I’ve spent a long time trying to work out why photographers would post their work on Flickr, as opposed to say, a blog or a personal website – paricularly a blog, as blogs are so easy to set up and start using, even if you have no technical or HTML coding knowledge. But I recently gave Flickr a try, just to see what I was missing. There’s no question – Flickr has a great user interface and it displays photographs beautifully. But beyond that, what does it actually offer?
My initial hope was that the power of the massive Flickr site would give my pics a quick and prominent presence on the search engines. I planned to add lots of text into the photos’ descriptions – writing them almost like small blog posts, to comply with good SEO (search engine optimisation) practice. I’d then add links to the text, pointing visitors to related posts on my own sites. The additional hits delivered to my own sites via these links was what I hoped would be my 'payback' for using Flickr.
However, on Google, in comparison with photos I’m posting to established blogs, the performance of my Flickr pics has so far been poor. Indexing to Image Search has been slow – taking around ten days (much longer than WordPress, which can get my photos onto Image Search the day after posting). And given that the individual subjects of my pics are not that widely covered online, the visibility of my Flickr posts on Image Search hasn’t been that great either.
What happened when I posted a photo on Flickr, provided I tagged it well that is, was that it got hits from within the Flickr community for two or three days, and then the hits died a complete death until the photo was indexed on Image Search. After that, the hits depended on the precise subject, and how well it ranked on Google. I should say that I didn’t enter into the ‘networking’ side of Flickr. I don't like that idea of going round pretending to be interested in other people’s work, and I haven’t really got time to do it. Also, I don’t want to feel obligated to respond to any comments (and I feel it’s kind of rude not to respond if you have a small, new account), so I disabled commenting. How much that hindered things I don’t know, but I am comparing like for like, because I don’t network or have commenting enabled on any of my blogs either. What I can confirm is that blogs I established last year are able to get my photos into higher positions on Google Image Search than Flickr has. I’ve been able to compare like for like on precise subject matter too (though not the same photos, obviously), so the result seems pretty conclusive.
So to return to the notion I had before starting my trial, there are things a blog can do for me that Flickr can’t, such as allowing me to monetise my content, allowing me to tailor the look of my pages to my own preferences, giving me free access to full and comprehensive stats, etc. What, exactly, can Flickr do that a free blog can’t?
FLICKR'S MAIN ADVANTAGES COMPARED WITH A PHOTO BLOG
Well, Flickr is undeniably superior when it comes to image display. The sharpness of the photos whether displayed at full or reduced size is superb, and I can’t fault the general clarity and vitality. That certainly can’t be said for the free WordPress blogging platform. WP’s sharpness on image display when sizes are reduced is truly woeful. For a visitor who doesn’t know how sharp the original image is, there’s not a great problem. It’s not like the photos are really blurred. But they do lose their sharpness very noticeably, and if you’re a photographer I’m convinced you won’t be very happy with it. In fact, on WordPress.com, some photographers take the step of uploading two versions of every image. One for full-screen viewing and download, and the other pre-reduced in size for displaying within a post. I’ve done this myself and it does circumvent the problem, but what an unnecessary hassle! You do wonder why an organisation with the resources of WordPress can’t sort out such a simple issue, and give millions of bloggers either better display quality, or an easier life. Google’s Blogger platform displays images much more sharply than WordPress at reduced size. Mind you, that’s hardly difficult, and the quality still isn’t as dazzlingly impressive as with Flickr.
The second thing Flickr does which the free blogs don’t is that it gets surfers off Google Image Search (UPDATE: since 25th Jan 2013 when Google modified Image Search, no longer the case). This is a much bigger plus than a lot of users realise. If you have a free blog, and someone finds one of your photos on Google Image Search, they can click on that photo and then download it, without visiting your blog. The photo click does register as a visit in itself, but it’s kind of a fake visit, because a) all the web surfer has done is viewed the image and maybe downloaded it, and b) they’re still on Google Image Search and in many cases will just continue browsing Google. They never get to find out what else your blog or site has to offer.
This can be quite dispiriting if you’re a blogger who does post a lot of good, original image content. It can look from your blog stats as if, say, 150 or 200 people have landed on the blog and then simply vacated it straight away without further exploration. And if you’ve put a lot of effort into your blog page design, offering related content, etc, you can start to wonder what on earth you have to do to attract vistors’ attention. But the reality is that those 150 or 200 surfers coming in via Image Search may not even have visited your blog page(s). They may just have clicked an image on Google, viewed or downloaded it, and remained on Google. If they're not even getting onto your blog, it doesn't matter what you do with the design - it's all for nothing.
