Something kept me awake last night. I thought a lot about the current pace of change in the online world.
Earlier this month I received an email from Smugmug, the current owners of Flickr. They were offering a discount to open a Smugmug account. I thought that was curious since I thought I was already part of the Smugmug Group.
Then came an email from one of the Big Wigs at Smugmug. It sounds like Flickr is failing to meet financial expectations. As a last gasp, the new owners of Flickr are pleading with users to buy more subscriptions.
I've been a Flickr member for 15 years and am a rather heavy user. I have over 28 thousand images posted and 13 million views.
My use pattern quickly developed in the early days. Flickr hosted everything I wanted to share. It has never been a backup site (a massive image cloud, if you will). Rather, it was a site for publishing finished works and the make connections with like-minded image-making crafts/arts-people.
My blogs, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and PX500 pages all pointed to or originated from my Flickr account. I have links to Flickr sprinkled nearly everywhere I've had an online presence.
Over time, however, my online participation changed.
I closed and deleted my Facebook account after I realized Zuckerberg and his management team were more interested in selling out than they were to expressing, enabling, or extending truth telling, truth sharing of democratic impulses in the country they are incorporated in.
By extension, because Facebook owns Instagram and has an even more onerous business style, I cancelled them, too. It wasn't just the personal information selling that concerned me, it was their loose interpretation of copyright protections.
Similarly, I deleted my Tumblr pages after Yahoo sold to Verizon and became "Oath." Tumblr had been a free-wheeling environment where I could find just about anything image-related. There were sometimes interesting image ideas that I could borrow from. But with the Verizon acquisition came a Puritanical lock-down on certain image forms thus casting out any art expression management didn't like. My image never tended toward anything controversial, but it was the principal of the matter.
At one time it seemed like PX500 was doing good things. They had their image sharing platform and they offered guidance on creating good images as well as conducting interviews with prominent photographers. Two things happened in similar time to cause me to close my accounts there, too. First was the huge security breach that they failed to tell users about for quite a long time. Second was sale of PX500 to the Chinese. That did it. I was done. Out of there.
Now comes word that Flickr is not meeting financial goals. The implication is that the platform may not be around much longer for paid subscribers.
This leads to a number of questions -
- What will become of the images I've posted to Flickr?
- Will the site simply go "dark?"
- Will Smugmug provide a migration path to their other platform?
- What do I do about all my Flickr links that are embedded in things I've written
- How do I manage links and information on sites I have contributed to but have no control over where my contact information is published?
Most of this I can manage, I hope. Yet this doesn't really address my concern for where to share my images.
Should I move to Smugmug and bet against history that they continue to live? Or is there another platform I haven't already considered? Or should I just pull the plug and "go dark?"
Happy Holidays! It's been an interesting year.
UPDATE: The CEO updated his comments.
UPDATE2: The CEO added yet another comment.
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