Homeless in Vancouver: Better back-up your free Flickr account in case it flickers out
Monday (April 23), along with 75 million other registered Flickr users, I received an email explaining that the 14-year-old photo and video sharing service is now under new ownership. But not to worry, nothing will change “immediately” with regard to my Flickr account.
In fact, I have about a month—until May 25, 2018—to download any images I have in my free account before the new owner—a premium hosting service called SmugMug (which has never offered free accounts) takes control.
As the email lays it down:
We think you are going to love Flickr under SmugMug ownership, but you can choose to not have your Flickr account and data transferred to SmugMug until May 25, 2018. If you want to keep your Flickr account and data from being transferred, you must go to your Flickr account to download the photos and videos you want to keep, then delete your account from your Account Settings by May 25, 2018.
If you do not delete your account by May 25, 2018, your Flickr account and data will transfer to SmugMug and will be governed by SmugMug’s Terms and Privacy Policy.
The email effectively tells me that by leaving my account and content on Flicker past May 25, I accept.
SmugMug is an image-hosting and sharing service that does very well catering exclusively to professional users willing to pay for premium features.
SmugMug’s purchase of Flickr could be good news for the relatively small percentage of Flickr users who already pay for the Pro tier of service and have been fairly starved for attention and new features for some years. But I honestly expect that it signals the beginning of the end for tens of millions of free Flickr accounts.
In buying Flickr, I believe that SmugMug (which I don’t expect has half as many registered users as Flicker) only has eyes, ultimately, to absorb the upwards of five million-or-so paying Flickr Pro users.
I expect the Flicker name to vanish and I will be surprised if SmugMug commits to permanently maintaining a free service tier. At best, I envision some kind of transition period and/or a limited time complimentary offer to free Flickr users, which will require them to signup with credit card information.
Personally, I only have about four images stored on my free Flickr account but I have no doubt that there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who have been using free Flickr accounts as cloud storage and sole backup for gigabytes-worth of photos.
I found it more than a little ominous that SmugMug’s email had nothing to say about what would happen to the data stored in free accounts after May 25. The Flickr blog, however, is at pains to say that nothing will happen to Flickr’s free accounts.
Beyond all free and Pro Flickr accounts coming under the SmugMug terms and privacy policy, the new owner is taking the line that it has no plans to at this time merge the two services.
Which I still take to mean that we all have a month to back up our free Flickr accounts.
It pays to focus on quality over quantity for a change
SmugMug picked up Flickr for an undisclosed price on April 20 from U.S. Telco Verizon Wireless, which bought Flickr’s parent company Yahoo for US$4.8 billion in July of 2017.
Yahoo, in turn, picked up Flickr for a rumoured US$25 million back in 2005. This was a year after the instantly popular photo hosting and sharing service was founded right here in Vancouver by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake of Ludicorp Research & Development.
SmugMug is a privately held Internet image-hosting and sharing service, based in Mountain View, California. The company was founded in 2002 by the father and son team of Chris and Don MacAskill and is still a family-run business.
SmugMug survived the sudden emergence and rapid growth of Flickr by focusing on quality of service over quantity of users. As cofounder Chris MacAskill described SmugMug to Mixergy in 2010:
It's designed around making your photos look spectacular and you can customize it like you customize a blog. Its a little bit like flickr but flickrs’ built around social networking and we’re built around good looks.
Both Flickr and SmugMug offer pay services but, unlike Flickr, SmugMug does not have a free account tier to pull in a large general audience. Instead, it has always pitched itself as a premium niche service; offering high-quality image printing for a price, as well as premium pay services tailored to the needs of professional photographers—including e-commerce blogs, where photographers can display and sell their photos.
A small fish just swallowed a big pond
As of 2017, Flickr admitted to having around 75 million registered users but the closest that the privately owned SmugMug has come to revealing its usage numbers may have been in 2015, on the Quora website, when CEO Don MacAskill answered the question: “How many users does SmugMug have?”:
We don’t get very explicit with this, but we’re pretty up front on our pages that we have “Millions of passionate customers, billions of happy photos”. Hope that helps!
