[cyberjunkie]

I have so many mixed feelings about this. I've always been a big Flickr fan. I absolutely loved the Explore section.

It had a set of really nice photos that I would spend every evening after working, browsing, sipping on a cup of tea and listening to music. I find some fun groups, some people who click some great photos on some really impressive gear which I don't own, but I would love to. The quality of Explore dropped drastically, sometimes showing up weird, creepy things, or something just random photos. It didn’t seem curated at all.

Fast-forward to recent times, I've seen Flickr bought and sold, schemes changed and more. There have been times of instability on the site, the Yahoo! login has been a pain. Performance has been erratic as a whole.

At a time where Instagram, Google Photos (and other cunning) services are the only healthy (in terms of users), ‘social’ photo hosting services, Flickr to my naive mind stands out so I don't want to see it go away. I started paying for a Flickr Pro to support it, even backed up my entire photo base to it. Now, I’m not sure if I need find alternatives

I feel the e-mail sounds more personal, than the usual two-faced PR spiel we see from larger corporations. It's nice that Smugmug appears to have good intentions, but it hasn't treated Flickr too well either. Logins have been broken in the recent past, there have been several outages, terrible migration attempts that almost speak of incompetence. Of late, it says I can't login using Firefox. Once logged in (after setting a different User Agent), it works perfectly fine.

So I really don't know what to feel.

[techsupporter]

I would have stayed with Flickr post-acquisition and likely even upgraded to a Pro account out of a sense of support.

That all went out the window when SmugMug decided to force a mandatory binding arbitration clause on its users, just like Verizon wanted to do to users who remained with OATH/Yahoo. I clicked on every link and followed every process I could to make sure my logins were closed out on either side and walked away.

I expect bullshit like that from companies like Verizon but not from "a thriving, family-owned and -operated business that cares deeply about photographers." Both companies should know better but I'm making the (obviously incorrect) assumption that SmugMug values caring more about respecting its users.

> Of late, it says I can't login using Firefox. Once logged in (after setting a different User Agent), it works perfectly fine.

This is icing on the crappy cupcake.

[Hnrobert42]

Haha. I thought I was the only one swimming upstream against binding arbitration. Just last night, after reading the absurdly long Zynga ToS update, I contacted them to opt out of binding arbitration. During the whole thing, the devil on my shoulder was saying, “You’re an idiot. This doesn’t matter. Let it go.”

[inferiorhuman]

Fuck em. Both Yahoo! and SmugMug have beaten the dead horse that is Flickr more than enough. I've moved on (and self-host these days) and I'm not looking back even if there were some inkling that Flickr was better at image hosting than I am.

For me, Flickr became less and less usable with every UI update. Back when Sonic was charging beaucoup bucks for 3Mbit DSL in San Francisco this was a big usability problem. The social stuff was neglected (SNR on the groups became abysmal). For a while I had a "pro" account. At some point they marked my account adult only with no explanation so I made another (free accout) and moved on. Then Yahoo! migrated everyone to Yahoo! logins and my Flickr accounts kind of operated in some odd grey area and I just use Flickr for free photo storage.

And then came SmugMug. My last public Flickr post was a screenshot of what SmugMug did to the Flickr mobile app — they'd just pushed some notification about the SmugMug buyout and all of the "excitement" clobbered the navigation links[1].

I tried in vain to migrate my Flickr account. The mobile app worked but wouldn't let me reset my password. The desktop site would send reset messages to my email address, but the auth infra thought I shouldn't be allowed to reset my password from that email address. Obviously the SmugMug guy who was posting on HN never got back to me. Neither dud Flickr/SmugMug support.

So I went back to self-hosting. And it worked. I didn't even have to beg support for access to anything. And now SmugMug wants more money? Sorry guys, you've had many chances.

1: https://live.staticflickr.com/979/41376824904_bba1b08851_o.p...

[jazoom]

May I ask what software you use for self-hosting?

[inferiorhuman]

May I ask what software you use for self-hosting?

It's just a home grown thing. I'm not trying to compete with all the social crap that Flickr used to do well. These days I'm leaning towards making it more of a static site generator type thing. Image processing is done with a combination of imagemagick and exiftool.

Initially it started out as an Elixir+Phoenix app with an eye towards setting up some image processing as a set of background services taking the form of Elixir apps. Elixir and Phoenix were pretty painful so it's since been rewritten in Rust+Rocket.