Flickr Views HOWTO
# Introduction #
Flickr (http://flickr.com) is an extremely popular photo sharing
website owned by Yahoo! and its rich web UI and programming interfaces
make it a great destination for exchanging photographic content among
photographers and consumers. This HOWTO gives tips on how to improve
view counts on your photostream and get your photographs to be noticed
not just by your friends but also unknown people who might be
interested in content that you have photographed.
# Copying this document #
This document is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Sharealike license. For details, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
# Essentials #
Before moving on to specifics, we take a look at the high level
objectives of Flickr, and therefore yours, that would direct traffic
to your photostream:
* Sharing: Make your content discoverable, easy to find and easy to
use.
* Community: Engage the Flickr community with your photostream,
instead of just dumping photographs in it.
* Quality: Flickr community is highly sensitive to photographic
quality. Make efforts to improve your photographic skills and end
results.
In the following sections, I shall elaborate on each of the above high
level objectives and arrive at specific tips on how to meet them.
# Sharing #
1. Licensing: Choose a Creative Commons license by default. You can't
stop theft of your content by just slapping a (C) label and you
prevent legitimate consumers from using and popularising your content
by not choosing a CC license that appeals to you. I use a BY-NC-ND
license by default and grant explicit permission to make derivatives
that don't "alter the depicted content" (thereby allowing
cropping/resizing, etc.) when someone asks.
2. Tagging: Tags are a significant source of traffic to your
photostream, especially through hundreds of Flickr API
consumers. Choose your tags wisely. You should tag your photos with
whatever you want a particular photo to be searchable by. You should
also consider the likelihood of someone using a particular tag to
search. "Birthday Party" is a tag far more likely to be searched upon
than "John's Birthday Party", and "John's Birthday Party at HRC,
Universal Studios" is practically never going to be searched
upon. Those things are more suitable for the photo descriptions.
3. Titles and Descriptions: Needless to say, no one ever wants to
search for "_DSC9087" in an image search engine, but this is the only
searchable content you expose when you dump your photographs without
making any efforts at describing them. Use meaningful titles for your
photographs, that people are likely to search for. Include enough
detail in the photographs' descriptions to capture all aspects of the
photograph for which you might want them to be discoverable.
4. Sizing and Resolution: Many professional photographers choose not
to upload full resolution originals to Flickr to prevent content
theft. Figure out how important copyright theft is to you, not just
in principle but in terms of actual damages incurred. Search engines
give a strong boost to high quality images. If you upload full
resolution originals to Flickr, and allow people to download them
through a CC license, you can be assured of getting significant
amount of love from image search engines.
# Community #
1. Upload Frequency: One of the easiest ways to turn away potential
audience among your Flickr contacts is to dump 50 photographs at
once. Let me assure you, none of your contacts is going to look at
more than 10 of those 50 photographs. Throttle your upload frequency
and try to keep it between 3 to 6 photographs, once a day. This
ensures that your photostream keeps getting bubbled up on your Flickr
contacts' home pages and gives them a chance to view all your
photographs without feeling like they are spending too much time on
your photostream. Don't over-do it, though. Uploading one photograph
every 4 hours might cause some of your contacts to be annoyed at your
persistence! I can't understate the importance of regulating your
upload frequency.
2. Comments: One of the most potent ways of keeping your contacts
engaged is through comments. Make it a point to comment on every
photograph from your contacts that you find interesting enough to
reach the photo details page of. Also make it a point to respond to
each and everyone who comments on your photographs with a thank you
note or any other response that may be appropriate. This helps a lot
in making your contacts feel that you are engaged with their
photostreams and they, in turn, feel obliged to be engaged with
yours. Of course, this being a two-way exchange, you should ignore
contacts who never revert and focus more on those who care.
3. Strategic Descriptions: Another reason to be creative with the
descriptions is to make people viewing your photostream click through
to the photo details page. A description that begins telling a story
but gets truncated on the "browse photostream" page is an open
invitation for viewers to click through to the photo details in order
to find out how the story concluded. Back in the pre-Flickr Stats
days, some of us used a GreaseMonkey script by Sumeet Mulani that
reported changes in the count of visits to the photo details page,
so getting people to visit this page was a prime objective that was
best handled through this tip!
4. De-duplication: Strongly avoid posting photographs that are near
duplicates of each other. It is quite understandable that sometimes
in difficult shooting conditions, you need to take several shots of
the same scene but you need not upload all of them on to
Flickr. Nothing turns people away like a bunch of scene-duplicate
photographs.
5. Group Participation: Flickr groups are a rich resource for
information exchange and you are likely to find groups that belong to
your areas of interest. Typically, these groups serve the purpose of
introducing you to more like-minded members of the Flickr community,
serve as a platform for showcasing your work to an audience that
might appreciate it better and also help you improve your content and
skills.
Avoid groups that are centered around artificial boosting of
comment/fave counts like the plague. They will pollute your photo
details page with meaningless comments and drive away traffic from
your friends. I would rather lose out on view count than lose out on
friends' engagement with my photostream. Also note that Flickr has
some smarts for detecting such groups and using them as a means of
getting on to the Interestingness Hall of Fame is futile.
# Quality #
There are no specific tips to address this objective. Just remember
that Flickr is about photography, before everything else. The more
passionate you are about developing your photography skills and
keeping your content interesting, the more likely you are to find
audience for your content.
One of the most important things to be highlighted here is that you
shouldn't treat Flickr as a backup for your photographs -- at least
not for the content that is accessible to the public. You ought to
keep up and maintain your reputation as a skilled photographer on
Flickr and that often requires ruthlessly cutting down on the photos
that you choose to upload.
If you are as much of a view-count freak as I was a year ago, you
might also want to weed out (yes, I mean _delete_) photos that fail
to gather enough views to keep up your average view count numbers
high.
# Postscript #
After going through this HOWTO, you might end up feeling like you have
come away without any ground-breaking insights. What I have mentioned
above is all common sense stuff. Sometimes, however, common sense
requires organisation, articulate expression and reminders. I hope
that this HOWTO serves that purpose. You might have found some easy
tips here while some require a lot of investment in terms of time and
effort and one thing this HOWTO never promised was an easy, effortless
way of boosting view counts. Also note that some of these steps work
better together than in isolation.
Finally, I have no verifiable proof that these tips work and I
wouldn't spend any time trying to prove their efficacy. Convincing
yourself is an exercise for you. I would like to mention, however,
that through these tips I managed to boost my average view count on
photo details pages from 16 to 20 (over 1000+ total photographs) in a
span of less than six weeks.
A Note on Mirroring: My Livejournal intentionally disallows indexing
by search engines, so I would be grateful if someone mirrors this HOWTO
at a location that has search engine visibility, along with proper
attribution and a link back.
--
Tahir Hashmi
07 October, 2008
http://flickr.com/photos/code_martial/