Flickr combats this problem with what looks like a Javascript routine executed as soon as Image Search tries to load a clicked image for viewing on Google. The routine automatically transfers the web surfer straight off Google Images, and onto the photographer’s Flickr page. From there, the visitor can see any text relating to the image, along with other thumbails from the same photographer’s photostream. This is much, much better for the photographer, because he or she does always at least have some chance of capturing a web surfer’s interest beyond the one photo that surfer clicked.
Incidentally, I tried disabling Javascript in my browser, and my Flickr pics wouldn’t load on Image Search at all. Whether the script is active may depend on the copyright selection the photographer makes (I’m guessing that officially, Flickr uses the script as a copyright infringement prevention measure above all - although it's a futile measure if someone really wants to steal a photo). But if you select ‘All Rights Reserved’, Flickr will definitely get your visitors off Google Image Search for you, and that’s a big positive. If a particular blog of mine did that I'm sure I’d double my page visits overnight – at least!
And finally, in the long term, Flickr allows a higher quantity of photo uploads than the free blogs. Google's Blogger provides 1GB image storage per free account, full stop. WordPress provides 3GB image storage per free blog (that's per blog, not per account - if you have ten free WP blogs, you get 30GB in total). Flickr, however, provides 300MB per month to free users. That's 3.6GB per year. That easily beats Blogger in less than four months, and it beats a single WP blog in less than a year. It doesn't beat multiple WordPress blogs for a very long time, but in terms of convenience, and having everything in one place, Flickr's current free storage capacity system is the most attractive proposition for me.
NEUTRALS
Those are Flickr's definitive advantages. Unfortunately, however, there are also some disadvantages. Before I get to those, though, there's a quick neutral point... Flickr doesn’t over-advertise on free accounts. It’s nothing like the horrific Photobucket for ad spam. But I’m comparing Flickr with the free blogs here, not the image hosts, and Google’s Blogger doesn’t place any ads at all either for users or visitors – unless the user places the ads him/herself, in which case he/she will get a cut of the revenue. WordPress does show ads to those not logged in, but not to those who are logged in. Flickr shows ads to those who are logged in, but not to those who aren't. It depends which of those options you prefer as a user. Would you rather see the ads yourself, or have your visitors see them?… Or use Blogger, which is completely ad-free by default?... Anyway, moving onto Flickr's disadvantages...
FLICKR'S MAIN DISADVANTAGES COMPARED WITH A PHOTO BLOG
Firstly, your Flickr account has to be ‘approved’ by staff before it clears for indexing with the search engines and Flickr’s internal browse function. So you can’t sign up today, post some images, and expect anyone to find them immediately. Subjecting all new accounts to staff approval is probably a good deterrent for those just intending to abuse the site, but it does make you, the photographer, feel a bit like you’re back at school. I don’t know how long it took to approve my account because I set it up in June, and when it hadn’t been approved after a few days I just forgot about it. Then when I logged back into the account in the autumn it had been approved.
Secondly, unless you pay for a Pro Flickr account, you don’t get a visitor stats chart. Free blogs such as Blogger and WordPress provide comprehensive visit and referral statistics.
Thirdly, Flickr’s backlinks are ‘nofollow’. If you know a little about search engine optimisation you’ll probably regard this as a negative. It means that if you link to one of your other blogs or sites from Flickr, Flickr will tell the search engines not to follow those links. When visitors click the links they still transfer to the linked page as normal, so the ‘nofollow’ property doesn’t in any way hinder the function of the link as a hyperlnk. Only the search crawlers and auto routines are instructed not to follow the links. It’s generally perceived, however, that search engines don’t award ‘nofollow’ links the same significance as ‘dofollow’ links when it comes to calculating the relevance and status of the site you've linked to. In short, if your own site or blog had 100 ‘dofollow’ links pointing to it, then with everything else equal it would be expected to have a higher search status than if it had 100 ‘nofollow’ links pointing to it. Flickr’s use as a search engine optimisation tool would therefore appear limited – certainly directly, if not indirectly. This is not the case with free blogs.
