You are not our product. Professional accounts have the ability to add custom digital watermarkings to their photos. We’ve been hard at work improving Flickr. Photographers have always found ways to share their passion, work, and inspiration with each other. But we cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve been doing.

Why? It has support for both account-level and gallery-level passwords, as well as hidden galleries. Together, we created the world’s largest photographer-focused community: a place where photographers can stand out and fit in. The company was started without any venture capital funding, and for a time was run out of the MacAskill family home. SmugMug has options to allow control over the privacy and security of published photos. SmugMug doesn’t even support batch operations or having photos in multiple albums. We’re still listening. Two photo-sharing services are teaming up, as SmugMug buys Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary Oath.

MacAskill didn’t reveal at the time how much SmugMug — which is itself an independent, family-owned operation — paid for Flickr. In an email tonight to users of Flickr who pay roughly $50 annually for the service, MacAskill has basically asked them if they know anyone else who might be interested in a yearly subscription to Flickr, explaining that it “still needs your help. And yet, Flickr—the world’s most-beloved, money-losing business—still needs your help. You told us you needed somewhere safe for your priceless photos. Today, we are home to the creators, the shutter pressers, the doers and makers. Thank you for being a Flickr Pro. In the worst-case scenario, it disappears, along with a whole lot of pictures. We bought it because we love photographers, we love photography, and we believe Flickr deserves not only to live on but thrive. We’re home to a community that knows photography has the power to change the world. Ben MacAskill, Don’s brother and the company’s COO, said at the time that the flaw “potentially impacts a very small number of our members today, and we are actively working to deploy an update as quickly as possible.” He also noted that the images that had been accessed pre-dated SmugMug’s involvement with Flickr by several years. It’s losing a lot less money than it was. Millions of photographers all over the world continue to tell us what they want—what they need. As technology changes the way we consume and create photographs, storytelling remains above the static: it’s a language for people, not machines. They can also sell prints and digital downloads of their photos through the SmugMug interface with their own pricing. Flickr still needs your help.

Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and their visitors, advanced stats, unlimited full-quality storage for all their photos, plus premium features and access to the world’s largest photographer-focused community. SmugMug + Flickr, core to the entire fabric of the Internet. Here’s the full text of Don MacAskill’s note to its customers: First, and above all else: thank you. Either way, it sounds like the future of Flickr — founded by entrepreneurs Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield in 2004, sold to Yahoo the following year, and later swept into Verizon as part of its 2016 acquisition by Yahoo —  is again up in the air.