For photographers, professionals and hobbyists seeking a larger audience, FLICKR has a lot to recommend it. According to Harold Davis:
If I conducted a survey of what people thought was the most important social media site for photographers, I bet most people would say Facebook, or maybe Twitter. But not so fast. Flickr is far and away the most important social media site for photographers—partly because it is a community aimed squarely at photographers…Using Flickr is an indispensable part of finding an audience; as photographer G. Dan Mitchell notes, “almost any photographer should have a presence there.” Landscape photographer Jeff Clow adds, “If you would have told me five years ago that I would have a large portfolio represented by Getty, I would have laughed out loud. But it has happened through the magic that I call Flickr magic.”
Simply put here are some reasons why you should use FLICKR if you want to improve the exposure of your photos and improve your photos
- Simple Assignment of copyrights
- Facebook’s terms and conditions states that they can use your photos as they see fit if you don’t have a prior copyright set on each photo.
- Flickr makes copyright assignment simple (standard copyright: all rights reserved is the default) and allows several forms of the Creative Commons Licensing.
- Creative Commons licensing in turn exposes your photos to the photo sharing and distribution network of Create Commons.
- Ease of blocking right-click downloads
- this is not the default but it is fairly straight forward to do. Of course, the cleaver can always copy any image that is transmitted to your browser.
- Accurate, simple GEO coding
- Exposure your photos to other photographers
- who may comment and critique your photos
- Make your photos available to be reviewed by Getty Images for inclusion into their distribution network
- Make your photos available to be search within the Creative Commons distribution network
- Ease of uploading:
However, many folks like to use Facebook and Google+ for obvious social reasons and others may have commercial reasons. What to do. Loading photos separately to all three sites is time consuming and error prone. The problem of copy right registration remains on Facebook and Google+ unless you really want to let Mr. Zukerman make even more money of you.
Recently a new web based solution has appeared. The site: Social Photos allows users to drag and drop photos between the three sites: Facebook, Google+ and Flickr. I have been using the product for a few weeks and really like it. I always post FIRST to Flickr and setup my copyrights and group. Then I use Social Photos to drag selected photos to Google+ (I have to admit that I don’t use Facebook for political reasons so I have not tried that interface but I assume it works as well as the Flickr to Google+). Nice product, Highly recommended.
Related articles
- Best social networks for photographers (techradar.com)
- Selected Flickr images now sold through Getty (news.cnet.com)
- Flickr Pro tweaks are fine, but we need bigger changes (news.cnet.com)
- How to get your photo in Zemanta? (zemanta.com)
Hey, any idea when Social Photos’ web site will be operational, or do you have any contact info to them? The site hasn’t worked all day long.