4 ms·

SmugMug's social aspects are largely external. Due to its very high adoption on sites like AdvRider, and its rudimentary community support (e.g. http://www.smu

SmugMug's social aspects are largely external. Due to its very high adoption on sites like AdvRider, and its rudimentary community support (e.g. http://www.smugmug.com/community/ADVrider/popular/all http://www.smugmug.com/community/ADVrider/popular/all), it seems to be more than a typical gallery site. IMO Flickr will lose because they focused too much on the social angle. Meanwhile, it's a mediocre photo-management site, with lousy uploader apps, and people are just posting directly to Facebook.

potatolicious 16y ago
"Lose" is relative I suppose - Flickr has a hard lock on much of the photographic community. FB Photos is still limited to vacation photos, wild nights out, etc. There's not a great deal of hard photography going on there - a photographer's social graph is inevitably a lot of non-photogs, and Flickr's ability to discover and participate across vast social graphs is powerful for photographers. FB's limitation of requiring social graph adjacency for most levels of participation is a liability for this use case. So sure, SmugMug and FB are destroying Flickr as a tool for Joe Average's image uploads, but as a photographic community I honestly don't think it's doing so badly. From a monetization standpoint it's not a bad bet - you would have a hard time selling a Flickr Pro account to the average FB user. But $20/yr. as a ticket price for a ludicrous number of amateur to professional photographers? No brainer.
- georgieporgie 16y ago
  You're absolutely right about the hardcore photographer crowd. But as Facebook's image support improves, and Flickr remains static, I think you'll even see that shift. Even if Facebook's own image support doesn't improve to the level of Flickr Pro, don't you suppose that a service like SmugMug, plus social integration via Facebook (or similar), would match or beat Flickr for both quality of hosting and social connectivity? By the way, I'm a Flickr Pro member. I got tired of managing Gallery 2, but I'm pretty disappointed by the lousy uploader tool, the restrictive 'photo stream' concept, etc.

potatolicious 16y ago

"Lose" is relative I suppose - Flickr has a hard lock on much of the photographic community. FB Photos is still limited to vacation photos, wild nights out, etc. There's not a great deal of hard photography going on there - a photographer's social graph is inevitably a lot of non-photogs, and Flickr's ability to discover and participate across vast social graphs is powerful for photographers. FB's limitation of requiring social graph adjacency for most levels of participation is a liability for this use case. So sure, SmugMug and FB are destroying Flickr as a tool for Joe Average's image uploads, but as a photographic community I honestly don't think it's doing so badly. From a monetization standpoint it's not a bad bet - you would have a hard time selling a Flickr Pro account to the average FB user. But $20/yr. as a ticket price for a ludicrous number of amateur to professional photographers? No brainer.

georgieporgie 16y ago
You're absolutely right about the hardcore photographer crowd. But as Facebook's image support improves, and Flickr remains static, I think you'll even see that shift. Even if Facebook's own image support doesn't improve to the level of Flickr Pro, don't you suppose that a service like SmugMug, plus social integration via Facebook (or similar), would match or beat Flickr for both quality of hosting and social connectivity? By the way, I'm a Flickr Pro member. I got tired of managing Gallery 2, but I'm pretty disappointed by the lousy uploader tool, the restrictive 'photo stream' concept, etc.