9 ms·

Don here, thanks so much for the vote of confidence. Big job ahead of us, but the community is the reason we did this. We want to invest, innovate and grow th

Don here, thanks so much for the vote of confidence. Big job ahead of us, but the community is the reason we did this. We want to invest, innovate and grow there. We'll be working hard. But first I have a lot of learning to do. Stay tuned.

jjguy 8y ago
This is why I continue to hang out on HN. Is there anywhere else on the internet this kind of connection would happen?
- IrrationalPhoto 8y ago
  Slashdot?
- sah2ed 8y ago
  In terms of communities where you can get the most qualified person on a topic to reply, I think Quora would also qualify, and to a limited extent, Twitter.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    Quora really seemed nice until they started publish everything I did there. I also think they had a real name policy. (At least thats how I remember it.) They might have fixed that now but I feel it would take quite some effort for them to make them feel safe again.
- wccrawford 8y ago
  Reddit has a tendency to gain so much momentum that companies can't ignore people that are having problems like this. In that case, you often see a rep from the company log in and start triageing the situation. Don here is clearly much more on top of the situation than that, but my point is that any big social site ends up seeing this with enough outrage.
  - mygo 8y ago
    I don’t think that facebook facilitates this well. Since you have to go out of your way to find a discussion there. And there is no “right now” feeling if you do find a relevant discussion. But here I just visited the home page of what I consider a general newsfeed and we’re talking to their new owners.
    - wccrawford 8y ago
      If you join a Facebook group about a particular thing, you'll find plenty of discussion about that thing. And when something is big enough news, it makes it to the top-10 news thing on the right-hand side of Facebook.
audiometry 8y ago
Don— I was a paying customer too. Then Flickr changed their login, forcing me to get a yahoo account, which I then lost over time. So for years now, my account, and all the photos of my 1-3yo kid are buried and locked behind the “you need (login) and pay premium access to see all your photos”. All because that stupid yahoo login integration. Unrecoverable.
- onethumb 8y ago
  I will move heaven and earth to solve this for you. We're moving off of Yahoo Auth as soon as we can, but can likely fix before that (which will take awhile). Raising this up the flag pole.
  - bitcoinmoney 8y ago
    Wow. The comments are gold. We should have a best of HN with materials like this and the one on foundationdb.
  - 1024core 8y ago
    > We're moving off of Yahoo Auth So what will replace it? I've been a Flickr user for more than 10 years.
    - mc32 8y ago
      Maybe they'll return the Flickr logins to users?
      - happertiger 8y ago
        I would be very surprised if what they did wasn’t common sense. Their track record has been fantastic.
    - onethumb 8y ago
      Already designing and architecting that. Should be great. Stay tuned.
  - 8y ago
jumelles 8y ago
I'm glad to hear that! From yet another formerly-paying Flickr user :)
et-al 8y ago
Hi Don, Since you're here, may I voice a thing I really enjoyed about Flickr? Community and actual human communication. Perhaps in the mobile era this isn't possible anymore since everyone is attention starved and tiny screens and keyboards aren't conducive to longform communication, but this was Flickr's strength. You'd find a group where your photos were relevant and start conversations with strangers halfway around the world. The ability for groups to self-moderate is key because it kept groups on topic. I just poked around some communities I used to frequent like Hardcore Street Photography [0] and Guess Where SF [1], and they're surprisingly still habited. Instead of trying to be another Instagram, I hope the future of Flickr will play to its strengths. [0] https://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/ https://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/ [1] https://www.flickr.com/groups/guesswheresf https://www.flickr.com/groups/guesswheresf
- lobster_johnson 8y ago
  Back in 2006 or so when I last used Flickr, one of my biggest problems was spam and noise. One of the biggest annoyances was the constant comments from "award groups" that wanted you to join them, enticing you with some arbitrary "award", which consisted of some kind of gaudy badge. To be honest, most of the Flickr groups seemed completely useless, full of HDR junk and asinine motivational stuff. Though I'm sure it's a bit like Reddit — the good communities are small and hidden. Follower spam is another example of noise, and something Instagram is also rife with.
  - et-al 8y ago
    I forgot about those gaudy animated badges. Social media does have tough challenges ahead, especially as bots/spam become more and more prevalent. I would love to work on a bot-prevention team somewhere, but my background isn't in ML.
    - alanfalcon 8y ago
      I like the idea of building a reputation system that accepts bots as first class citizens instead of imagining them as an inherent problem. Anyone who meaningfully contributes is good even if they are a bot, and anyone who doesn’t gets left behind. (Easier said than done but the approach to the problem is what’s fundamentally different.)
romwell 8y ago
I am happy to hear of the new era of Flickr! Some questions: 1. Are you going to keep the 1TB free space for everyone? 2. Do you think you'll have a desktop uploader available for non-paying users? 3. What about open-source integration (digiKam, etc)? Last time I tried, I couldn't get it to work with Yahoo authentication. Thanks, and looking forward to the new life :)
- onethumb 8y ago
  I'm in heavy learning mode so I don't have these answers yet. I wish I did. The way I run SmugMug is pretty simple: We love our customers, we listen to them, we build great experiences for them based on that feedback, then we do it all over again. We're going to apply that same approach to Flickr. Simply migrating them into AWS, and getting off of Yahoo Auth, and the variety of other urgent issues, will take a lot of time, effort, energy, etc. But we're also very excited to get to work enhancing the existing experiences and building new ones. So please be patient with me as I learn, come up to speed, and tackle some of the big obstacles in front of us. It'll be worth it. :)
