I was full of hope when SmugMug bought Flickr earlier this year. I’ve used the Flickr platform for several years. As a place to store and display photos, it’s great. But it did seem a little stodgy and old.
I thought the SmugMug purchase might spruce the site up and excite people to reconsider it as a visual social media destination. I don’t know the Flickr numbers but I haven’t read anything about a resurgence in use so I assume one hasn’t happened.
Instead of any apparent optimizations to the site, Flickr has now decided to limit free accounts to 1000 photos and videos. Now, 1000 is pretty good and I’m nowhere near that number of photos on the site. But for SmugMug to come in and start taking away what users have been used to in the past seems like a bad decision. Now, all over the Flickr site I’m getting ads for the platform’s paid “pro” subscription.
