Dear WeatherCat Shutterbugs,
If you really enjoy sharing photos, some sort of online hosting service is a must. Longtime WeatherCatter, Steve Morris got me hooked up with
SmugMug. It is an independent, family owned service that has always been fee based and commercial free. So it came as no small shock when it was announced that SmugMug has acquired the former Yahoo service Flickr. Flickr started off as quite a success in its own right. Alas, Yahoo basically neglected it to death after purchasing it. The woeful tale is part of this USA Today story about the acquisition:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/04/20/smugmug-buys-flickr-verizon-oath/537377002/The story also makes clear how different the two services are. SmugMug was more for professional and serious amateur photographers. It also has always had a strong infrastructure support for privacy. It had to because people were paying for that service. Flickr in contrast has always been mostly supported by advertising. How this sort of marriage is supposed to work is at best unclear.
There was this message on the SmugMug website:
https://www.smugmug.com/together/The video portion of the SmugMug announcement can be found on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/T4B_qlaN8C4It suggests that perhaps the motivation was to collect the hardcore Flickr faithful under the SmugMug umbrella. After all the Yahoo squandering, many of the purely social types have abandoned Flickr. After all, Facebook has its own rebust photo hosting capabilities. The lonely souls still using Flickr are doing so because they want something more dedicated to photography. It is this appeal that you'll find in the SmugMug announcement and video.
I'm all in favor of rescuing some orphaned budding photographers; however, with one extremely important caveat - that SmugMug continue to provide the services I've been paying for all these years and continuing to do that
well!Sign me as
"one irked and concerned photographer" . . . . .
Edouard