toast, or at least they will be if the owners of SmugMug have any business sense (Full disclosure: I only have a free account myself). SmugMug has already spent the money necessary to rebuild/upgrade the Flickr software and migrate it to AWS, but server costs are almost the same for free and Pro accounts. Ad revenue from the free accounts doesn't come close to covering those costs, so cancelling the free accounts frees up money and nobody who already has a Pro account (or a paid SmugMug account) is going to cancel because the free Flickr accounts are no longer available. If only 1 out of every 1000 free accounts end up converting to a Pro account, SmugMug is much further ahead.

Looking to a future without free Flickr accounts, it shouldn't cost SmugMug more to support Flickr Pro accounts than it does to support paid SmugMug accounts and by offering two significantly different services means that SmugMug can keep more paying customers overall and differentiate SmugMug from Flickr by offering special services more oriented to photography businesses in order to charge more than a Flickr Pro account for those services.

---------- Post added 12-20-19 at 03:50 PM ----------

If I were trying to decide whether to use Flickr as a permanent image host, this email would really lead me to think twice about it.

The question that needs to be answered is how permanent does public access to your photos need to be? If you look at some of the older, more popular threads in this forum, you will find lots of examples of shared photos that can no longer be viewed, either because the service used by a PF member is no longer available or the member has removed the image from the hosting service in order to stay under a storage limit. I use Flickr to store images that I post here (for higher resolution and so I don't go over my limits on this site) and for a convenient way to share a bunch of photos with people I know. The social aspects of Flickr have zero value to me and if free Flickr accounts go away, I can find other ways to share photos. It isn't as if there are people who depend on having access to my photos for long periods of time and have no other way of accessing them.

[UncleVanya]

I think the free accounts are toast, or at least they will be if the owners of SmugMug have any business sense (Full disclosure: I only have a free account myself). SmugMug has already spent the money necessary to rebuild/upgrade the Flickr software and migrate it to AWS, but server costs are almost the same for free and Pro accounts. Ad revenue from the free accounts doesn't come close to covering those costs, so cancelling the free accounts frees up money and nobody who already has a Pro account (or a paid SmugMug account) is going to cancel because the free Flickr accounts are no longer available. If only 1 out of every 1000 free accounts end up converting to a Pro account, SmugMug is much further ahead.

Looking to a future without free Flickr accounts, it shouldn't cost SmugMug more to support Flickr Pro accounts than it does to support paid SmugMug accounts and by offering two significantly different services means that SmugMug can keep more paying customers overall and differentiate SmugMug from Flickr by offering special services more oriented to photography businesses in order to charge more than a Flickr Pro account for those services.

---------- Post added 12-20-19 at 03:50 PM ----------

The question that needs to be answered is how permanent does public access to your photos need to be? If you look at some of the older, more popular threads in this forum, you will find lots of examples of shared photos that can no longer be viewed, either because the service used by a PF member is no longer available or the member has removed the image from the hosting service in order to stay under a storage limit. I use Flickr to store images that I post here (for higher resolution and so I don't go over my limits on this site) and for a convenient way to share a bunch of photos with people I know. The social aspects of Flickr have zero value to me and if free Flickr accounts go away, I can find other ways to share photos. It isn't as if there are people who depend on having access to my photos for long periods of time and have no other way of accessing them.

First I think that reducing the caps a bit and maybe giving a tier in between pro and free might help.

Second, I think permanent storage is a good goal. I think the world of forums would be a great deal less functional if the sites like flickr disappeared. I'm aware some of this has happened with other sites but flickr is a much larger platform than any of the one's that are gone. Maybe I'm biased...

[THoog]

Flickr is Doomed!(tm). (Translation: we've been here before - when Yahoo bought flickr, when Yahoo started cost-cutting, when Yahoo sold it off to Verizon, when Verizon sold it to SmugMug, when SmugMug pulled back from the free terabyte. We're still here.)

I've been a "Pro" member for about thirteen years. While they may have to change pricing to reflect actual hosting costs and/or be less generous to free accounts, I don't see the paid service going away any time soon. They asked that Pro members encourage others to take advantage of the 25% off deal next week, so consider yourselves encouraged.

[manishved]

Not sure if there are other options besides Smugmug currently. I did see a project on Github that leverages Amazon S3 storage to create a smugmug-like site and its very tempting.

[NeverSatisfied]

I'm debating / researching the use and future of Flickr myself, thus finding threads like this to help make my decision. I'd been a "Pro" user for a number of years but let it lapse more recently after "Oath" took over. I haven't added any photos in a long time, but I am well below the cut-off (maybe 300 - 400 photos total). I do think Flickr needs to rein certain users in though. There is a person in my Flickr contacts who just regurgitates everything he shoots into his Flickr account. Countless hundreds of very similar squirrel photos in a row, for example, no editing whatsoever. I just checked and he is up to 428,000 photos on Flickr!!! That number of images seems like an unmanageable waste of storage space.

[jcdoss]

The email they sent to non-Pro users is even more pessimistic. If I were trying to decide whether to use Flickr as a permanent image host, this email would really lead me to think twice about it.

Oh, how I weep for a Silicon Valley millionaire. The website is priceless, yet his lack of profits require hat-in-hand begging with hand-wringing and everything. I shall not only never visit Flickr again, but will allow my Smugmug account to lapse as well (no, they won't prorate if you cancel because they really want your money). No tolerance anymore from the 1%.

[UncleVanya]

Oh, how I weep for a Silicon Valley millionaire. The website is priceless, yet his lack of profits require hat-in-hand begging with hand-wringing and everything. I shall not only never visit Flickr again, but will allow my Smugmug account to lapse as well (no, they won't prorate if you cancel because they really want your money). No tolerance anymore from the 1%.

Would you rent you house for less than your mortgage payment?

[jcdoss]

Would you rent you house for less than your mortgage payment?

If I felt like the tenants were "priceless" and if I was a multimillionaire, then yes sir. Yes I would, and in fact I did. There are a surprising number of things I lose money on, photography being first and foremost among them, that I do for the fun of it or for the joy of sharing and human interaction (that doesn't involve dollars).


Let's not weigh every darn thing on the planet in the balance of the almighty dollar.

[UncleVanya]

If I felt like the tenants were "priceless" and if I was a multimillionaire, then yes sir. Yes I would, and in fact I did. There are a surprising number of things I lose money on, photography being first and foremost among them, that I do for the fun of it or for the joy of sharing and human interaction (that doesn't involve dollars).


Let's not weigh every darn thing on the planet in the balance of the almighty dollar.

That's a view that is not sustainable. You don't need to make massive profit but you do need to cover expenses. Losing money is no way to keep in business.

[boriscleto]

That's a view that is not sustainable. You don't need to make massive profit but you do need to cover expenses. Losing money is no way to keep in business.

Then explain the continued existence of the various gig economy companies...

[jcdoss]

It's not as though Flickr is their only source of income.. don't be disingenuous. He is makig a ton on Smugmug many different ways, so it is remarkably unlikely that the family will miss a meal. Since the books aren't open, we don't know what "at a loss" means. So, it very well could be a sustainable view if the owner/CEO/family aren't taking salaries aid if losses were low. I would be spectacularly surprised to find out that's the case, wouldn't you? Why are you defending the millionaire class, anyway?