  - romwell 8y ago
    Thanks again, and the best of luck to y'all!
happertiger 8y ago
I still have an account. If there was a reasonably priced, full featured Flickr I would resubscribe. I have a smugmug account. Is there going to be a way to marry the two??? I have 11 years of photos on Flickr and would hate to have to move them (your sys people would hate it too I’m sure).
- onethumb 8y ago
  We know we don't want to merge the two. They're both super valuable, offer two different & great experiences, etc. But logically, it makes sense that connecting them somehow makes a lot of sense. SmugMug has consumed the Flickr API for awhile, so some of the plumbing is already in place. Stay tuned while we learn from our customers what they'd like and then build it. My hunch is better connectivity between the two services is going to be high on the list, but I'm going to let our customers drive that decision.
afs35mm 8y ago
Hi Don! Are you hiring engineers in NYC by chance for this new opportunity? :)
- onethumb 8y ago
  We're always hiring great people, so if you're interested, please apply. :)
IrrationalPhoto 8y ago
Hey Don, I have been on flickr since 2010 and I have been subscribed to Flickr's "Pro" service for several years. I rely a lot on those statistics to generate more views and contacts I would also like an expansion and more detailed analysis Why can't I know WHICH picture was found through Google (You don't, you say there were X finds through Google, but we can't see which picture)? Why don't you show the Google Search URL? Looking at SmugMug price plans you are MUCH more expensive than Flickr, are you going to be raising PRO costs? And if you do, are you going to pull the PR stunt of saying it is needed to "To Grow and Improve" and"We think the services offered are at the best price point, there is always free" ? Because Free is not a middle ground. Because you acquired Flickr, you knew what was coming with it, IE, customers, there is no way to pass raising Tariffs without upsetting your New user base which has never asked for you and is tired of being thrown around from one company to another.and saying you have "no plans for the immediate future" it really does seem that you care more about your increased bourse instead of offering your clients an increased experience? Are you going to include website hosting services to flickr users within the PRO price and go after 500px, or will you Keep the two Services very clear of each other for a different experience? If you are keeping the two Services Separate, then aren't you really just here to collect a bigger check? If Yahoo / Verizon / Oath was not willing to spend money to upgrade our services and gain more users and you are, wouldn't this mean our subscription fees will increase? Why should we remain here instead of going to 500px which offers a similar service to you but for much cheaper?
- hackbinary 8y ago
  I had a quick look over their pricing plans, and they actually seem pretty fair to me. $48 per year to store all of your photos on the basic paid tier, and all the other tiers seemed aimed at people that are either enthusiasts or professionals, eg people who want to have their own domain. The old adage of "you kind of get what you pay for" seems to apply.
  - dexterdog 8y ago
    In this day and age using your own domain adds no cost aside from the domain itself.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
aaronbrethorst 8y ago
Sounds great. I can’t wait to see where you take this!
RyJones 8y ago
long time flickr user - I would love to continue paying for the service!
- onethumb 8y ago
  We'd love to have you keep paying! And we'd love to put your payment to work improving the service for you and everyone else. Thanks!
TheWiseOne 8y ago
Don, Will you keep the current 1 TB free storage tier as is?
- onethumb 8y ago
  I don't know yet, I'm still learning and coming up to speed. That being said, 1TB free is definitely a massive outlier on the Internet. We'll see. SmugMug has offered unlimited storage for more than 15 years, so we know a lot about the space. I'm excited to see what we can do with and for the community.
killjoywashere 8y ago
Hi Don, been paying for Flickr and looking lustfully at SmugMug for a long time, user back when Game Neverending was still mixed in. Bought accounts for all my family too. Looking forward to work.
- onethumb 8y ago
  Thanks! Can't wait to deliver awesome experiences to you and your family. Thanks for being a customer!
chrissnell 8y ago
Hi Don, I've been a Pro user of Flickr since 2005 or so. I actually thought for the first time this year that I would cancel it. My number-one complaint is speed. It's so slow. As a professional infrastructure guy, it just kills me and I wished I could buy the company myself and make it fast again. I really hope you will invest in revitalizing this service because I really don't want to go. My life--from young skier/mountaineer guy--to Army soldier--to dating a girl--marriage--kids--it's all documented there. I look at my old photos all the time but it's just so unbearably slow. Chris aka https://flickr.com/photos/Defender90 https://flickr.com/photos/Defender90
- ausjke 8y ago
  same here, pro user for 10+ years and I rarely use flickr these days but have been letting my credit card renew nonetheless. please revive flickr.
  - onethumb 8y ago
    You have my promise that we'll work very hard to do just that.
- onethumb 8y ago
  On it. We were a pre-launch customer of AWS, so we've been building both modern and at scale for quite some time. Super-talented team at Flickr, I can't wait to see what we can do together.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
Greetings Don. Always had a place in my heart for Flickr. Would love to see if thrive again. My gut sez there's a pretty big space between (the disposalness of) Instagram and the (heavy handiness of) 500px. Maybe you agree. I guess we'll find out. I wish y'all the best. Fun and competition is a positive for all.
b_f 8y ago
