Stick all your photos on flickr, crazy?

[Avotius]

I was picking through my photos today and had a maybe very stupid thought. I have thousands and thousands of photos that I have taken here in China. Stuff that most of you will never ever get to see because its all been torn down, and also because they sit on my hard drives and no one sees them.

So I had a crazy idea.

What if I made resized versions of them, say 500 pixles on the long side, no editing, just weeding out the obvious one, and then just stick it all on flickr for people to look at. All the nitty gritty, mostly direct scans and the sort from the last 7 years that I have wandered around the country with camera and film in hand.

Crazy? Maybe.

A lot of people bug me about making a book, I never get around to it because of work and stuff. I do have enough here to do a book, and if I ever got down to it I doubt a publisher would be very happy to see I let everyone have the milk for free already.

Thoughts?

 

[kbg32]

I know a lot of people will have different thoughts about this, but you've done work. The work is meant to be seen, especially since your thoughts are on doing a book. There is nothing wrong with posting them, low res, on Flickr. You might get some interesting feedback and some ideas on what to do next. It's also a place, other than a personal website, to point people to see your work.

I've had some interesting things happen form posting work. You never know what can happen!

 

[Sparrow]

... many others on flickr seem to do just that, so, why not?

 

[dexdog]

I like the idea a lot. I was reading an article online yesterday about the destruction of the home of one of China's leading architects in one Beijing's hutongs. It seems that the kind of stuff that you have a record of would be interesting, given that it appears to be disappearing at a rapid pace- as you state, a person traveling today would not be able to see these sites because they are gone. Perhaps a few images of what was built in place of the vanished locales could be inserted as a counterpoint...

 

[dreilly]

I don't think it's crazy at all. I use flickr as my secondary backup since it's a lot cheaper than purchasing hard drives, so I upload full-res scans or digitally-generated images (just my "keepers".) Sure, I have download disabled but I'm not foolish enough to think that's trustworthy. But I have a bit more trust in their backup systems, however, and anything that threatens their warehouses of spinning disks is likely to be a much bigger worry than me losing a few photographs. The cost for a pro account is very modest and I like the flickr UI far better than any other image hosting site I've tried (smugmug, etc).

With what you have in mind, there is no real down side. As you said, the work is meant to be shown. The only thing I might caution is that you at least do a single run cull of them to weed out multiple takes of the same thing, etc. Sometimes in that respect, less is more. But otherwise go for it. I'll look at them!

 

[gb hill]

Flickr is a good start to post your images. You can tie them in to your FB account if you & your friends are on facebook. Why don't you post some of them here in the RFF Gallery?

 

[mackigator]

Not crazy

Not crazy

Definitely not crazy, but you should consider the goal. What is it?

I'd do at least a light edit to cut down the total number of photos; no reason to do a straight dump of all photos imho.

If you want people to buy a future book, or to hire or buy your other works, I suggest uploading the lo-res versions to Flickr and keyword tagging them with some care. Then drop a link to your other URL - the one for the book or your main photography site - in the description of each photo. Next to the link, write a sentence about how to use the image legally, stating that your photo must be attributed to you with a link to the URL.

Then mark each lo-res photo as creative commons, commercial use allowed, attribution required. Some will use the photos without contacting you, using the description of the photo to create the attribution. When contacted for an attribution, make sure it always includes a link.

In this way your China trip will slowly build inbound links and influence to your other site without intervention on your part, as one at a time the images get used and links go live to your target site.

The tagging of the images is important for making them searchable, thus leading people into your system.

You can periodically give the system a tune up by searching for your images with Google image search and Tin Eye to check on the attributions.

 

[Avotius]

For sure I would do a basic cull to get rid of double and whatnot. But otherwise the goal in mind it to let other people see the photos, keepers and otherwise. At least that is the initial though. I have been pondering this for all of 30 minutes and am developing the idea still.

 

[mdarnton]

Great idea, and I'd love to see them, but please consider a slightly higher resolution. As computer screens get bigger and bigger, with higher resolution, I see photos getting smaller and smaller, to the point where they're hardly worth looking at. I'm on a fancy Mac right now, and went to check 500p at Flickr. IMO it's too small to be interesting, on this computer.

I was a news photographer, and saw a zillion of my pix in print, and it's no longer exciting to me to think that someone may be using a stolen photo of mine on some obscure website, so I put my photos up larger so people who want to really look into them can. If you're worried about your pictures getting around w/o permission, you might want to do otherwise.

 

[bwcolor]

I store every edited TIFF (local) as a full size JPG on Flickr, but I keep 99.9% private. I figure that when the house burns down, I'll at least have full size JPG.

 

[Mablo]

Just keep in mind that you need a Pro license for Flickr for unlimited storage. The annual cost is $20. Not too much IMO.

 

[mdarnton]

I store every edited TIFF (local) as a full size JPG on Flickr, but I keep 99.9% private. I figure that when the house burns down, I'll at least have full size JPG.

Same here--it's cheap back-up, well worth the $20.

 

[axiom]

If you downsize it that much, Google Plus is free for unlimited # of pix.

 

[nightfly]

Easy to this in Lightroom with the built in publish to Flickr thing.

Flickr is not a bad option.

 

[ColSebastianMoran]

I like the Flickr option for showing your work. May I suggest 700 px wide. I get frustrated at smaller images where I can't see enough.

I don't like it as a serious backup option. To ultimate downside risk, I keep a reasonably up to date hard drive in a safe deposit box. Cloud storage is great for continuous backup of current files.

 

[swoop]

It's doable. I'd check with the rights agreement of flickr first though. Wouldn't want your photos ending up somewhere without permission.

 

[Sureño]

do it, if you dont care about your photos' copyright.

 

[Araakii]

I would do some editing because no one would have the time and energy to plow through thousands of images in one single stream. But it's definitely a good idea.