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    Yahoo just sold Flickr to Smugmug, officially time to forget about Yahoo


    Flickr used to be the largest photosharing website on the internet. Then Facebook happened. If you’ve taken photos you’re proud of (and want to sell) there’s still plenty of niche sites for photographers to leverage and in terms of storage there’s Google Photos and OneDrive, but for sharing, Facebook is the giant of the industry by some margin.

    Yahoo never really knew what to do with Flickr and redesigns often alienated the biggest fans of the service. The biggest impact they made on the service was to the payment model, after being firmly beaten, they offered virtually unlimited storage for free with a paid tier for select features (don’t know anyone who used this).

    Today they’ve finally given up and have announced Flickr is now owned by Smugmug. The typical announcement of independence is supposed to reassure any remaining fans of the service, but to be honest, it needs an overhaul and it certainly needs better sign in options because who remembers their Yahoo account at this point?

    Smugmug have committed to transition Flickr to their technology stack over time.

    The two companies aren’t disclosing the value of the deal, probably because its a fraction of what Yahoo paid for them back in 2005. It’s a sad fall from grace and as a Flickr user who established a solid workflow of Lightroom to Flickr to embedded gallery on techAU, I stopped using the service some time ago, actually right around the time they removed 3rd party authentication.

    Jason Cartwright
    Jason Cartwrighthttps://techau.com.au/author/jason/
    Creator of techAU, Jason has spent the dozen+ years covering technology in Australia and around the world. Bringing a background in multimedia and passion for technology to the job, Cartwright delivers detailed product reviews, event coverage and industry news on a daily basis. Disclaimer: Tesla Shareholder from 20/01/2021

    1 COMMENT

    1. This is exciting news! Being frustrated by Flickr’s failings led me to SmugMug, where I can easily embed pics into WordPress and offer photos for sale. Despite this, I’ve maintained my (free) Flickr account, so I’m excited to see what will happen to the site under the new ownership.

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