Smugmug Aquires Flickr? What is up for Smugmug users?

David Evertsen

From the web and Smugmugs Twitter

https://www.smugmug.com/together/

David Evertsen

Honestlysurprised no mention to the Customers of Smugmug..

From Tech Crunch...

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/smugmug-acquires-flickr/

denisegoldberg

There is an FAQ at https://www.smugmug.com/together/faq. Hopefully that will start to answer your question.

Shinrya

Pretty stoked with the news. Much better investment than what the main competitor did with blowing all that cash on Keanu Reeves superbowl adverts!

Lets bring Flickr back to the glory days!

denisegoldberg

See @leftquark 's announcement SmugMug acquires Flickr in the SmugMug Product News forum.

leftquark

This is pretty exciting for all of us. While the two platforms will remain separate there’s so much that we can do together to make both platforms better. SmugMug will remain SmugMug and Flickr will remain Flickr. As we spend more time bringing the two teams together we’ll have a better sense of how we can grow each platform.

David Evertsen

I would love to see my Smart Galleries updated to 2.0 and honestly love to be asked for some feedback on how I use them.. It worries me that many things on SM will be pushed to the back burner after this aquistion.. Do I understand the need to keep Flickr viable? Absolutely, that is an amazing photo community, happy to see SM viable enough to aquire them, that is great news. Just want SM to accelerate their upgrades to the site many have been waiting a long time for...

leftquark

@David Evertsen said:
I would love to see my Smart Galleries updated to 2.0 and honestly love to be asked for some feedback on how I use them.. It worries me that many things on SM will be pushed to the back burner after this aquistion.. Do I understand the need to keep Flickr viable? Absolutely, that is an amazing photo community, happy to see SM viable enough to aquire them, that is great news. Just want SM to accelerate their upgrades to the site many have been waiting a long time for...

Our intention is to not let the excitement of the Flickr acquisition impact our roadmap for keeping SmugMug growing. We want to continue to make SmugMug be the place for all of you to be able to stand out with your stories, photos, etc. Our focus on improving SmugMug is as strong as it’s always been and the Flickr team will stay focused on improving Flickr. Where we can we’ll share so that both products grow together.

As a small company that’s built a large product it’s hard to be able to give the entire product love all the time. We’re currently focused on doubling down on some of the missing fundamentals that are deficiencies within SmugMug; you’ve seen the fruits of that recently: SSL for custom domains, improved functionality on mobile web and a doubling down within our mobile apps since phones are now the most used device globally, a mobile friendly shopping cart with additional improvements that are helping our pros out, new uploading apps for our desktop users to get their photos to SM easier ... the list goes on. From there we’ll be able to turn our attention to tuning things up.

As you all know, we love each and every one of you - it’s why we ask our support staff to be Heroes. But that’s also meant that, as we tried to satisfy each of you, we ended up with a product that was too large for us to maintain. We’ll prioritize improvements to features that make the most impact to the largest group of SmugMuggers. Because we have so many features, that may mean that some features a minority of you love may not see improvements immediately.

We have a great plan going forward and it involves a ton of involvement from all of you (make sure you’re part of our Viewfinders panel!). The future is bright for both SmugMug and Flickr!

David_S85

@leftquark said:
We have a great plan going forward and it involves a ton of involvement from all of you (make sure you’re part of our Viewfinders panel!). The future is bright for both SmugMug and Flickr!

Aaron, maybe you could explain what this Viewfinder panel is all about?

denisegoldberg

@leftquark said:
We have a great plan going forward and it involves a ton of involvement from all of you (make sure you’re part of our Viewfinders panel!).

I'm with David - I would like to know what the Viewfinders panel is about. A web search turned up nothing.

David Evertsen

Yes please let me know about the Viewfinders Panel, another iteration of the please place a vote on another site for the features you want fixed or updated? Been there done that? I sure hope not.. It takes me more clicks to do Smart Galleries now than it did before SM2.0.. Thing about the click fatigue on that..

leftquark

No, not another iteration of UserVoice with voting....

We've been growing a Research team here at SmugMug so that we can dive deeper into various issues, questions, and prototypes that we're working on. The team is responsible for a wide range of research but the two biggest areas are around Surveys and User Experience. The surveys help us in many ways while the UX Research lets us test early design iterations so we can refine experiences, test assumptions, and build a better SmugMug.

The Viewfinders Panel is a website where we post surveys and requests to participate in the user research. Participants can earn points by filling out surveys and you can then redeem those points for gift cards and other prizes.

You can join the panel here: https://smugmug.opinioninsight.com/

David Evertsen

Thanks man, joined this morning..