I've been a Flickr pro user since 2007, and I still think it's the only site and community that is truly dedicated to serious photography. I think the site languished at the advent of the ubiquity of mobile browsing (be it app or even mobile site), and suffered from certain trends that yielded a strange mix of infinite scrolling and wonky pagination (I still have trouble finding my own photos). I'm hoping for the best, and excited for new blood.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bjelkeman-again 8y ago
Hi Don, great to hear. Paying Flickr customer for many years. One thing we lost recently was the ability to post a Tweet directly from the Flickr mobile app. I think the way Apple/Twitter interacts changed with an iOS upgrade. I really don’t want to use another platform for storing my photos, even Twitter stream photos, and having Flickr, where I am in control was always my preferred choice. Looking forward to keep using Flickr where the owners actually care.
amygdyl 8y ago
Hi Don, I hope you are able to see my post, I think I became a bit invisible here, but I just want to take the opportunity to thank you for all those ZFS filer reviews, back in the day. This had a profound utility for us, which I will date to mention, now shuttered fifteen years ago due to the sudden death of my co-founder and best friend, we were so struck by what you guys were doing that we spent ten man years on a competitor... Ahm, no, no we didn't actually intend to compete, that would have been unable to pass my late co-founder's stringent "is it any good?" test, where I had to convince him as nauseam we had no negative motivation..but we thought we saw a higher end need for photo hosting, in the advertising world, where we saw that a readily available search and lightbox app, like you see at Corbis, or Getty, plus of course actually reliable storage, would be in immediate demand from photographers who liaise with ADs, everywhere. We had nifty features like rendering photos for the display capability, and were planning to hook up deals where the AD could subscribe to get so many 10 by 8 or larger proofs bikes to them, potentially from the nearest photographer who upheld a minimum process standard. This had ambition to take on digital advertising delivery. We thought smugmug was the game changer able to bring credibility to our dream of expanding access to lucrative agency work, to normal photographers. So we set about making the tools... even the dot com is long lost during my life's upheavals that followed from personal loss in large part, I grew up knowing my co-founder, but I think we've still got the unused Twitter handle. It was to be called PhotoAlta. Or PA (short for Photo Agency, which we thought was cute) . This is still a dream about opening the industry in ways that can make advertising affordable to small businesses, which is simply not at all the case now. In 03/04/05, we didn't see the hockey stick of the cloud, not at all clearly anyhow, but we knew that rather than bike proofs about, we'd rather provide on demand runtimes of proofing software, fronted by preconfiguration and parameter checks for avoiding waste. There's a realm of incredibly expensive software loosely categorised as pre press, that we desperately wanted to democratize. This expense was the hurdle to starting out business almost a decade earlier, and I've never been far from my work for opening the advertising industry economy, so random as this is, shame faced and also humbly if you are at all interested in what I'm on about here, I'd simply be delighted to pass on, unreservedly, to where it may do some good.
jacquesm 8y ago
This is the very best thing that could have happened to Flickr. The only other long term option would have been a mausoleum at archive.org or Archive Team. Much good luck!
silveira 8y ago
Hi Don, I have been a pro member of Flickr since 2008. I love the product and I'm very excited by this acquisition. What I really would like to see in Flickr is a reliable upload application. When I'm back from a trip, I usually have a few gigabytes of photos. Regular applications can handle small (hundreds megabytes) batches but when you are talking about gigabytes they start crashing, or stopping in the middle, and cannot continue where they stopped reliably. I would like an application that uploads to Flickr, with retries, status, and with checksum verification on the client and in the server. The same is true for download. Flickr handle well individual downloads and small batches of download. But when trying to download large albums they simple cannot handle it. I have been writing my own applications and scripts to handle my photos on Flickr, so it's absolutely important to keep the current API open.
- adjagu 8y ago
  @silveira would any of your applications work on linux and if so would you be willing to share? I've been trying to download my Flickr photographs and so far only single image download works for me.
throwawayad7d9f 8y ago
Hi Don, Since you're here and talking about community, can you say what your approach is going to be to the copious content on Flickr that violates SmugMug's content policy (but not Flickr's)? Flickr's approach in the past [0] has allowed most things as long as a content filter is applied to keep it from kids and those who don't want to see it. SmugMug's approach [1] is to very broadly ban anything "indecent" in any context whatsoever (even private backups). I contacted support and the story right now is that SmugMug policy will apply and any Flickr content that violates it is up for removal. Are you sticking to that? If so, why? It seems like a very destructive thing to do to the community as your first act after acquisition. [0] https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines [1] https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms
- onethumb 8y ago
  Flickr has its own Privacy Policy [0] and Terms of Service [1], separate and different from SmugMug's. I actually think this represents a good opportunity to revisit, and possibly update, what is and isn't allowed on SmugMug as well, something we haven't done in ages. We'll see, still learning. :) [0] https://www.smugmug.com/about/privacy-flickr https://www.smugmug.com/about/privacy-flickr [1] https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms-flickr https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms-flickr

