SmugMug and Flickr

pigeon

http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2006/11/19/flickr-far-superior-to-smugmug/

Reading this blog made me wonder - who exactly IS SmugMug's target customer? and Flickr's? How do they fill different niches, and in what areas do you see each excelling in?

Just curious. I'm not looking to move, and for the most part I'm very happy (although I do have a "wish list", but it would just be a different one elsewhere.) But someone asked me about the differences beween Flickr and SmugMug, and I was clueless - I've never tried Flickr.

Can someone clue me in?

thanks,
teresa

Baldy

Hey Teresa,

Flickr's a great site and in their early years they brought a lot of innovation to photo sharing.

There is some overlap with SmugMug but mostly Flickr is built around social networking. They dedicate more of each page to social networking and less to photos than we do, and their customers tend to be people who want to get comments on their photos and find other people and photos they like. (Helping people find the good stuff on SmugMug is high on our list, btw, but right now Flickr does that better.)

Our customers tend to be people who want to share photos with their existing social network -- families, clients, friends, clubs, etc. -- and want the best experience for them. So they care about customization (you can't customize Flickr), security (placing photos of your 13-year-old daughter on Flickr isn't fun), and making the photos front and center, filling most of the screen.

More Flickr subscribers are single than ours.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Chris

pigeon

Chris,
Yes, this does help. Thanks for the fast, thoughtful response!

-teresa

Baldy wrote:

Hey Teresa,

Flickr's a great site and in their early years they brought a lot of innovation to photo sharing.

There is some overlap with SmugMug but mostly Flickr is built around social networking. They dedicate more of each page to social networking and less to photos than we do, and their customers tend to be people who want to get comments on their photos and find other people and photos they like. (Helping people find the good stuff on SmugMug is high on our list, btw, but right now Flickr does that better.)

Our customers tend to be people who want to share photos with their existing social network -- families, clients, friends, clubs, etc. -- and want the best experience for them. So they care about customization (you can't customize Flickr), security (placing photos of your 13-year-old daughter on Flickr isn't fun), and making the photos front and center, filling most of the screen.

More Flickr subscribers are single than ours.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Chris

jchin

I personally use SmugMug for more of my shared galleries with friends, family, etc.

I have a Flickr account to share with mostly total strangers (of course my friends are there too), mainly for comments and outside comments on a few particular photos. I have friends who use Flickr to drive traffic to their blogs and stuff like that because the Flickr tag searching is great. I may plan to use that to drive traffic to my SmugMug galleries.

Most definitely Flickr and SmugMug have different audiances. Also Flickr is not (IMHO) as great at handling large (many megapixel) photos as SmugMug. Customization of my SmugMug account makes it great.

To me Flickr is a clean "mySpace" or "Xanga". SmugMug is more for sharing all of my family vacation photos with my family; and the keyword is "all". On Flickr, you must use "sets" to organize your photos, but everything is on the main photos page (not exactly what I like, when I have 100s of vacation photos).