Social Media Marketing for Photographers // Photography + Community

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):

• This one is almost too obvious, but always tag. Add some keywords so that folks will find your photos.
• Add some “concept” tags. Think of the emotions, feelings, activities, or general concepts that might apply to a photo. Does the photo depict happiness, reading, or the idea of busy? Add those as tags.
• 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. Or better yet: use both.
• 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.

Photo by sheldonschwartz, used under Creative Commons licensing

These other posts might be of interest to you:

1. Is Anyone Using Flickr’s People-Tagging Feature?
2. Tag! You’re It on Flickr
3. Facebook vs. Flickr: Where to Share?

Tagged as:
flickr,
keywords,
tagging

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I’m going to borrow a slogan from Nike and suggest it as a mantra for organization of photographs. Just Do It.

Whether your photography medium is film, slides, or digital, as you take more photos you’re going to end up with storage and organization needs. I know a couple guys who have gradually accumulated thousands of photos which they organize simply by burning them to CD and writing on the CD. I suppose that’s better than a complete lack of any system, but when you need to find a photo, it’s a challenge to guess when it was shot and to figure out which disc it might be on.

When it comes to storing digital images, there are several programs specifically for that purpose. I use Lightroom and will likely write more details about how I use it in the future. Regardless of the organization system you choose, here are four things you should keep in mind:

1. The system should allow for images to easily be found my multiple criteria. Those criteria might include date taken, subject matter, photographic style, time of day, and other information specific to the types of photos you take. For example, I take a lot of photos of trains, and I can easily find those of a specific railroad.
2. The system must scale. What works for keeping track of 100 photos might not be practical when that collection grows to a few thousand. Choose an organization method that allows for expansion both in the quantity of photos, as well as the types of material being tracked, that is, to have new categories or ways to find the material.
3. The system should be easily backed up. If you’re using a software program, there should be a feature to backup the database. If you’re storing something in the physical sense (slides, prints, negatives, etc), your organization scheme should allow for a duplicate set of material.
4. The system should be able to be used fast enough to be effective. If you avoid cataloging your photos because it’s too hard or too time-consuming, the system won’t get used, and you might as well not have any system at all.

How does photo organization relate to social media and online community? It’s hard to share your photos if you can’t find them. A strong keywording and tagging system as part of your organization system will translate into a strong set of keywords and tags when you post photos to Flickr, SmugMug, or another online location.

Spending a few minutes to develop an organizational system will pay off in reduced frustration and time spent looking for photos in the future. In a future post, I’ll dive further into the world of digital asset management software and offer some specific information on my program of choice, Lightroom. Regardless of the system you choose, the important thing is to have system, and use it.

These other posts might be of interest to you:

1. A Social Photo Workflow: Posting Photos from the 30 Hour Day

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It’s been nearly a month since Flickr announced support for tagging people in photos. Are you using it?

Personally I’ve tagged a few people as I’ve uploaded small groups of photos, but when I process a large quantity of pictures for an event or other client job I haven’t been taking the time to tag people. When I’ve browsed around to various photos, most of them don’t seem to be people-tagged.

Is it just me, or is Flickr’s people-tagging feature being underutilized? Why? What do you think?

Photo by sheldonschwartz, used under Creative Commons licensing

These other posts might be of interest to you:

1. Tips for Effective Flickr Tagging
2. Tag! You’re It on Flickr
3. An Introduction to Flickr’s Contacts Feature

Tagged as:
flickr,
tagging

One of Facebook’s popular social features has been the ability to “tag” people in photos. Users can indicate who is in a photo, and that indication becomes a link to that person’s Facebook page. Yesterday Flickr added a similar feature, calling it “People in Photos” (Yahoo must’ve cut the funding for any sort of innovative or catchy name).

How to Use Flickr’s People in Photos

From a Flickr photo page, users can identify people in the photo. Along with the feature Flickr has launched a slew of new options that control privacy and permission settings so that one can control at what level he or she wants to participate in people-tagging. Check out the People in Photos FAQ for more information.

What Does it Mean for Serious Photographers?

While being able to tag your friends or family in photos is great, the feature could present some challenges for professionals or for serious hobbyists who are processing large numbers of pictures. My workflow (and I suspect that of many others) includes adding metadata keywords (tags) as part of the post processing before uploading to Flickr. Thus far I’ve added keywords for people that I’ve identified in photos, and those keywords will flow upstream to Flickr.

From what I can tell, there’s no way to perform Flickr people-tagging outside of Flickr (and there’s not any fast/efficient way to do it on Flickr either). For a photographer who occasionally delivers work via Flickr, expectations that people are tagged could potentially result in a significant new workload.

How will it shake out after the feature has been in the wild for a while? My suspicion is that those processing large groups of photos won’t be doing the people-tagging and that it will be more of an afterthought where individuals and viewers will add people to the photos casually and over time. It’s a nice new feature that will be quite a bit of fun, but like any sort of metadata the value will be proportional to the completeness.

What do you think? Are you headed over to Flickr to start tagging people?

Photo by selena marie, used under Creative Commons licensing

Tagged as:
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