Flickr bought by photo management platform SmugMug

Photo management platform SmugMug said on Friday it has agreed to buy popular image and video-hosting website Flickr for an undisclosed amount. SmugMug says Flickr will continue to operate as a separate entity after the closure of the deal.

"Uniting the SmugMug and Flickr brands will make the whole photography community stronger and better connected. Together, we can preserve photography as the global language of storytelling," SmugMug Chief Executive Don MacAskill said in a statement.

Verizon bought Yahoo Inc's core business for $4.48 billion last year and the acquisition included Flickr, among other web properties.

Flickr 2.0

SmugMug, which is a small family-owned company, is hopeful the acquisition will help revive Flickr whose fate has been hanging since the Verizon-Yahoo acquisition deal. Oath, a subsidiary of Verizon, has of late sold some of the older assets, reports USAToday. Earlier this month, the company sold Polyvore, an e-commerce company which it had acquired from Yahoo.

Flickr, a pre-smartphone era photo sharing platform, was founded in 2004. The platform became instantly popular with a number of people flocking to Flickr to share their photos and comment on others'. After the advent of smartphone apps like Facebook and Instagram, Flickr's popularity gradually faded away.

Flickr may still seem like a platform from yesteryear, it still has some solid fan following. According to the USAToday report, it has over 75 million registered photographers and more than 100 million unique users.

SmugMug VP of Operations Ben MacAskill says the company is capable of restoring Flickr's glorious days.

"We love photographers, we are photographers, we've been catering directly to photographers for a long long time and we think we have the most insight into what photographers want from these platforms," the executive said.

(with inputs from HT Correspondent).