Flickr--what Is Your Experience With Flickr

I've been found on Flickr by several people and companies who have paid well. My biggest sale was through Flickr several years ago. Also a production company doing a reality TV show and an interior design company doing some local bar and grills. FAA works nice for me for folks wanting to buy one image here and there, but so far, Flickr has been well worth the little bit of money I put in over 8 years.

You'd need to increase your reverse oogle image searches though.

Ross -- What Joe said. If you want to learn more do a discussion search here for "Flickr". ... make a pot of coffee and absorb it all.

@Frank - That actually needs to be on my todo list as well. I have an account and hardy use it. It's got a handful of old/odd items posted and that's it.

My basic question with it is, "How does one use it for promotion while at the same time protecting their work from total loss...?"

I am a member of over 300 groups on flickr - and it seems only two dozen or so are regularly active in the discussions.

zzzzzzzz...

flickr works as "cloud storage" = 1Tb.

U can keep the bandwidth down on a
personal site by linking the picture
thumbnails outside of your personal,
mb/month site to flickr.

HW -- Jack is about right. I belong to several groups and submit images but don't participate in discussions.... and I should be because I see positive response from it on my images. However, the way Flickr works is very similar to FAA. My analytics tells me that Flickr is my third larges referral and this is because more and more people are searching on Flickr for pictures just like they search for video on YouTube.

Again, do a discussion search for Flickr and check out what I said in this thread as well: http://pixels.com/showmessages.php?messageid=2210764

How do you redirect views on flickr to FAA (or any other place where you sell?)

On Flickr I share in the description on each photo post a link to my Flickr profile ( used to be my blog ), then on my profile I have links to both my blog and FAA. Flickr rules are that you can't post a link on your photos that leads to a site with a shopping cart ... But you can post those on your profile .... People who shop Flickr know to check your profile.

@Frank. Excellent. Thanks! I believe I have some editing to do.

Oh, that's good info. I didn't know much of this about Flickr. Off to update my profile that I don't thinks been updated in about 5 years. ;)

I know we can easily share our FAA/Pixels/Artist Website, etc. image links to places like Twitter and Facebook, but most of the the time I don't like the blatant promo-selling component to it. Too much of that I've found turns people off and gets you unfriended, unfollowed, and otherwise muted. For this reason, I mostly just upload a lower web-resolution version to social networks directly.

However, I've noticed others who share their images to social networks solely from their Flickr albums. Is there any extra benefit to doing it this way? Perhaps better search attribution since the images shared on personal Facebook pages are private and not indexed by Google, Bing, etc.?

If I share a new image to social networks, I primarily want people to have a look and hopefully respond in some way, preferably with something affirmative. When I see other users sharing to Facebook from their Flickr account, I mostly won't click on it to see the full image if I don't want to be taken away from Facebook at that moment. So, the image doesn't get viewed in other than the cropped portion in the newsfeed. Wondering if there's some other benefit to sharing via Flickr to social networks as opposed to uploading a web resolution directly as I'm doing currently?

I get more views of my pictures at Flickr than I ever do on FAA, but won't be invited to sell because I use a watermark on most shots and have always chosen 'all rights reserved' so I;m sure they will deal with the 50 million who have CC licenses first.
I enjoy the interaction on Flickr and their picture management interface beats FAA in some respects, but I don't interact enough with other photographers.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/42701751@N03/

http://mickflynnimages.com/

@Skip "Wondering if there's some other benefit to sharing via Flickr to social networks as opposed to uploading a web resolution directly as I'm doing currently?"


If Facebook want to sell the images which are shared on their site, they can't sell them if it's a link to the picture elsewhere.
I do both methods, but usually a link to Flickr.
I started posting FAA links a long while back and lost lot's of followers very quickly as they think you are just trying to sell stuff (which, of course, you are)!

Skip -- when I was on FB sharing from Flickr was the only way to go because of the TOS on FB. They say the can do what they want with your images. IG has the same rules as they are owned by FB. In Flickr, as soon as I turned sharing on, the number of my images pireted started to plumet. I agree want Mick says about Flickr . ....

I also,think you're on to something about,the " buy this" posting. " people don't like to be sold but they love to buy " I wish that I coined that but Jeffrey Gitomer did. On the right platform, sharing images from Flickr makes a value statement compelling without having to 'sell'. This is what Flickr excels at ... Store, organize, share.

EDIT: hopefully I cleaned up what that darn auto correct messed up!

@Mick, yes. Of course I'd love to sell my work at every opportunity, but your friends on sites like Facebook are already getting heavily marketed to by Facebook banner ads, etc. and the last thing they want to see is their friends marketing to them also. It's a tough line to walk, ie. sharing your work with your friends without blatantly marketing to them.

Other than a recent experimental promo I did, I try not to use any links that have any shopping cart attached to them. I'll share sometimes that I've sold something, but I mostly just do that via "like" and not posted to wall.

The Flickr question has more to do if you benefit more by getting your name and images to show up in Google/Bing, etc. searches somehow if you're sharing them onto your private personal Facebook page, and/or Facebook fan/biz pages via Flickr?

Thanks Frank, I might play around with sharing via Flickr some and see what happens. As much as people criticize Flickr management, it does seem to be a decent storage, stats, and sharing solution overall.

waste of time

I've been on Flickr since 2006 and have developed a lot of contacts. I tag all my photos -- don't geotag nearly as much as I used to -- and belong to a lot of groups. I suspect a lot of folks put me in their faves and know to look back from time to time. Like FAA, I suspect the longer one is on the web site, the better the results they will see.

Interesting discussion...I've been on Flickr for a couple of years and post quite regularly - much more than to FAA. I got one sale from Flickr when a local graphic artist asked for permission to use one of my photos for a local garden's fundraising brochure.

Flickr's GUI leaves a lot to be desired - in some areas - while excelling in others. However, I find it a great tool to learn from other photographers and peruse some amazing photographs. If I make a sale from it, that's bonus :)

I do agree with Skip that it's a tough balancing act trying not to sell to friends/family. I have a not-so-updated photography business page on FB that I almost always post photos only from my 365-project on Flickr, but seldom from FAA as almost all of my FB 'fans' are friends/family and I don't feel comfortable selling stuff to them. I did both - directly posting photos and sharing Flickr links, although I prefer sharing links to keep the photo somewhat out of reach of FB's grasp. The problem with it though is that FB doesn't show your posts that have links as commonly as posts that do have images...so you sort of have to balance the posts.

http://flickr.com/photos/kunalmehra

I have been on Flickr for about 4 years, have a great exposure - more than 1 million views. Have many great friends-photographers, even met some of them personally and about thousand followers. But i never had any deal through...
So Im there mostly for exposure, Flickr gave me a lot, have to mention that I was starting my photographer carrier from that site...
Also I have 3 accounts on Flickr with specific themes.

First one my main: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jenny_rainbow/
Second - my photo sessions with people: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jenny_rainbow1
And 3rd - travel journalism: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jenny_rainbow2

Jenny Rainbow Fine Art Photography