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Flickr or not Flickr?
I would like to know if anybody has any experience with showing his or her work on Flickr or even MySpace. I just took the step and opened a Flickr account to promote a book and another series of images (a test so to speak), 500 people have viewed my work in 3 days and I really have not been very active promoting it yet, but I got on some groups that I found interesting. I did the same on MySpace, just promoting the book. That gets visitors, too, some of whom I rather did not have, but you just delete them with a click of your mouse. The nice thing about both sites is, if you have a book published or want to show a photo story on a specific topic, you can “target” your viewers by searching for the groups who are interested in the topic to begin with. If they like it, they might send it out to others. And there are many, many, many groups for just about anything. I just don’t know what it does to a photographer professionally to be present at these sites, but one thing is sure, with a little work the images will be seen by far more people then before, and is that not what most of us want ? This might just be an additional way to get your work out there.
I have written about it on my blog at http://stefanfalkephotography.blogspot.com/2007/05/flickr-and-myspace.html
the sites are http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefanfalke/
and http://www.myspace.com/stefanfalke
Please let me/us know if you post images at these sites and what your experience with it is…thanks, Stefan
by
Stefan Falke
at
Wed May 09 02:56:46 UTC 2007
(ed. Mar 12 2008)
Brooklyn,
United States
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I agree It’s a very effective way of getting your work seen. Also people are very keen to give positive feedback. It’s sort of like a focus group,I have found that people are very positive and overall the 3 months I have been putting stuff on there have been a good learning experience. I haven’t made any money yet.. but it has cost me only my time
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I’m not pro but I find flickr very useful, many of my photos there have been viewed thousands of times, something quite difficult to achieve in other ways. And as there are many professional photographers sharing their work there is a great tool for me to learn from others. It’s also nice to hear different opinions/suggestions etc. I’m going to check your flickr account! ;)
Best,
Agustín
PS: congratulations for your book! I liked it very much
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By design, Flickr is an amateur haven. Not that all members are taking snapshots of their families. But it does seem that most of the galleries were created for grandma to keep up with the grand kids.
I know many ama-pro’s and a few professionals on Flickr. So as a way to garner feedback, reactions, and critique, it can work. Yes, many people will see the work and some interesting discussions can come from it.
As a professional source for showcasing work, I’m not sure the population on the flickr is quite ripe. As a place where rep may stumble upon your images, after uploadig their photos from Holiday? Sure, anything can happen.
In my own experience: i’ve received offers through Flickr for my work to be published, yet many offers were from fairly amateur outlets (no payment, no organization, no awareess of copyrights), and i personally didn’t feel comfortable allowing them to use my work.
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I agree with Meredith, it’s a good place to get feedback on the image but not ready for prime-time yet when it comes ot showcasing work to potential clients.
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Meredith, I quite agree BUT as we all know the web is very dynamic and in my view it would be foolish not to keep Flickr on the radar
John
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flickr is a very cheap place to archive and has an easy interface to locate your pictures for download. i use it only for this. its eased my mind from worrying about whether my negs will burn up in a fire or hard drive fail.
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If you dont know how to put in order your pictures in portfolio or project, the flickr is in my opinion the easier way to experiments than doing it on computer… when i want to put in order my pictures it’s really easy there(you just Drag & Drop your pictures in right order)!... so I am useing Flickr as “first draft”.
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Rian, be careful about archiving. It is impossible to stop people downloading your images, so if you have full size ones on there be careful. Flickr has options not to allow downloading of your images but a quick trawl through goggle easily turns up hacks around this
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serious? i didnt know that. what about DRR or photoshelter? are they hackable?
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If I had to find out a downside of flickr or myspace is that only a small % does really understand photography or how to read a picture. Therefore you get many feedbacks but very often they are not very usefull, or, if you prefer, you have thousands of “Oh that’s great, that’s awesome, and so on…” but only few have the experience to make a real comment on your pictures. BTW, you are doing a great thing to stay connect and promoting your work through the Web, with your blog, flickr, my space, and so on….They are great marketing tools.
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To answer your question “Flickr or not Flickr?”, well, of course Flickr, it’s so cheap you can try, and stop whenever you want….No sunk costs!
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I’ve been busy promoting my Photoshelter account, so I let my Flickr account go dormant.
I’ll try testing the water with my new set of photos at Flickr because these have not been looked at much at Photoshelter.
My view statistics for my fine-art photos and travel shots of Venice are reversed between Photoshelter and Flickr. The Flickr viewers have looked at my fine-art photos more. My website stats more or less agree with the Photoshelter view stats in general trends, so maybe I am sending my visitors to the Photoshelter.
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Rian DDR and Photoshelter are obviously more secure. you get what you pay for I guess
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but are they really? why would flickr be easier to hack than any others?
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mmm maybe obviously was not the right word.. It’s just that PS and DDR have a vested interest in protecting your investment with them. Flickr is more of a social thing on which advertising is sold. If you think about it the more photos that are “shared” the better for Flickr.
I’ll shut up now..
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Fact is, if the browser renders the image, IT IS EASILY STOLEN. in 10 years as a hacker, i’ve seen many pathetic ways that people have tried to save their images, including disabling right clicks, stopping people viewing the source etc, but they are all useless.
