Last week we got the news – SmugMug buys Flickr. OK, now what?

SmugMug vs. Flickr

Before I get started, I want to disclose that I am an affiliate for SmugMug. I have no knowledge of the inner workings of SmugMug, but I do get paid if you decide to purchase an account with SmugMug based upon my recommendation (and you also save 15%). Since I'm disclosing all of that, here's my SmugMug discount URL:

https://williambeem.com/smugmug

With that out of the way, let's talk about this purchase.

Flickr and SmugMug are both online photo sharing sites, but they serve different markets and needs. Flickr is a social media site where you upload your photos to share, either on the service with other photographers or using links to post your photos elsewhere on the Internet.

SmugMug is a portfolio site and also a point of sale for photographers. This is where you create galleries of photos that you can share, either publicly or to a limited audience, and allow them to purchase your photos through the site. SmugMug integrates with Bay Photo for prints or allows you to sell digital downloads.

Flickr has a free version of the service supported by ads, but you can pay for an annual membership that provides more features and removes the ads for a relatively small fee.

SmugMug isn't free, but it does offer a 14 free trial. Other than that, you pay to use the service. SmugMug also takes a 15% cut of your online photo sales.

Flickr Used to Be the Place for Photographers

That headline may upset some people who are still diehard fans of Flickr, but it's safe to say that Flickr's community diminished over the past few years. Different social media and photo sharing sites rose up to steal much of Flickr's thunder, and Flickr did little to nothing to remain competitive.

Facebook is a horrible place to post your photos due to the aggressive compression applied to your images, but people post there anyway.

Why?

Because that's where everyone else is these days. Not everyone has a Flickr account because it primarily appeals to photographers. However, nearly everyone has a Facebook account. So you put up with horrible compression in order to potentially reach a wider audience.

Another group of people embraced Instagram (which Facebook bought) for mostly the same reasons. With the rise of mobile phone photography, it was an easy and frictionless what to share photos in the moment.

Photographers who want to share their carefully composed and post-processed photos jump through hoops to get them on Instagram for much the same reason we post them on Facebook.

That's where the people are.

The Social Media Backlash Created a New Awareness

Mark Zuckerberg's two days of testimony before Congress opened a lot of eyes about the price we pay for using Facebook and Instagram as a “free” service.

These free social media sites are full of opportunities for us to reveal information about ourselves that Facebook and developers can mine to either sell us things or attempt to manipulate our opinions.

That sort of thing never happened on Flickr or SmugMug.

The problem is that we didn't truly have an alternative that came to mind.

That all changed with the headline – SmugMug buys Flickr.

That's because Flickr didn't come to mind under the ownership of Yahoo or Verizon. Why?

Because both of those organizations are essentially advertising companies. They're the other side of the same coin when compared to Facebook or Google services. They're mining your data to exploit.