While I do not post my pictures to Flickr for an ego boost, it would be nice for my photographs to be viewed more people as I believe you get more out of Flickr when you enjoy the community aspect as well as the excellent photo gallery features.
Thomas Hawk has produced an excellent article outlining the ways he has promoted his photostream to get him hundreds of thousands of views. Check them out, you might find a new flood of traffic is just round the corner.
At present my photostream on Flickr has been viewed over 400,000 times. While Flickr provides no rank of their photographers this would probably put me in the top 1% of photographers viewed on Flickr. Certainly others have been viewed more but I’ve received more than my fair share of attention over the course of the past year. Hopefully these tips below will provide you some ideas on how you can better promote your work on Flickr.
- Take great pictures
- You get one shot a day. Don’t randomly upload your last 20 shots
- Interestingness.
- Fav lots of photos.
- When you post counts.
- Blog your photos.
- Tell everyone you know about Flickr.
- Post your photo to lots of groups and participate in some of the game groups
- Make everyone who makes you a contact a contact back.
- Tag your photos religiously.
Source: Thomas Hawk
Point one is obvious but combined combined with point 2 it makes great sense. I use Flickr first and foremost as an archive. While I do sort out the real crap before uploading I only rarely touch up my pics before posting and then only some contrast or crops using Picassa. I haven’t used Photoshop since last October (since I went 100% legit with my software).
It’s interesting about the time of day, I guess that will be the time of day in Vancouver which is the west coast of Canada so way out of my timezone!
Regardless of if you want to have your photographs gain lots of traffic I would still suggest everyone participate in the groups, they really are excellent and so far not as prone to the forum/newsgroup trolling that happens elsewhere on the interwebs. It’s not all talk about Photography either, if you can photograph it you can talk about it. In fact right now as I type this I am getting advice on house-shopping in the Calgary group!
The last point is probably the one Flickr newbies make the most mistakes with. In fact many peoples pictures I see don’t even have titles.
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One Comment
Very useful.