This month Charlotte takes a look at image sharing site Flickr,  one of the essential ports of call for anyone wishing to put their work out to the widest possible audience

By Charlotte Griffiths

I’ve written about the joys of Flickr before, but it’s worth revisiting as it’s nigh on essential to a photographer who wants to make the most of social media. Flickr was established in 2004 and over the past six years has become home to a staggering four billion images. It has two goals:

1. To help people make their content available to the people who matter to them.

2. To enable new ways of organizing photos and video.

There is a third point that’s key to Flickr’s success: its simplicity. If you’ve used the Internet to host images before now, you’ll no doubt have stumbled on some truly appalling image-hosting services that require you to undergo Crystal-Maze-like rigmaroles to get your pictures online. Flickr just wants you to hoik up your shots so you can share them as quickly as possible, and does all the resizing for you – there’s even a handy desktop uploader that allows you to queue up pictures in your own time.

If you don’t want people to access the full hi-res version of your shot you can protect that in your profile’s options. Equally, you can give people download links for the full versions of your images – which is very handy for sharing images around the world or getting access to hi-res files in a jiffy.

Once you’ve got your pictures online, the simplicity continues: tagging your images is as easy as entering a word in a box and pressing ‘enter.’ Your picture is then filed in-amongst the thousands of others that share that tag, making Flickr a great place to start looking for stock images if you’re in that market.

Although one of the ‘community guidelines’ (Flickr’s more fluffy term for ‘The Rules’) is that you can’t use Flickr for commercial purposes, there are ways to make money from this site. Late last year, Flickr’s hitherto-untapped suitability for stock images was appropriated by the image library Getty, who now have a Flickr Collection that contains their pick of uploaded shots. Flickr members can submit images to be considered for invitation to the Getty Flickr Collection by adding them to the Getty group – and Getty photo editors regularly trawl the site on the hunt for the very best images. Although it seems to be a very personal decision whether you choose to license your Flickr images with Getty or not, photographers have made money from this process. It’s only a few photographers at the moment, but every little helps…

Let’s get together

Groups are another function of Flickr that evolved as the site became more popular. Say you’re into taking strobist shots, and want to learn more about the techniques to create them – you simply search for ‘Strobist’ in the ‘Search Groups’ panel and voila: all the groups you could ever want, full of similarly-minded photographers who (for the most part) are keen to share their knowledge and discovery. You might even find a group based near you.

How do I get the best from Flickr?

1. Don’t upload hundreds of pics at once. Part of the point is looking at other people’s shots, and if you bombard the site with tonnes of shots then some of your pictures miss their chance to shine in a slot on your contacts’ ‘Recently Uploaded’ window.

2. Share your work and get involved.Flickr’s not a one way street. You can’t just throw a bunch of pictures on there and expect fame and fortune – as I’ve said many times before now, you have to interact with the networking community to get the most out of it.

3. Get in for the long haul. Keep updating, keep interacting, keep finding new people to talk to. The more people who know your name, the more likely it is that you’ll find people who want to employ you (an adage that works across all disciplines, not just photography)

4. Be very good at what you do. Again, this applies to all things, but with over four billion images on Flickr to tempt peoples’ eyes, your shots have got to sing out. Flickr can help even if your images aren’t up to snuff: join a group, post your images and ask for criticism/advice.

Personally, I love Flickr for the huge dose of inspiration that the site offers every single day. With millions of images from all over the world, Flickr provides access to the photographic zeitgeist: it’s an instant guide to “what’s hot and what’s not” that you can tap into at any time. If you’re going on location, running a quick Flickr search beforehand can arm you with heaps of ideas and examples of how people have creatively used the location beforehand – either so you can build on their ideas, or stay away from them!

Case Study

Kevin Meredith is a photographer who I stumbled across on Flickr when I started tinkering with film images: his success is, in part, due to the exposure he got by using the photo sharing site, and he’s the photographer I always mention when people slam social media and online networking as pointless.

“Flickr has quite literally changed my life. It provides a level playing field for people to show off their work: all it takes is a few people to blog or tweet about an image and it could get viewed by tens of thousands of people in a very short space of time.

“One of the reasons some photographers shy away from it is because they are worried about getting their photos taken without credit, but the positives [of having your shots on Flickr] far outweigh the negatives as the site makes it easy to get discovered.

“Every major success with my photography can be traced back to Flickr. It’s hard to think that it was just five years ago that I joined the site. Because of Flickr I can teach a photography course on another continent and there’s no shortage of students willing to take part.

“I could not imagine my life without the people that I’ve got to know though Flickr, many of who I now know in the real world. The opportunities that Flickr have given me are beyond measure: I have a whole new career because of it, and I got my book deal because of it. I have also been constantly amazed at the innovative new features that the Flickr team have designed and built into site, such as the maps and the video function.

“For me, Flickr goes beyond a website and beyond a social platform – it’s on a whole other level. I can't wait to see what she has up her sleeve for the years to come and know a lot of people think the same thing.”

flickr.com/lomokev

Twitter Thoughts

I opened the floor up to Twitter using our twitter.com/PhotoProUk account, and asked people how using Flickr had helped their business.

@TammyLynn_17: I like how you can search for images with tags. I like being able to look up images from events and news type happenings….I like the little communities. I’ve met new contacts for my area through Flickr.

@MrPhotographic: Flickr has helped my business many times. It’s great for making connections and tagging your portfolio. So simple… Great for research, inspiration, location scouting, landscape direction and tag searching.

@Mnoo: Flickr is great for getting your images in front of many people and for making connections. There’s a wealth of knowledge in the groups.

@ghenesnowdon: I find Flickr a very useful website both for personal projects and for the business.

@tarlyn: Flickr is a repository for my photos. I have sold work to magazines via Flickr and gained national exposure because of it.

Get started

www.flickr.com