The Los Angeles Times reported that SmugMug had about 100,000 members in 2007; the same year that Flickr was estimated to be using using about two petabytes of data, in order to serve an estimated seven million registered users. Three years later, in 2010, the Mixergy interview with Chris MacAskill had SmugMug using two petabytes of image storage, when Flickr had well over 32 million users (and no doubt used more like 6 to 9 petabytes of storage).
This hodgepodge of numbers doesn’t tell us much (if anything) but I take it to suggest that SmugMug has at least 21 million registered users today.
Back in 2011 blogger Thomas Hawk indulged in some similarly dodgy guesswork about the number of Flickr’s paying customers and came up with about seven percent, which would scales up to a present day total of about 5.2 million Flickr Pro users. At the listed Pro rate of US$49.99 per year, that equals an annual revenue of nearly US$260 million.
However, we neither know the actual number of Flickr’s paying users nor what SmugMug paid to try and get them, but I have no doubt that getting the pay users is what this sale is all about. SmugMug’s features and annual pricing literally start where Flickr’s Pro tier ends.
In U.S. dollars, its cheapest Basic tier is $47.88; Power is $71.88; Portfolio is $179.88, and Business is $359.88.
Verizon’s price may have been low enough to make it worthwhile for SmugMug to buy Flickr to get its Pro users and get rid of it as a cheaper alternative.
As for Flickr’s free tier, I’m predicting that it’s toast.
If SmugMug thought that a free tier was such a good idea it could have implemented one at any time over the last 14 years. But it did not and it prospered by not doing so. Therefore I cannot imagine why would it see Flickr’s free users as anything but financial dead weight.
SmugMug is passionate about your personal information
For 12 years Flickr users had to suffer under the sloppy security of Yahoo ownership—with Yahoo’s infrastructure suffering some kind of major breach of user data one or twice almost every year. Then in 2017 Flickr became the property of Verizon Wireless, a company well known for its “aggressive use of customer information”, as the Los Angeles Times put it at the time of the Yahoo sale.
If Verizon purchased Yahoo to get at the saleable personal data of the failing white elephant’s over one billion active monthly users, then no doubt every bit of valuable user data was harvested by the telecom long before the sale of Flickr to SmugMug on April 20.
But even so, the long-suffering users of Flickr should still be wary (or aware, at least) of SmugMug’s seemingly cavalier-sounding attitude towards the personal information of their users and their users’ friends.
SmugMug’s privacy policy begins by stating that the company is “passionately committed to the privacy of our customers”. Then it runs through the long list of personal information that it may collect from those customers.
The personal information SmugMug collects on you begins when you sign up and includes (but is hardly limited to) your name, email, postal address, phone number, and credit card information.
There are also the particulars of each of your log-in sessions, including the page you came to SmugMug from, as well as a lot of detail about your web browser, computer device, and network. Your physical location is also noted, as is any location and other EXIF data stored in the code of your photos by your digital camera.
Still more information is collected, regarding how you navigate the website and potentially your wider activity pattern on the web, by cookies and other tracking technologies deposited on your device by SmugMug and its affiliates.
If you log in through a social media site, SmugMug then gains access to certain information from that site, such as your name, account information, and your friend lists.
And finally, when you provide a credit card number you are giving SmugMug access to certain personal information connected to that credit card, such as an updated billing address.
Some of the above information, such as browser, device and network information, is collected automatically by even the simplest web pages, although such information cannot easily be connected to an individual user.
The personal information which SmugMug collects can certainly be easily connected to its users—and to tracking their activity longitudinally, over time and in relation to the activity of their friends.
So what does SmugMug say that it will do, or not do, with all the information that it may collect?
It says what all Internet companies say—that it will use the personal data it collects to provide and improve its service to customers. But, although there is a mention of sharing “aggregated information that does not directly identify you”, there is is no limit whatsoever placed by SmugMug on how it can share all the user data it collects.
It says that it will share the information it collects with vendors, consultants and other service providers, including affiliated websites and advertisers. It says that it will also share user information in accordance with any applicable law, regulation or legal process and:
In connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company; and with your consent…
This last bit—user consent—can be secured by the simple action a person takes to click the button completing a sign-up process.
I have no immediate need or recommendations regarding suitable free alternatives to Flickr but, just in case, I will be looking and weighing the available choices and if I come up with anything really good, I will let everyone know.
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