jjguy 8y ago

This is why I continue to hang out on HN. Is there anywhere else on the internet this kind of connection would happen?

IrrationalPhoto 8y ago
Slashdot?
sah2ed 8y ago
In terms of communities where you can get the most qualified person on a topic to reply, I think Quora would also qualify, and to a limited extent, Twitter.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Quora really seemed nice until they started publish everything I did there. I also think they had a real name policy. (At least thats how I remember it.) They might have fixed that now but I feel it would take quite some effort for them to make them feel safe again.
wccrawford 8y ago
Reddit has a tendency to gain so much momentum that companies can't ignore people that are having problems like this. In that case, you often see a rep from the company log in and start triageing the situation. Don here is clearly much more on top of the situation than that, but my point is that any big social site ends up seeing this with enough outrage.
- mygo 8y ago
  I don’t think that facebook facilitates this well. Since you have to go out of your way to find a discussion there. And there is no “right now” feeling if you do find a relevant discussion. But here I just visited the home page of what I consider a general newsfeed and we’re talking to their new owners.
  - wccrawford 8y ago
    If you join a Facebook group about a particular thing, you'll find plenty of discussion about that thing. And when something is big enough news, it makes it to the top-10 news thing on the right-hand side of Facebook.

audiometry 8y ago

Don— I was a paying customer too. Then Flickr changed their login, forcing me to get a yahoo account, which I then lost over time. So for years now, my account, and all the photos of my 1-3yo kid are buried and locked behind the “you need (login) and pay premium access to see all your photos”. All because that stupid yahoo login integration. Unrecoverable.