Take for instance the HTML standard, all a person would need to do on DRR/Photoshelter/Flickr or any other site which allows you to post an image, is sniff the traffic and look for ![]() , once you have that it’s game over.
As for DDR and Photoshelter being more secure, how? What do they offer that goes against the standards of the web?
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Maybe I may look naive, but can’t you just add a watermark before uploading the pictures on flickr? Am I missing something? please tell me..
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Watermarks are easily removed. We had this discussion a while back about image protection. Ideally the only way you can really protect the image would be using steganography ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography)
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Thanks a lot! now I go and see it!
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I might add that my images on Flickr are no bigger than 600 X 400 pixels. Smaller is useless, bigger very risky, I guess.Yes, they can be stolen and used on the web, needless to say, but at least they cannot be reproduced for print, which is my bigger concern.
http://stefanfalkephotography.blogspot.com/
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Has anyone actually had any images stolen from Flickr?
I ask because i keep getting emails from people representing various dubious publications wanting to use my images for free.
Needless to say, this is utterly out of the question, but to my knowledge nobody has actually robbed any from me yet.
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Again this is one part of the digital age that developers have forgotten about, image theft.
How do you know when your image is being used on the web? Unless you surf all day long, there is no way in hell you can determine if your images are being used in an illegal manner.
One idea i had was some form of signature, something like md5sum embedded in the image which could then be trawled by the search engines. It would work like:
1: You save your image and the md5sum is encrypted using 3des or something, which makes it hard to remove the tag.
2: You upload the image to the web
3: You then login to your search engines “image protection runtime location unit © daniel 2007”* and enter the md5sum key into the app. Google will then search the web for all instances of this key whilst on their daily crawls.
4: If it finds the image, it is collected into a central place and you are sent an email with the site details etc.
Whilst this may seem like a far-fetched idea, the technology is already there and it’s easy to embed details via images and have a routine on a web search engine read them (think metadata, only better)
- If Google or any other company implements this, or thinks of doing it, i would like a hasselblad H3d in return thanks, pm me for postal address
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I use flickr to store small images and to share large images privately to clients (temporary basis) but I would not use it to archive my originals and large images.
As others have said, you can use flickr to belong to hundreds of groups and have your image seen thousand of times. Is this really how we want it? I’m not sure. The excitement wears off quickly once you start getting too much remedial feedback.
I belong to only one group and it is because it has most of my friends from other online venues. My friends list is kept purposefully small because I try to take time to see their work. I frequently parse my contact list to keep people whose work I respect and want to see.
For that, I think flickr is great. In addition you can use it to link images to your blog or to populate a gallery here at lightstalkers…
It think it also depends at which stage of your profession you are. The shooters who publish and sell books seem to be very careful in protecting their work and to limit the amount of work released. It, sort of, creates an impression of familiarity to easily recognise their trademark and ‘look’. If you are at this stage of your profession, I think, releasing thousands of images on Flickr would be a bad idea.
I’m nowhere near that level but I do mark majority of my shots as ‘private’ after New Years Eve. On January 1st I start with a clean slate but from time to time I post the older pictures in wnw threads of the only flickr group I belong to.
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Daniel doesn’t the digimarc spider do just that (for an enormous price and not 100% effective) trawl the web for illegally reproduced photos etc? Or is that not the same? Is this tracking something a half way decent programmer can set up?
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From first glances, it makes use of some embedded watermark but i’d be interested how they trawl for it
as for the development costs, im looking into that
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John A.M – I don’t beleive there’s ignorance in where Flickr could go. Just a fact that currently it’s not quite there. Yet, because of discussions like this, taking place in various forums, it will actually be interesting to see where the developers take it, as the membership changes.
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Flickr is one of the most superficial places in the net.
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Angela:
Seems the digimarc option is rubbish for 2 reasons:
1: They add a watermark to the image which is trivial to remove
2: The spider they operate doesn’t scan the web well
It seems like a damn expensive option to use imho
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Daniel Thanks, Yes wondered about that – the only way I can imagine that is fail safe re: protecting images is at the point of download, after that the web is so huge it can never be adequately trawled. But, you can also just copy the screen without downloading anything, most images are only 72dpi anyway and that’s what a screen copy gets you.
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click here and scroll down to ‘A Discussion With Martin Parr’, and you can download a 40mb 1.5 hour mp3 and hear Martin Parr discuss Flickr, and his vision of the future of Flickr and the threat/opportunities that he/Magnum feel it poses/offers….
cheers,
Jeremy
TokyoLand blog
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I use flickr all the time, and I’ve done sales via it. It’s nothing to be feared, it something to be used! Also very handy for printing Moo Cards.
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cool interview (parr). very refreshing.
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Thank you Jeremy,
I really recommend to listen to ‘A Discussion With Martin Parr’, thanks for the link (you find it two posts up, from Jeremy). The reaction to my post here and the mails I get in respones to my blog show that this issue seems to be on many people’s minds. I am also discussing it with my agency’s ceo, Peter Bitzer of laif (laif.de), maybe I ask him to ‘guest post’ here on that topic.
r, Stefan
http://stefanfalkephotography.blogspot.com/
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Participants
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Aga Łuczakowska
photographer
(ah-gah woo-chah-kov-skah)
Katowice
,
Poland
En route to
Karlsruhe
(ETA: Aug 3 2008)
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