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Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz
Two photo-sharing services are teaming up, as SmugMug buys Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary Oath. USA Today broke the news and interviewed SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, who said he hopes to revitalize Flickr . At the same time, he said he's still figuring out his actual plans: "It sounds silly for the CEO to not to totally know what he's going to do, but we haven't built SmugMug on a master plan either. We try to listen to our customers and when enough of them ask for something that's important to them or to the community, we go and build it."
[...] In an FAQ about the deal, SmugMug says it will continue to operate Flickr as a separate site, with no merging of user accounts or photos: "Over time, we'll be migrating Flickr onto SmugMug's technology infrastructure, and your Flickr photos will move as a part of this migration — but the photos themselves will remain on Flickr."
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/smugmug-acquires-flickr/
(Score: 2) by terrab0t on Monday April 23 2018, @11:41AM (2 children)
Flickr is dying because you cannot reach an audience there.
Make a Flickr account today. Start posting the most amazing photos. Share them in Flickr groups. Talk to other users. Do everything you can to promote yourself on that platform. You will not build an audience there.
You won’t build an audience there because there isn’t one. It’s mainly other photographers trying to promote their work to you. The mass audience of casual users left long ago for easy, fun mobile apps like Instagram.
A friend of mine who does graphic art said the same thing about DeviantArt. It’s mostly artists trying to promote themselves to each other. He doesn’t bother posting his work there anymore. He posts it on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where people will see it.
SmugMug has a better strategy. They aim to be a nice portfolio site you can link people to. They let you heavily customize your profile page to make an uncluttered presentation of your work. That’s valuable. They also make it easy to sell prints and other merchandise. Again, something valuable to people who produce content. These are the things Flickr should have been focusing on when it started losing its mass audience.
(Score: 2) by dublet on Monday April 23 2018, @02:01PM
As an amateur photographer, I use Flickr and do agree with you somewhat. Using the social aspect of Flickr, and in particular the groups, is a waste of time.
However, in my voyages across the Internet, I've found it to be one of the best places to store and organize my photos and then share them on places like Twitter and facilitating the sharing of my photos with other social media platforms.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 4, Informative) by fyngyrz on Monday April 23 2018, @04:50PM
Most people who think they are doing this, are not actually doing this. Further, as Instagram has been a phone-photo site (no desktop client means very few DSLR images, for instance), you're not going to find a wealth of "most amazing" content on there. Flickr's groups, when well-moderated, can provide a decent experience along a particular line of interest. I'm talking about specific lines of interest, such as mineral photos, landscapes, etc.
Here's one I moderate...
...when groups accept just anything, they quickly devolve into noise. The trick has always been to find the well-moderated groups, and if you can't, then create one and make sure you keep the dreck out.
As a viewer, picking well moderated groups is on you. If you don't, well, there you go.
Well, I agree they should improve the site, but the "losing its mass audience" bit hasn't seemed to hurt the quality of images any. Growth for the sake of growth is often a direct path downwards into mediocrity and lower. And we were talking about Instagram, which serves to illustrate my case fairly well. :)
I think that – and your remark about Flickr being photographers looking at other photographers work – is simply a reflection of the fact that most people aren't into art of any kind. The impression I have is that the average phone user would much prefer to watch someone eat a Tide Pod and then click a thumbs-up icon as compared to consider light and shadow, sightlines, and amazing content. Other photographers (and by that, I'm not talking about your typical phone wielder) are more likely to look at your work and actually evaluate those aspects, responding accordingly. Likewise, people who are into appreciating photography as an art (or graphic art) will find the sites where those things are present. But there seem to be very few of them compared to the phone-having masses. It seems kind of silly to expect art and mass appeal to go hand-in-hand, at least to me.
Back to my original point, a lot of folks who think they are making art – other than in the sense of "if I say it's art, it's art – are not crafting work with much, or any, appeal to others. Which makes hunting it down an exercise in finding venues with quality moderation, and here we're back to Flickr groups or whatever the equivalent is on other sites.
Sometimes it's just about interest in a particular subject, which is the idea central to my moderation of the above example group. I'm not looking for art – but I'm also not looking for jewelry, promotion of new-age nonsense, and casual shots.
Anyway, Flickr's clearly still a going concern. It's not Instagram, no, but unless all you're doing is counting shekels / watching stock options, I consider that a significant plus. "Best" is better than "biggest." So I like to see a trend towards the former rather than the latter. No matter how hard it is to get there.