Nearing its 20-year anniversary, Flickr continues to represent the most important corpus of historical photos on the planet. Intent on making sure that, no matter what, the priceless collection of imagery is always accessible to the public and institutions are able to invest in saving their own collections of publicly accessible images, Awesome launches the Flickr Foundation, a 501(c)(3) aimed at the preservation and accessibility of the world’s most important historical artifacts: photos.

Demand for knowledge and education in the photography space remains at a fever pitch. To give our customers and photographers everywhere access to news and updates in the industry, Awesome acquires podcast and blog This Week in Photo and hires its founder to grow Awesome’s content platform and reach more passionate photographers where they’re looking for information.

Awesome, in a commitment both to the employees of SmugMug and Flickr as well as to the photographers we serve each and every day, earns its Certified Evergreen designation from the Tugboat Group, ensuring our values align with our long-term plan for slow, smart growth and longevity in service to our customers.

SmugMug and Flickr are together at last, but remain separate companies, each with their own goals, plans, and services for photographers. Awesome is established to serve as a parent company to its family of photography-focused brands and products.

SmugMug acquires Flickr from Yahoo, saving billions of photos from the risk of deletion and preserving one of the largest collections of digital photography ever created. Flickr, back in the hands of a company who values photographers and the content they create, invests in rebuilding the world’s most influential community of photographers.

With digital photography firmly cemented as the dominant photography medium, professionals and amateurs alike find inspiration online. SmugMug Films is born to celebrate the stories of photographers across the globe who are using their craft to tell stories, share perspectives, and change the world.

With the emergence and popularity of the iPhone, SmugMug launches Camera Awesome!, a camera and photo-editing app that would go on to earn 20 million installs in its first year in the Apple app store and be named best app of the year by TechCrunch among others.

The iPhone App Store launches with SmugShot, our first connected app, featured in the What’s Hot section. SmugMug continues to lead the way for digital photographers and the emerging photography industry coming out of smartphones.

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SmugMug wins Best Design at the inaugural Crunchies Awards, hosted by TechCrunch. Nominated by the readers of TechCrunch and selected by an all-star panel of tech’s very best, SmugMug solidifies its reputation as a top photography brand and platform.

SmugMug partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to use S3 in private beta ahead of its launch becoming AWS’s first customer, cementing a relationship that we continue to invest in today.

Barack Obama uses SmugMug as a campaign tool to share photos and stories with his constituents on the way to becoming a United States senator, winning with over 70% of the vote, an Illinois record.

SmugMug earns its first paying subscriber—a customer who is still with us to this day—cementing SmugMug as the first SaaS company to exist. The dream and hope of helping photographers store and share their photos drives SmugMug into the future.

Digital photography is exploding as a medium, billions of photos need a home on the Internet, ModGods sees an opportunity to serve photographers in a brand new way that’s never been done and work on SmugMug begins.

After a few months of building what would become SmugMug’s foundation, ModGods incorporates and officially becomes a business. Don MacAskill, the founder, hires his first employee, his father Chris.

The Awesome journey begins as the first lines of code are written for a product called ModGods, which became the building blocks of SmugMug.