onethumb 8y ago
I will move heaven and earth to solve this for you. We're moving off of Yahoo Auth as soon as we can, but can likely fix before that (which will take awhile). Raising this up the flag pole.
- bitcoinmoney 8y ago
  Wow. The comments are gold. We should have a best of HN with materials like this and the one on foundationdb.
- 1024core 8y ago
  > We're moving off of Yahoo Auth So what will replace it? I've been a Flickr user for more than 10 years.
  - mc32 8y ago
    Maybe they'll return the Flickr logins to users?
    - happertiger 8y ago
      I would be very surprised if what they did wasn’t common sense. Their track record has been fantastic.
  - onethumb 8y ago
    Already designing and architecting that. Should be great. Stay tuned.
- 8y ago

jumelles 8y ago

I'm glad to hear that! From yet another formerly-paying Flickr user :)

et-al 8y ago

Hi Don, Since you're here, may I voice a thing I really enjoyed about Flickr? Community and actual human communication. Perhaps in the mobile era this isn't possible anymore since everyone is attention starved and tiny screens and keyboards aren't conducive to longform communication, but this was Flickr's strength. You'd find a group where your photos were relevant and start conversations with strangers halfway around the world. The ability for groups to self-moderate is key because it kept groups on topic. I just poked around some communities I used to frequent like Hardcore Street Photography [0] and Guess Where SF [1], and they're surprisingly still habited. Instead of trying to be another Instagram, I hope the future of Flickr will play to its strengths. [0] https://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/ https://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/ [1] https://www.flickr.com/groups/guesswheresf https://www.flickr.com/groups/guesswheresf

lobster_johnson 8y ago
Back in 2006 or so when I last used Flickr, one of my biggest problems was spam and noise. One of the biggest annoyances was the constant comments from "award groups" that wanted you to join them, enticing you with some arbitrary "award", which consisted of some kind of gaudy badge. To be honest, most of the Flickr groups seemed completely useless, full of HDR junk and asinine motivational stuff. Though I'm sure it's a bit like Reddit — the good communities are small and hidden. Follower spam is another example of noise, and something Instagram is also rife with.
- et-al 8y ago
  I forgot about those gaudy animated badges. Social media does have tough challenges ahead, especially as bots/spam become more and more prevalent. I would love to work on a bot-prevention team somewhere, but my background isn't in ML.
  - alanfalcon 8y ago
    I like the idea of building a reputation system that accepts bots as first class citizens instead of imagining them as an inherent problem. Anyone who meaningfully contributes is good even if they are a bot, and anyone who doesn’t gets left behind. (Easier said than done but the approach to the problem is what’s fundamentally different.)

romwell 8y ago

I am happy to hear of the new era of Flickr! Some questions: 1. Are you going to keep the 1TB free space for everyone? 2. Do you think you'll have a desktop uploader available for non-paying users? 3. What about open-source integration (digiKam, etc)? Last time I tried, I couldn't get it to work with Yahoo authentication. Thanks, and looking forward to the new life :)

onethumb 8y ago
I'm in heavy learning mode so I don't have these answers yet. I wish I did. The way I run SmugMug is pretty simple: We love our customers, we listen to them, we build great experiences for them based on that feedback, then we do it all over again. We're going to apply that same approach to Flickr. Simply migrating them into AWS, and getting off of Yahoo Auth, and the variety of other urgent issues, will take a lot of time, effort, energy, etc. But we're also very excited to get to work enhancing the existing experiences and building new ones. So please be patient with me as I learn, come up to speed, and tackle some of the big obstacles in front of us. It'll be worth it. :)
- romwell 8y ago
  Thanks again, and the best of luck to y'all!

happertiger 8y ago

I still have an account. If there was a reasonably priced, full featured Flickr I would resubscribe. I have a smugmug account. Is there going to be a way to marry the two??? I have 11 years of photos on Flickr and would hate to have to move them (your sys people would hate it too I’m sure).

onethumb 8y ago
We know we don't want to merge the two. They're both super valuable, offer two different & great experiences, etc. But logically, it makes sense that connecting them somehow makes a lot of sense. SmugMug has consumed the Flickr API for awhile, so some of the plumbing is already in place. Stay tuned while we learn from our customers what they'd like and then build it. My hunch is better connectivity between the two services is going to be high on the list, but I'm going to let our customers drive that decision.

afs35mm 8y ago

Hi Don! Are you hiring engineers in NYC by chance for this new opportunity? :)

onethumb 8y ago
We're always hiring great people, so if you're interested, please apply. :)

