Smugmug Acquires Flickr

I've known the SmugMug founders from the beginning.

First of all, they're one of the nicest people you can imagine. They're also super committed to the photographers and the photography community. Everyone there is not only a photo geek, but they're constantly helping, supporting and promoting photographers. 4 of my photos are printed in large size (one is wall-height) at their office along with many other photographers. That alone just shows you how much they're into their community.

An interesting ironic story. In one of my old jobs, I signed a multiyear partnership with them and our company. They had just started. Flicker was couple of years old, but it was already surpassing the early photo sharing site, Pbase.

The founders of SmugMug had earlier started FatBrain online bookstore and had a successful exit. But both my CEO and myself were photo geeks and we thought of ourselves as consumer experts. So we kept nagging on SmugMug to change their UI to resemble more like Flickr. Mind you, SmugMug now, looks very different than it did back then. However, the founders were very focused (obviously much smarter than we were) on what they thought should be their main focus, building an online solution for pro photographers.

So, for me it's very ironic, that after all these years and us nagging on them to be more like Flickr, that they now own Flickr.

I know some of you might be skeptical of mergers, and it remains to be seen. However, knowing the SmugMug DNA, I couldn't have imagined a better custodian for the Flickr and its community. Give the SmugMug guys a chance to prove themselves to you.

There are hundreds of sites where people can dump their unprocessed vacation photos from their iPhones. My main interest in Flickr was as a place to share and discover high-quality photo works. That means good support for high-resolution images, professionally looking albums, flexible sharing options (private groups, etc).