After Flickr’s fate has been put up in the air with Yahoo’s sale to Verizon and being joined with AOL in Verizon’s Oath subsidiary, professional photo hosting service SmugMug wanted to help out. The company has just bought Flickr for an undisclosed amount. The photo service hasn’t been able to mount a successful comeback with tough competition in its space because of services like Instagram. But SmugMug is confident it can thrive still. SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill told USA Today “Flickr has survived through thick-and-thin and is core to the entire fabric of the internet.”
Now, whether SmugMug can revive the service is something we can’t say yet at the moment. The company promises to keep Flickr as a standalone community and will supposedly get the focus and resources it needs.