Nine months after a report by The Lafayette found that images from Lafayette College and other schools’ Flickr profiles were being used for pornographic purposes by a mass of anonymous users, the college continues to search for a permanent home for its photographs.
The college has uploaded four albums for temporary viewing to the photo-sharing site SmugMug since May. Its most recent album, featuring snapshots from the Pre-Orientation Service Program’s visit to LaFarm and Gracedale Nursing Home in Nazareth, is publicly available until Saturday. However, the roughly 72,000 photos taken between 2010 and 2025 that were previously published on Flickr remain unavailable.
Photos uploaded to the college’s SmugMug page are available to the public for 10 days before they are made private, according to Vice President of Communications Kristen Daily, who wrote in an email that transitioning to SmugMug is “a stopgap solution” rather than “a permanent replacement” for Flickr.
Daily did not share a timeline for when the college planned to adopt a permanent replacement.
“The college is actively evaluating digital asset management solutions with input from our library and ITS teams,” added Daily, who took over the department on Aug. 17.
The college is spending between $20 and $37 per month for hosting, a price Daily termed “affordable.” While Flickr has been a subsidiary of SmugMug since 2018, Daily described the two as operationally separate.
Kate Pitts, the operations, communications and assessment manager at Skillman Library, wrote that “the libraries aren’t involved at all” in selecting a permanent image-hosting site. Daily wrote that the library, along with Information Technology Services, is part of a “conversation” for a “permanent digital asset management solution” in its “early discovery phase” in a follow-up email.
Chief of Staff Scott Morse referred questions back to Daily. Morse was the acting head of the communications department when the college uploaded its first two albums to SmugMug, but wrote in an email that the transition occurred before his recent time as acting department head.
Along with Lafayette, at least two other institutions — Claremont McKenna College and Albion College — removed most or all of their photos from their respective Flickr profiles following The Lafayette’s report. While Albion’s page still contains 2,715 photos uploaded between 2018 and 2023, Claremont McKenna has opted to store photos on PhotoShelter, a paid photo-upload site. Neither college’s media liaison responded to a request for comment.
Kathryn Meier, who oversaw the division during the Flickr site’s scrubbing until her resignation in February, did not respond to a request for comment.