The Preamble
Firstly, this article is written from the viewpoint of a hobbyist photographer without great leanings to generating income from photography. If you are yearning to make money from photography using the web, there are many, many gurus and articles that would be of interest to you.
Why put up your photos online?
Before you read further, I'll pose the question, "
Are you concerned about photo theft from unknown people on the internet?" If you are obsessively concerned about image theft,
stop reading now. Putting up photos on the internet is just making it easy as pie for someone to steal your exact photo or at least copy your concept. Don't do it. Point people to
Unsplash if they ask you to put up your photos.
Now, for the rest of us, here are my thoughts about some of the services I use and don't use.
Google+
Oops, that slipped out. I was on
Gee Plus for several years, almost from its launch until its termination. It was a grand time. Google had made an antfarm to watch how people would behave in the social network to rival Facebook (ostensibly, at that time, Facebook was taking big chunks of search and advertising away from Google's Search engine). So as ants, we were really happy, we had a social network that we could control comments to our posts, free photo storage and did not have to suffer relos and school buddies who would never "come over" to the photographer's eye and urge to take random photos of puddles and shoes. Of all the services that let me celebrate my joy of photography and meet like minded people, G+ was it. But it's gone, repurposed as a corporate intranet.
Facebook
So my presence on Facebook preceded G+. Initially I posted on my private personal presence. No, that was not good. Negatives of posting as private person?
- Strangers want to friend you. Some are genuine nice people, others are all kinds of nefarious.
- When you friend someone and eventually are not so into them, it's a painful experience to disconnect from them.
- You mix your relatives and close friends with people you are superficial to.
- Your relatives and close friends treasure you for what you are but don't like your artistic leanings in photography.
- and a tonne of other issues.
If you want to post on Facebook, you have several better ways
- Make a public Facebook Page - people make Facebook pages to present a business or just be at a different doorway. Here's mine.
- Your close friends and relatives don't automatically follow your Facebook page. They can opt in if they want, voluntarily. One issue solved.
- You don't have to lower down the boom gate to strangers and friend them. Strangers can appreciate your artwork without needing to be friended.
- You can hop into private or public photo enthusiast groups. Some are camera or gear based. Some are photography based. You can join in more than one. If the group is private you can show photos and have long winding conversations, these will not appear in public view. Negatives to this?
- Unless you are the owner or administrator, you are a guest in the group and have to comply with the moderation rules of the owners and administrators.
- Poorly managed groups that allow undesirables to come into the group will get spam postings from said undesirables
The negatives of Facebook postings?
- The image display dimensions are restricted. Even if you have a wide screen, the image display does not expand in size.
- Image quality is reduced due to compression. This limits examination and appreciation.
- Facebook slaps a hand on your photos - the old fear of losing your copyright to them is as old as Facebook - it's a perceived fear.
- Your Facebook account could be abruptly suspended or terminated based on a complaint from someone about violating community guidelines.
The positives of posting photos on Facebook?
- It is after all the largest social network in the world, filled with laypeople, not just limited to photographers. These people might give you likes and appreciate your photos differently, as laypeople, compared to the sometimes paranoid critical response from image makers.
- You can feed your ego by paying real money to sponsor your posts.
- The Facebook algorithm is generally kind to you and your followers will see your postings.
- You can make private album postings to targeted stakeholders.
- The conversation about your posting is threaded for easier reading
- You can mention someone in your posting or your reply - meaning they get notified (dinged) and hyperlinked.
Instagram
Instagram started as a photo sharing service for snapshots from phone cameras. It was so successful, it was bought over by Facebook. Here's
my current Insta
Positives of posting on Instagram?
- Like Facebook, your photos potentially reach many many eyeballs, normal people, photographers, marketing and branding companies, and so on. Not just photographers. These people often have a different appreciation aesthetic to photographers.
- Although Instagram has recently stated that it is no longer a pure photo service (meaning they want to Tik Tok and Youtube), there are many established photographers and delegates on it. As well as upcoming talent and wannabes. This is a great place to see what you feel is talented work, and rub shoulders by posting your own shots.
Negatives of Instagram?
- There is no concept of albums, your images are all in one stream, mixed. If you want to have curated albums of different genre, or to split work images from personal casual images, you need to create separate accounts.
- The postings do not accept hyperlinks - so you can't direct a conversation to another location / blog article / presence. The only place a hyperlink will work is to place it in your bio. If you want more than one hyperlink in your bio, try linktr.ee - here's my linkte.ee .
- Like Facebook, your account could be abruptly suspended or terminated. This could be due to a complaint about violating community guidelines or just plain switching between machines often when you log in. Potentially worse than Facebook, if your account is terminated, there is no phone number or email address to register a rebuttal.
- The aspect ratio of an image is preferably square or squarish. Grossly rectangular images are either automatically cropped or have to be fiddled with third party editors so that there are huge borders and very little image content.
- The image display dimensions are restricted. Even if you have a wide screen, the image display does not expand in size, more restrictive than Facebook display.
- The discussion to your posting is not threaded, so threads are difficult to follow.
- There is no concept of a discussion group like in Facebook.
- Your account is either private or public, you don't have the option of having both private and public "albums" to show for example a family event.
- The native client for Instagram on your desktop computer does not allow posting of images. You have to fiddle with the Browser's User Agent to fake the situation that you are using a mobile device so that the Upload icon and subsequent pick-a-file dialog works.
- The background around your image is white and is expected to be white. That means you need to edit your images with that appearance in mind.
- Many people will view your images on their small phone screen, often in bright light. Bear that in mind when you edit your image as well as choice of content. Although a full sized image can be uploaded, the display by the native Instagram web app forces a limited image size. You can find hacks to re-direct the image to full size in a separate web browser window.
- The famous Instagram algorithm will fiddle with whose images appear on your stream.
That having been said, why does Instagram attract so much talent? Because it is the most popular photo sharing service
