SmugMug Acquires Flickr ⇥ usatoday.com

Jessica Guynn, USA Today:

Flickr has been snapped up by Silicon Valley photo-sharing and storage company SmugMug, USA TODAY has learned.

SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill told USA TODAY he’s committed to breathing new life into the faded social networking pioneer, which hosted photos and lively interactions long before it became trendy. 

SmugMug, an independent, family-run company, will maintain Flickr as a standalone community of amateur and professional photographers and give the long neglected service the focus and resources it deserves, MacAskill said in an exclusive interview. 

He declined to disclose the terms of the deal, which closed this week.

The last time Oath — née Yahoo — showed any interest in Flickr was five years ago when they rethought the platform and gave everyone a terabyte of storage for free, and unlimited storage for just $25/year. And then they just sort of sat on it.

This is potentially good news because Flickr was, until this week, a Verizon company, and I think that it’s a little bit weird for an ISP and cable TV provider to be in charge of hosting your precious photographs. SmugMug, though, is a much smaller company, and it’s a good question whether they’ll be able to revitalize Flickr while retaining those high storage accounts.