New beginnings for Flickr? For years, Flickr was a beacon for aspiring photographers. The image-sharing website was an innovative platform for this thriving community at a time when the digital camera was one the verge of becoming ubiquitous. Flickr offered a slick place for photographers to share their best images but also to discover new talents, gather around shared interests and exchange camera news. I remember the countless debates I found myself into, discussing new cameras and the latest Flickr features. Then came Yahoo! The search mastodon saw an opportunity to grow its social graph with its acquisition of Flickr, but it came at a cost for longtime users. Development of the platform slowed to a crawl, promised features disappeared from the company's road map, and a switch to a Yahoo login system was a disaster – one that continues to agitate users more than a decade later. During the crucial years when smartphones transformed photography, Flickr's stagnation was Instagram's gain. The Facebook-owned app thrived, becoming for many photographers a window-front for their best work. Now, hardcore Flickr users are hopeful again. Earlier this week, SmugMug, a "photography platform dedicated to visual storytellers," announced that it was acquiring Flickr, pledging to keep the brand's experience intact. For Thomas Hawk, one of the most vocal Flickr users since the company's inception, the move is a positive one – one that will allow Flickr "to be much more nimble in terms of hacking on and developing the site," he wrote. "Big organizations … have layers of bureaucracy that sometimes make things difficult to get done. Small organizations, by contrast, can move much more quickly. While I don't expect any immediate changes to Flickr, I think that going forward it will improve more rapidly." That's welcome news for the users who have stuck with Flickr all these years. In other news this week: Sim Chi Yin won this year's Getty Images and Chris Hondros Fund Award, named after the photographer killed in Misrata, Libya, in 2011; Snapchat released a lighter, faster and slicker version of its Spectacles – glasses that can shoot photos and videos from your point of view; and Instagram introduced a tool to download all of the photos and content you've shared over the years. - Olivier Laurent |
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