An active user of Flickr, I was astonished to read that it is being acquired by SmugMug. The email said, “We’re excited to announce that Flickr has agreed to be acquired by SmugMug, the photography platform dedicated to visual storytellers.” This would be the third time in over a decade that Flickr has changed hands with its owners since its launch by the Vancouver-based Ludicorp in 2004. It was in early 2005 that Yahoo! decided to buy this image hosting company for $35 million. Then in 2017 Verizon acquired Yahoo! and all its assets in a $4.48 billion deal, and now it’s SmugMug acquiring Flickr from Oath Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Despite its base of over 90 million users, I think it’s becoming harder to sustain itself in competing with the established photo-sharing social networks, although it’s one of the few places where professional photographers (the folks who experiment with DSLRs) still venture out. I’m not sure what the future holds for Flickr, I adore it, to be honest, but I doubt that it has a long way left now. Given that mobiles are adept at capturing & sharing incredible photos & videos at higher resolutions, only time will tell if the era of image hosting platforms is entering its last lap.
Photo-Sharing
Instagram Used Co-Creation For Its New Icon Design
Last year, Instagram changed its skeuomorphic icon branding to a purplish logo and it was only recently that I came across the design process on Fast CoDesign.
Instagram’s Design Head Ian Spalter, guided the branding exercise into a co-creation session. The write-up from the FastCoDesign article mentions…
At first, Spalter was most concerned with figuring out what elements people recognized most about the admittedly very complex and highly detailed Instagram logo. So he started by asking the whole company to draw the logo from memory in 10 seconds or less. “That gave us a sense of what was burned in,” Spalter says. What emerged were the camera lens, the rounded shape of the icon, and, surprisingly, the little black viewfinder in the top right corner.
Goodbye Yahoo! Photos
Current users might want to take note of this latest development. Yahoo! has decided to shut down it’s photo sharing service Yahoo! Photos and focus on its other twin, Flickr. I read this bit of rather surprising news on the Yodel blog. Curtains will formally come down on September 20, 2007 and the all the current users will be moved to a photo sharing service of their choice – Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket. For a complete list of the FAQs, you can click here or visit this page.