IrrationalPhoto 8y ago

Hey Don, I have been on flickr since 2010 and I have been subscribed to Flickr's "Pro" service for several years. I rely a lot on those statistics to generate more views and contacts I would also like an expansion and more detailed analysis Why can't I know WHICH picture was found through Google (You don't, you say there were X finds through Google, but we can't see which picture)? Why don't you show the Google Search URL? Looking at SmugMug price plans you are MUCH more expensive than Flickr, are you going to be raising PRO costs? And if you do, are you going to pull the PR stunt of saying it is needed to "To Grow and Improve" and"We think the services offered are at the best price point, there is always free" ? Because Free is not a middle ground. Because you acquired Flickr, you knew what was coming with it, IE, customers, there is no way to pass raising Tariffs without upsetting your New user base which has never asked for you and is tired of being thrown around from one company to another.and saying you have "no plans for the immediate future" it really does seem that you care more about your increased bourse instead of offering your clients an increased experience? Are you going to include website hosting services to flickr users within the PRO price and go after 500px, or will you Keep the two Services very clear of each other for a different experience? If you are keeping the two Services Separate, then aren't you really just here to collect a bigger check? If Yahoo / Verizon / Oath was not willing to spend money to upgrade our services and gain more users and you are, wouldn't this mean our subscription fees will increase? Why should we remain here instead of going to 500px which offers a similar service to you but for much cheaper?

hackbinary 8y ago
I had a quick look over their pricing plans, and they actually seem pretty fair to me. $48 per year to store all of your photos on the basic paid tier, and all the other tiers seemed aimed at people that are either enthusiasts or professionals, eg people who want to have their own domain. The old adage of "you kind of get what you pay for" seems to apply.
- dexterdog 8y ago
  In this day and age using your own domain adds no cost aside from the domain itself.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

aaronbrethorst 8y ago

Sounds great. I can’t wait to see where you take this!

RyJones 8y ago

long time flickr user - I would love to continue paying for the service!

onethumb 8y ago
We'd love to have you keep paying! And we'd love to put your payment to work improving the service for you and everyone else. Thanks!

TheWiseOne 8y ago

Don, Will you keep the current 1 TB free storage tier as is?

onethumb 8y ago
I don't know yet, I'm still learning and coming up to speed. That being said, 1TB free is definitely a massive outlier on the Internet. We'll see. SmugMug has offered unlimited storage for more than 15 years, so we know a lot about the space. I'm excited to see what we can do with and for the community.

killjoywashere 8y ago

Hi Don, been paying for Flickr and looking lustfully at SmugMug for a long time, user back when Game Neverending was still mixed in. Bought accounts for all my family too. Looking forward to work.

onethumb 8y ago
Thanks! Can't wait to deliver awesome experiences to you and your family. Thanks for being a customer!

chrissnell 8y ago

Hi Don, I've been a Pro user of Flickr since 2005 or so. I actually thought for the first time this year that I would cancel it. My number-one complaint is speed. It's so slow. As a professional infrastructure guy, it just kills me and I wished I could buy the company myself and make it fast again. I really hope you will invest in revitalizing this service because I really don't want to go. My life--from young skier/mountaineer guy--to Army soldier--to dating a girl--marriage--kids--it's all documented there. I look at my old photos all the time but it's just so unbearably slow. Chris aka https://flickr.com/photos/Defender90 https://flickr.com/photos/Defender90

ausjke 8y ago
same here, pro user for 10+ years and I rarely use flickr these days but have been letting my credit card renew nonetheless. please revive flickr.
- onethumb 8y ago
  You have my promise that we'll work very hard to do just that.
onethumb 8y ago
On it. We were a pre-launch customer of AWS, so we've been building both modern and at scale for quite some time. Super-talented team at Flickr, I can't wait to see what we can do together.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

Greetings Don. Always had a place in my heart for Flickr. Would love to see if thrive again. My gut sez there's a pretty big space between (the disposalness of) Instagram and the (heavy handiness of) 500px. Maybe you agree. I guess we'll find out. I wish y'all the best. Fun and competition is a positive for all.

b_f 8y ago

I've been a Flickr pro user since 2007, and I still think it's the only site and community that is truly dedicated to serious photography. I think the site languished at the advent of the ubiquity of mobile browsing (be it app or even mobile site), and suffered from certain trends that yielded a strange mix of infinite scrolling and wonky pagination (I still have trouble finding my own photos). I'm hoping for the best, and excited for new blood.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bjelkeman-again 8y ago

Hi Don, great to hear. Paying Flickr customer for many years. One thing we lost recently was the ability to post a Tweet directly from the Flickr mobile app. I think the way Apple/Twitter interacts changed with an iOS upgrade. I really don’t want to use another platform for storing my photos, even Twitter stream photos, and having Flickr, where I am in control was always my preferred choice. Looking forward to keep using Flickr where the owners actually care.

