How I Used Flickr To Power My Blog and Got 1,496,603 Visits
Why do I show my work on Flickr? There are a number of reasons, but they boil down to 1,496,603. Let me explain my affair with Flickr.
When I started Photoblog 2.0 in May 2005, I made the decision to serve my photos out of Flickr. This means that the several thousand photos in my blog are sitting on Flickr's servers, instead of my own server (where I could perfectly well have put them).
Choosing to "mash-up" and outsource Flickr's photo serving with my own WordPress and MySQL installation was a very Web 2.0 decision, and it has proved to be a smart move from a technology perspective. Flickr takes care of many aspects of image management that I don't have to worry about, including having each of my photos available in a variety of standardized sizes, image tagging, and image searching. Flickr also saves me from having to manage commentary on my photos, and allows me a great platform for entering into dialogs with people who are interested in my work. For example, hundreds of people on Flickr have stopped by to visit the image below, without me ever having blogged it:
View this image larger.
In fact, my presence on Flickr has taken on a life of its own. My Flickr photostream is complementary and as important to me as my blog. According to Flickr (as of January 25, 2008) 1,496,603 people had paid visits to my photos. This is a huge number. Read this complete story on my blog.
Categories
Photography
Comments (3)
Read More Entries by Harold Davis.
Wow! That's a lot of visits. Congrats.
Ben, if you read my full post you'll see I note a couple of downsides: people seem to feel it is more OK to use photosposted to Flickr w/o permission even if they have a copyright notice; the Flickr filters tend to be overcontrasty and they make some images look really bad. It's also weird to have my photos hosted somewhere that is not under my control, but in some ways you can say the same thing about my generic web hosting account. On balance, the downsides are small compared to both the convenience and the Flickr community. Please feel free to send me a private email if there are other aspects of this you want to explore.
"Choosing to "mash-up" and outsource Flickr's photo serving ... was a very Web 2.0 decision" -- whoa, can you mash in any more buzzwords 3.0? heh.
Seriously, though: Have you found any down-sides to this approach? Do you (or did you) have any concerns about losing control over your own works by hosting them on a third-party service, for example? For a few years I've been running my own home-rolled PHP-backed photo "blog" and I've been hesitant to follow the sheep to flickr. However, your posting inspires some confidence that it may be worthwhile to revisit the decision -- and having the increased audience is certainly the biggest appeal.
I'm curious what else there is to be learned by hearing how your thinking went.
-ben