How can you make your photographs stand out against 6 billion others?
With more than 80 million visitors monthly, Flickr embodies an unmatched way to get people’s attention for your images. However, with more than 50 million registered users, you are obviously not the only one wanting to get noticed and attract attention to your photos. Here is our step-by-step guide on what to do to become a sensation on Flickr:
1. Put Your Best Foot Forward
If you are hellbent on getting attention to your photographs, you have to ensure that all of the images featured in your photostream are top quality. Many viewers wouldn’t exert too much effort to wade through your “okay enough” pictures to find the great ones – so ensure that every photo is excellent.
If you have an account already, and it has a lot of shots that do not showcase your best works, you can try to make your lower quality photos private. If that sounds like an arduous task, you could likewise sign up for a second Flickr account and use this account, particularly to highlight your best works.
Also, adjust your photostream’s layout to make the most out of each photo’s aesthetic appeal by configuring it to show medium-sized photos. When somebody looks at your Flickr photostream, the bigger the images are, the more chance they will not just scroll right past it. Ensure that you choose” or “Medium + collections” or “Medium + sets,” so the audience could easily see other amazing images you’ve captured.
2. Don’t Spam Your Photostream
Like what we’ve covered in the first step, make it a point to not upload too many pictures per-day to your Flickr photostream. Uploading over three photos daily is, in our opinion, asking too much from your Flickr contacts and people viewing your stream. Keep in mind that you should only be posting the best.
Moreover, make sure you also avoid the mistake of not posting regularly. Although you do not want to post too often, the opposite holds true, as well. If you do not upload content for long periods, interest in your work may dwindle and wane.
Post regularly, but not too much.
3. Use Creative Commons Licensing
Having a Creative Commons license on your photographs is an ideal way to get your images noticed since it allows people to freely use your photos on their own blogs and websites.
You do not give away your rights to your pictures, but you allow people to use them – potentially serving as your free marketing strategy.
4. Make it Easier to Find Your Photographs
To begin, ensure that you have given your photographs clear and descriptive titles. It could be hard to be original and unique when you are posting images every day, but the photo’s title is the initial element that the Flickr algorithm considers when a viewer is doing a search. If your audience tries to find “sunset on water”, but your photo is labeled “IM134”, you might have just lost a follower.
Tags
Put tags on all of your images. Tags are also a good way to describe your photos aside from the title and enable you to be more descriptive and creative with your photos. Your tags should include your photo’s subject, the venue, the setting, and pretty much anything else you could think of that’s related to the photo, and somebody might search for.
Location Information
You can also add location info to your pictures with Geotags. This is information about the location a picture was taken, and viewers usually look for photographs from a certain place
5. Make Friends on Flickr
You could encourage other fellow Flickr users to discover your images by going out and viewing theirs.
Flickr has a ton of different ways to discover amazing images – you could check out photos they have labelled as interesting, view a photo calendar of the previous month, and even see stunning pictures on a world map (another good reason to try geotagging).
Whenever you see a photograph that you find astounding, add the image as a Favorite. Flickr would then notify the user who uploaded the photo you favourited, and they might even take the time to view your photos and return the favour.
Try not to add too many photos as your favourite, though, as it would become obvious to other users if you have discerning tastes in photos.
What you could do limitlessly, though, is to comment on other users’ photos. They love to receive comments on their photographs, and again, they might return the favour, thus increasing engagement on your posts. However, you need to make sure that your comments are on topic and insightful.
Join Flickr Groups
Another great way to directly show your photographs with other users is to send your top quality photos to Flickr groups. These groups are established by Flickr users and are a collection of photos that have something in common. Don’t worry if your photography niche is unusual, as there are more than a million groups on Flickr, so there’s surely one for your works.
The last way to make friends on Flickr and to have a bigger audience for your photos is to add users as Contacts. A contact is somebody whose uploaded photographs you like, and their images would show up on your Flickr front page. You are, again, aiming to get reciprocity with this approach – if you add a user as a contact, they might try to add you back.
6. Shoot Interesting Photographs
Flickr’s Explore page highlights great photographs, and you should aim to get seen on it. The other steps in this handy guide have been working to achieve this ultimate goal.
Although Flickr will not disclose specifically how they evaluate if a photo is good enough, we know that a photo, generally, is more fascinating and interesting when it captures attention – like when people Favorite it or comment on it.
P.S. Although it is not Flickr, you could likewise get exposure for your photographs by uploading onto the Watermarquee Facebook Fan page. All images watermarked using Watermarquee are considered eligible; you can just send it my way at john@watermarquee.com.
