SmugMug announced this week that it will acquire venerable photo-sharing service Flickr for an undisclosed sum.

“Flickr is an amazing community, full of some of the world’s most passionate photographers,” SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill told USA Today. “It’s a fantastic product and a beloved brand, supplying tens of billions of photos to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Flickr has survived through thick-and-thin and is core to the entire fabric of the Internet.”

It’s also on the way out: Despite launching early in the Internet era—in 2002, no less—Flickr has foundered in the face of superior photo services, especially Google Photos, which commanded over 500 million active users as of last May. USA Today reports that Flickr’s user base is actually just north of 100 million users.

It also suffered mightily at the hands of its previous and inept corporate parent, Yahoo. When Yahoo revealed in 2016 that over 500 million of its accounts had been compromised years early by hackers, I closed my own Yahoo account, which killed my Flickr account too. I recommended at the time that readers do the same.

Anyway, for those who have held out with Flickr, SmugMug says that it will not be making any changes to the service, which will remain standalone. You can find out more at the SmugMug + Flickr FAQ.

Tagged with Digital photos, Flickr, SmugMug