Tips for Effective Flickr Tagging
As I explore Flickr and look at others’ photos, here are some tips I’ve learned about effective photo tagging (as well as one pet peeve to avoid):
- Be consistent with plurality: Choose car or cars. Choose airplane or airplanes. Choose flower or flowers. Pick one method and stick with it, rather than some of each.
- Understand spaces: You have two choices to deal with spaces in tags. Either surround the tag with quotes like this: “new york” or simply remove the space and use newyork. If you simply type new york into a Flickr tag box, you’ll end up with two separate tags: new, and york.
- Avoid this pet peeve: If you’re uploading a group of photos, take the extra couple of minutes to correctly tag the individual photos. If your batch of 10 photos contains 2 that have rainbows in them, don’t tag all 10 photos with rainbows — folks will get frustrated as they wonder why photos without rainbows are showing up under your rainbows tag.
By following some consistent guidelines, you’ll result in more exposure for your photos on Flickr. Feel free to comment with any other tagging tips.
Flickr: What is Interestingness
What is interestingness?
The short answer is that it’s a way of measuring a photo’s popularity on Flickr.
The long ansser is that nobody knows the exact formula for computing a photo’s interestingness. It’s a combination of number of views, number of times that someone marks the photo as a favorite, and number of times the photo is blogged. But it’s not simply a matter of views or exposure. If a photo has been submitted to too many groups, it may affect the interestingness in a negative way. Similarly, it is thought that who views or favorites the photo may affect the interestingness rating. The number of views compared to other photos with the same tags is a factor. The quantity of comments is a factor (as well as who left those comments). All of this is time-related… a photo gathering 100 views in an hour is very different than a photo gathering 100 views in a month.
So… why does it matter? It really doesn’t. The primary use of interestingness is that Flickr features the 500 most interesting photos for a given day as part of the Explore section of their website. Post a good photo, get it noticed (so that it has a high interestingness factor) and you may find it featured in Flickr’s Explore section. Many folks (including myself) consider it a matter of pride to have a photo deemed interesting and featured in Explore.
If you want to see a bunch of photos featured in Explore, you can check out this Flickr group. If you’d like to see all of my photos which have ever been in Explore, follow this tag.
Flickr: Contacts
Flickr is a social photo sharing community, and what community could call itself social without some person-to-person interaction? When I first joined Flickr I wasn’t too sure if I’d use the Contacts feature very much. I knew a few other people on there… maybe half a dozen. I didn’t understand why I’d care too much about Contacts. (for the rest of this article, when I use Contacts with a capital C, I mean the Flickr Contacts feature, as opposed to people in general)
I misunderstood. I didn’t realize the power of Contacts.
How to Add Interesting Flickr Contacts
There are millions of photographers on Flickr. A bunch of them are really good. As you browse the website and come across interesting photos, it makes sense to take a look at the rest of that member’s portfolio. When I find someone who routinely takes interesting photos, I add them as a contact. To add someone as a contact:
- If you’re viewing a photo, click their username in the upper right side. This will take you to their recent photo stream.
- From their photo stream, click on “Profile” near the top middle of the screen.
- Finally, click on “Add *username* as a contact” in the upper right. You can optionally mark someone as a Friend or Family member, but usually you’ll just want to leave them as a regular contact so you’ll just click the OK button.
That’s it. Now they’re on your contact list. So what does that get you?
Using Your Contacts to Keep Up with Great Photos
Presumably you added someone as a contact because they take great pictures. Flickr provides an easy way to keep up with the newest photos posted by your contacts. There’s a couple ways to access the Contacts view: either click on “Contacts” in the top menu (next to Home, You, and Organize) or from the home screen click on the “Photos from your Contacts” link in the middle on the right side.
From there, you’ll see a page with thumbnails of photos recently uploaded by your contacts. By default, it will show you up to 5 recent photos for each Contact, in reverse chronological order (newest first). At the bottom of the screen (right under the numbered screen (previous/next) links) you will find a link to only show one photo per contact. This can be useful if you have an extremely large number of contacts, but the tradeoff is that you’ll only see one of each contact’s photos.
Important Tip: Best Photos Last
So… if your contacts screen only shows the most recent five (or one) photos, what does that mean when you upload your own photos? Make sure that your best photos are the five (or one) newest. When folks view their contacts page, that will guarantee they will see your best work.
Reciprocation: More Eyes
When you find people who consistently present good photographs, add them as a contact so you can enjoy their work. Often you’ll find they reciprocate the gesture, which means you’ll now have more eyes on your work. Contacts can be powerful, but only if you use them.
Flickr: Favorites
One of the great features of Flickr is the “favorites” function, which lets you easily mark your favorite photos so they can be found easily in the future. As you browse Flickr and look at images, when you see a great one you can click the “Add to Faves” star above the photo and it is instantly added to your favorite list.
Favorites can be useful to other people as well. For example, if you find someone who has some great photos, it can be interesting to view their favorites and see what type of photos they like. The image above? That’s a screen capture of the most recent images I’ve added as favorites. Click the image to view my entire favorites list.
Why Flickr, Part One
Over the past year or so, I have been using the social photo-sharing site Flickr as one of the main avenues for my photography on the web. Why Flickr? Why would I use a hosted service when I could host the photos on my own site? There are a variety of reasons, but the big ones can be summed up in one word: community. In a series of posts, I will explain some of Flickr’s features and reasons why I think the site is definitely worth my time (and the $25/year for a pro account).
Future posts will dive into more detail on some of Flickr’s features as well as provide tips, tricks, and tools to make the most of the Flickr experience, but first let’s talk a bit about community. The Flickr photography community shares a love of photography, and allows one to easily share their photos with the world while making it easy to engage in sharing and communications with others with common photography interests
Photos can easily be added to various topic groups for pretty much any topic imaginable. There are groups for locations, techniques, camera models, colors, objects, hobbies, portraits, and so on. You can comment on any photo or mark it as a favorite. Photos can be grouped into sets of related images.
By using the contacts feature, you can note those users you want to follow, and Flickr makes it easy to see a quick update of what your contacts have uploaded recently.
Flickr isn’t just photo storage, it’s photo sharing, and the community aspects can be a powerful tool for a photographer to get feedback on their work and improve the quality of their images. Stay tuned for coming posts that share more detail of how to best use Flickr.