amygdyl 8y ago

Hi Don, I hope you are able to see my post, I think I became a bit invisible here, but I just want to take the opportunity to thank you for all those ZFS filer reviews, back in the day. This had a profound utility for us, which I will date to mention, now shuttered fifteen years ago due to the sudden death of my co-founder and best friend, we were so struck by what you guys were doing that we spent ten man years on a competitor... Ahm, no, no we didn't actually intend to compete, that would have been unable to pass my late co-founder's stringent "is it any good?" test, where I had to convince him as nauseam we had no negative motivation..but we thought we saw a higher end need for photo hosting, in the advertising world, where we saw that a readily available search and lightbox app, like you see at Corbis, or Getty, plus of course actually reliable storage, would be in immediate demand from photographers who liaise with ADs, everywhere. We had nifty features like rendering photos for the display capability, and were planning to hook up deals where the AD could subscribe to get so many 10 by 8 or larger proofs bikes to them, potentially from the nearest photographer who upheld a minimum process standard. This had ambition to take on digital advertising delivery. We thought smugmug was the game changer able to bring credibility to our dream of expanding access to lucrative agency work, to normal photographers. So we set about making the tools... even the dot com is long lost during my life's upheavals that followed from personal loss in large part, I grew up knowing my co-founder, but I think we've still got the unused Twitter handle. It was to be called PhotoAlta. Or PA (short for Photo Agency, which we thought was cute) . This is still a dream about opening the industry in ways that can make advertising affordable to small businesses, which is simply not at all the case now. In 03/04/05, we didn't see the hockey stick of the cloud, not at all clearly anyhow, but we knew that rather than bike proofs about, we'd rather provide on demand runtimes of proofing software, fronted by preconfiguration and parameter checks for avoiding waste. There's a realm of incredibly expensive software loosely categorised as pre press, that we desperately wanted to democratize. This expense was the hurdle to starting out business almost a decade earlier, and I've never been far from my work for opening the advertising industry economy, so random as this is, shame faced and also humbly if you are at all interested in what I'm on about here, I'd simply be delighted to pass on, unreservedly, to where it may do some good.

jacquesm 8y ago

This is the very best thing that could have happened to Flickr. The only other long term option would have been a mausoleum at archive.org or Archive Team. Much good luck!

silveira 8y ago

Hi Don, I have been a pro member of Flickr since 2008. I love the product and I'm very excited by this acquisition. What I really would like to see in Flickr is a reliable upload application. When I'm back from a trip, I usually have a few gigabytes of photos. Regular applications can handle small (hundreds megabytes) batches but when you are talking about gigabytes they start crashing, or stopping in the middle, and cannot continue where they stopped reliably. I would like an application that uploads to Flickr, with retries, status, and with checksum verification on the client and in the server. The same is true for download. Flickr handle well individual downloads and small batches of download. But when trying to download large albums they simple cannot handle it. I have been writing my own applications and scripts to handle my photos on Flickr, so it's absolutely important to keep the current API open.

adjagu 8y ago
@silveira would any of your applications work on linux and if so would you be willing to share? I've been trying to download my Flickr photographs and so far only single image download works for me.

throwawayad7d9f 8y ago

Hi Don, Since you're here and talking about community, can you say what your approach is going to be to the copious content on Flickr that violates SmugMug's content policy (but not Flickr's)? Flickr's approach in the past [0] has allowed most things as long as a content filter is applied to keep it from kids and those who don't want to see it. SmugMug's approach [1] is to very broadly ban anything "indecent" in any context whatsoever (even private backups). I contacted support and the story right now is that SmugMug policy will apply and any Flickr content that violates it is up for removal. Are you sticking to that? If so, why? It seems like a very destructive thing to do to the community as your first act after acquisition. [0] https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines [1] https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms

onethumb 8y ago
Flickr has its own Privacy Policy [0] and Terms of Service [1], separate and different from SmugMug's. I actually think this represents a good opportunity to revisit, and possibly update, what is and isn't allowed on SmugMug as well, something we haven't done in ages. We'll see, still learning. :) [0] https://www.smugmug.com/about/privacy-flickr https://www.smugmug.com/about/privacy-flickr [1] https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms-flickr https://www.smugmug.com/about/terms-flickr