Flickr
Posted: Tue 5 April, 2005 Filed under: Photography, Resolutions, Thoughts 9 Comments »David asked why I didn’t bother using Flickr to display more of my photos. The simple answer is “because I never got round to it”.
The supplementary answer comes down to other things, including stuff to do with certain resolutions of mine. For a range of reasons, I’m not happy with passing copyright (or even potentially passing copyright) for my photos/images on to Flickr. Or anyone else, in fact. If I keep them hosted on d4d™ as I do now, then the copyright stays with me. Maybe that’s control-freak-esque, maybe it’s not. I don’t know. But it’s part of what I feel about Flickr, and the rest of the online photography stuff.
I rarely (if ever) leave the full-size images anywhere accessible, even on d4d™. They normally stay at 800×600, or perhaps 1024×768 if you’re lucky. Yes, they can be downloaded by people who look at d4d™, and that’s fine with me – I’ve posted them here, and it’s the only place they can be got from. I – for want of a better word – allow them to be used for that purpose from my site. With Flickr, they can be picked up by anyone, with no real link back to d4d™, other than user-name etc.
During 2005 I’m going to be seeking out some commercial opportunities and outlets for some of my photos. I’ve got some ideas already, and there’ll be more things happening. I just don’t want there to be any issues where anything I submit has been publicly available elsewhere previously. In some ways d4d™ suffers slightly for that – for instance this weekend there were a couple of photos that worked beautifully, but because I intend to see what I can do with them commercially,I’m not putting them here. There’s a balance to be drawn somewhere in all that, and I’m still working on managing to draw it.
So – I may try out Flickr, and indeed I’ve sorted myself out an account. But where I’ll use it, or what for, I don’t yet know. We’ll see. In the meantime though I’ll keep using the photos page on d4d™ for some, and this page for others.
Time will tell.
Flickr includes Creative Commons licensing options so you could always use that. And as for people coming to D4D to get your photos, you forget about the power of Google
As for re-using your own photos, as they are yours isn’t that your right? You could use Flickr to host low resolution/compressed versions which will never match up in quality to the “pro” versions??
Ohh and I warn you now, once you ‘get’ Flickr, you’ll be hooked. It’s that good.
Hmm, very true, re. Google’s search. However, it’s also worth pointing out that Google is disallowed from my photos directory, so there’s still that point which is valid.
As for low-res/compressed versions, that’s kind of what I do with hosting it on d4d™ in the first place – like it says above, they rarely go above 800×600 – try getting an A3 or A2 print from that! *grin*
When it comes to re-using photos, yes, in a lot of ways it is my right. However, when it comes to certain things, the agencies/companies have it as a standard condition that the images haven’t been made publicly available prior to them using the images.
It’s all random thoughts really, but I’d rather be safe than sorry!
Interesting thoughts. I’ve also worried about the issue of people using my photos without credit — if they never contact me, what are the chances of me noticing that some random website or magazine has nicked an image of mine? But that goes for wherever I choose to display them, whether on my site or on Flickr. So long as you never upload the full-resolution version (or retain the raw version), then you can always eventually prove that an image is your own. And Flickr is more explicit than I can ever bother to be about copyright: there’s a clear “All Rights Reserved” (or whichever CC licence you’ve opted for) notice on each and every photo’s individual page, and you can control who gets to download/view the higher-resolution versions (“family”/”friends”/everybody). But I didn’t know about this condition that some agengies have about the images never appearing elsewhere, that’s a fair point, but not really the issue if you are already posting images here. Flickr is just another way to get yourself noticed, rather than relying on visitors to d4d, some of whom wouldn’t necessarily be coming here explicitly for your photography.
Ahem, that’s “agencies”, not “agengies”. Obviously. 🙂
The group commenting feature of flickr I like, but the nasty Flash just to see an image is gross.
“nasty Flash”???
Come come, whilst it can and is abused I think Flickr is a perfect example of some very very clever usage of Flash and it’s much more in line with what the original idea behind Flash and Shockwave set out to achieve – to provide a content-rich format for the web.
I love flickr but only use it for my favourite photos. Makes me look like a better photographer that way too 🙂
I’ve recently started using flickr. I’m generally not a fan of third-party web services as they limit your control such a lot, and they rarely do everything you want, in exactly the way you want.
However, flickr doesn’t fall into this category! It really is good, and the way you can limit photos to friends and/or family is brilliant. Several friends and my bro are getting married this year, so it will be a brilliant place to dump and share photos from all the guests. And you can create private group albums, where members can all submit photos too, so this will be perfect for ‘the best’ snaps from each event!
I love flickr and put ALL my photos on it. This makes me look like a terrible photographer. I don’t care, it’s my new photo album.