aaron evans

I recently migrated all my photos from SmugMug to Flickr. A long time ago I wrote a blog post discussing why I originally chose SmugMug. I was so dedicated to SmugMug that I wrote an iPhoto plugin to upload photos from iPhoto to SmugMug. I still like SmugMug because the guys who run the site are really nice and responsive and they run an all around great site.

A few months ago I read Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and decided to switch to Flickr because my philosophy about sharing photos online changed.

I used to think that the big value of online photo-sharing was that the producer of photos was decoupled from the consumer: I can upload photos and anyone can view and use them. This is really a big difference between pre-web photo sharing but it doesn’t really address the many ways in which consumers can discover photos. The SmugMug way for discovering photos is at its roots very similar to the pre-web analog: a user has albums; albums have photos; people can find albums and photos.

This view is a rather rigid model for consumers. The reason why people consider Flickr a ‘web 2.0′ site is because consumers of content are able to become producers by creating new content from existing photos and add a lot of value along the way.

The great thing about Flickr is that there is a huge community that finds photos using all sorts of different lookup patterns other than user->album->photo and adds value to the photos by discussing photos or mashing up content into new content.

What can be so hard to understand is that SmugMug (and other competitors) have many similar features (tags, search, geolocation, comments, APIs, etc) that allow similar patterns for finding and sharing photos yet in my experience they are far less used. No one ever added my photos to a SmugMug group, I never added goelocation data to photos, I’m not even sure if I could set licenses for my photos. When I uploaded photos to SmugMug I felt like that was the end of their existence except for the very small group of people who knew where to look to find them. With Flickr, the photos I upload can be discovered and used in many new ways and this behavior is fairly commonplace.

This phenomenon is a case of network effects. Basically, a photo sharing site becomes much more valuable as more people join and this growth is probably non-linear.

This is a shame for competitors because they are at a huge disadvantage. For users, if you value your photos by how many other people see and use them, your photos have more value if they are part of the most valuable network.

So, that is why I switched over to Flickr. The only painful part was physically moving my photos from one site to the other. I didn’t find any standard tools so I wrote a little Python script. I really just wrote it for myself and wouldn’t recommend it unless you know some Python and maybe a bit of the SmugMug/Flickr APIs. Enjoy at your own peril.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Development, Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.