Now we get onto the more serious stuff… Unfortunately, masses of auto-post and spam sites scrape Flickr. ‘Scraping’, for those who are unaware, is automatically trawling the Internet for content and re-posting it, with no regard for copyright, on what’s normally known as a ‘spam site’ – typically in very high volume. These spam sites make money out of photographers’ work, by simply adding Flickr photos, automatically imported from Flickr in bulk, to their pages - and then directly or indirectly monetising the pages. It doesn’t matter what restrictions the photographer has placed on his/her work – the routines used by these sites can circumvent Flickr’s ‘protections’, get hold of it, and use it. Obviously in theory the photographer could issue takedown notices to any sites which infringe copyright, but frankly this is so widespread a practice that for some, issuing takedown notices to every offender would be impractical, if not impossible. Certain photographers might even spend more time doing that than posting the actual content. From what I’ve seen, most of the spam sites do link back to Flickr (hence Flickr itself not giving a stuff – presumably), but they’re still infringing copyright in displaying photos with an All Rights Reserved licence.
Tumblr has been cited as another notable relentless poacher of content from Flickr, as has Pinterest. I don’t generally post the kind of pics that would appeal to the average Tumblr user so I can’t speak from experience on that, but I can say that anything I’ve found featuring my blog content on Pinterest has linked back to my original pages. I'm okay with Pinterest as long as I am getting the links, but some photographers are not, and it's their right to control the spread of their copyrighted work. I usually write a lot of accompanying text for my photos, so there’s probably more often an incentive for people to link back to the actual articles. For those who only post photos, I’d imagine it’s quite a bit harder and people will be more tempted to straightforwardly ‘steal’ the images – re-posting without attribution.
To rub salt into the Flickr user’s wounds, the mechanical spam sites can often get their content indexed more quickly than Flickr. I found two photos I’d uploaded to Flickr indexed on Google with three separate spam sites, but not through my actual Flickr stream. Therefore, searching for the subject matter of those pics on Google would take a web surfer to one of the spam sites, and not to my Flickr account. I do the work, invisible parasites get the reward. That’s not specifically a problem with Flickr – Flickr’s clearly become a victim of its own size, and its reputation for usable photographs. But the fact still remains that if you post your photos on Flickr, you do put them at overwhelmingly high risk of being auto-blagged by the scum of the Internet and used to attract visitors to spam-, and possibly even scam-sites.
This isn’t as big a problem with a blog (although it is still a problem), because typically, the wider world doesn’t really know the blog exists until it’s reasonably well established and performing well enough on the search engines to outrank the content re-posted from it onto other sites. It's also the case that you can protect a free blog against content theft by pasting DMCA code onto its pages. You can't do that with Flickr. And if you truncate your blog feed, the majority of scrapers tend not to be so interested in the first place. They’re not getting the whole post via RSS and they don’t really know what your format is in advance, so truncated blog content is more difficult to automatically re-post. Plus, scrapers don’t really know by definition which blogs are photo blogs and which just contain a load of criminally-verbose, pseudo-Shakespearean ramblings. Flickr’s much simpler for them. They know the format, they know there’ll always be photos, and because Flickr staff vet the accounts, those photos will normally be original, properly categorised, family-friendly where specified, and relatively usable. It’s a scrapers’ paradise.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, I can’t deny Flickr makes a beautiful job of showing off great photos, but there just doesn’t seem to be enough in it for the photographer, and for me, the disadvantages still outweigh the advantages. It’s like Flickr doesn’t really consider what a photographer might be looking for, other than to show off their work and get verbal praise for it – which, as anyone who understands social networking will know, is in no way guaranteed to be genuine praise. For me, what tips the balance in favour of blogs more than anything else is the very high susceptibility of Flickr to content theft. It’s just really, really demotivating when you work hard producing something of value, then you offer it free to the world, and some bunch of useless, pointless parasites come along, take it without asking, monetise it, and sit there laughing their heads off because some crowd of losers was stupid enough to provide them with virtually limitless numbers of good photos for free. Given that Flickr doesn’t offer any direct means for the photographer to be compensated for his/her work, watching that happen over and over again could get extremely soul-destroying for the photographer I’m sure.
I should stress here that whilst free WordPress blogs cannot be monetised by the user, they can be converted to monetisable blogs. So if you built up a really happening site on WordPress, you could commercialise it – subject to terms and approval. That’s not possible on Flickr. Google’s Blogger blogs can be monetised for free, and free Tumblr blogs can be monetised without any outlay too – once again provided the sites and content comply with the terms of the advertising service.
So, to sum up Flickr?... It's great if you want to look at photos, or if you want to source Creative Commons-licenced photos to post legitimately for free on a blog or site, or, tragically, if you just want to steal photos for your own gain. Flickr really does seem to offer the best deal for everyone… except the photographer.
I don’t know if I’ll be adding any more photos to my Flickr account. I’ve stopped doing so for now so I can see what happens in the longer term with the stuff I have posted. Any surprises, and I’ll come back with an update.
