photo sharing | Rob Pegoraro

Today brought yet another rerun of a mobile-app routine that I’d like to see closed out: I saw an update for Flickr’s Android app waiting on my Pixel 5a, I installed the update, I went out and took some photos, and I saw that Flickr still isn’t saving location data when it backs up pictures automatically.

As bugs go, this one is not too consequential. But it’s also gone unfixed since late December, when I first noticed it. Flickr’s customer support promptly responded to that tweet, asking me to send in a sample photo, and the response I got hours later let me hope for a fairly quick resolution.

“We did some testing with the image you provided, and got mixed results upon uploading to a private test account that we use for cases like this,” the rep wrote. “The issue seems specific to the app, and possibly to the new update of 4.16.6.”

But the Flickr app has since seen multiple updates–it’s now up to version 4.16.15–and I’m still seeing automatically uploaded photos stripped of their geotags. That seriously erodes Flickr’s use as an unlimited-storage image backup vault; fortunately, I mainly employ Flickr for its original purpose of photo sharing, and for that I can use the share menu in Google Photos to post pictures, GPS data intact, to Flickr.

Flickr reps have remained a pleasure to deal with over e-mail, and the most recent one added three free months to my Pro subscription, which was a nice gesture.

But I also don’t feel that I can get too mad here, given that Flickr is my only major social-media platform that isn’t the property of a tech or media conglomerate, having been rescued from Yahoo’s erratic stewardship by the privately-held photo-sharing firm SmugMug in 2018.

And not only does Flickr have the advantage of being Not Google and Not Facebook, its support for albums has no equivalent on Instagram. And its support for Creative Commons licensing (my photos are free for non-commercial use while commercial users are welcome to pay) and groups of like-minded photographers (for instance, Capital Weather) have no equivalents at either Instagram or Google Photos.

I don’t even mind having this expense of a Flickr Pro subscription, now $71.99 a year and increasingly hard to avoid, in my Web-services budget. And while I would not turn down getting a few more months free, I would just as soon see Flickr fix this bug and restore this app to complete functionality.

My oldest social-media hangout is no longer the property of my biggest client’s corporate parent, and I am okay with that.

Last night brought word that Verizon’s Oath division had sold Flickr to the photo-sharing site SmugMug. Jessica Guynn’s USA Today story breaking the news calls Flickr a “faded social networking pioneer,” which is both uncomplimentary and correct.

My Flickr account dates to 2005, and over the subsequent 13 years I’ve seen Flickr suffer a lot of neglect–especially during Yahoo’s pre-Marissa Mayer years, when a succession of inept CEOs let Instagram run away with the mobile market.

Yet not only have I kept on uploading, editing and captioning pictures on Flickr (edit: with the occasional lag in sharing anything), since 2011 I’ve paid for a Flickr Pro membership. That first got me out from under the free version’s 100-megabyte monthly upload cap, but since Yahoo ditched that stingy limit in 2013… well, it’s a tiny monthly cost, and I like the idea of having a social-media account on which I’m not an advertising target with eyeballs to monetize.

Meanwhile, Flickr has continued to do a few things well: welcome both pictures taken with a standalone camera and those shot with a phone; make it easy to present and browse albums of photos (“photosets” if you’re old); support Creative Commons licensing so I can permit non-commercial sharing but prohibit commercial reuse (which required USA Today to pay me for one Flickr photo); and let people share their work in pools (for instance, Greater Greater Washington’s, which has occasionally resulted in my shots getting featured on that blog).

Instagram, where my active presence only dates to February of 2017, is easy, fun and great for engagement–slap #travel on a shot and you’ll get 15 likes in an hour. But it doesn’t do those things. And it’s a Facebook property, which raises the question of just how much of my online identity I need on that company’s servers.

Google Photos offers a fantastic private-backup service, but it, too, belongs to a company that already hosts much of my digital life.

SmugMug hasn’t said much about its plans for Flickr beyond promising not to merge Flickr and SmugMug. But unlike Oath, it has no other lines of business besides photo sharing. And as a privately-owned firm that hasn’t taken outside investments, SmugMug doesn’t need to meet impatient expectations from Wall Street or Silicon Valley. I feel pretty good about this transition, and I doubt I’ll have any big hangups about paying for my next Flickr Pro bill.