Artists Photo Sharing Online

I have talked about the benefit of using photo sharing sites like Flickr.com for artits. One can find out many useful information regarding how a particular image is received by the public. Flickr categorizes broadly regarding how the viewers come to the image. One can find out if people found the image through one's website, blog, image search engine or from Flickr itself. These can enable artists to adjust the tags or labels used, to align with the most commonly searched terms.

However, high viewership doesn't necessarily mean the success of the artwork. People might come to view the work for the purposes other than art appraisal.

Amongst my public images, the mostly viewed image is a female nude painting, which has just overtaken the top spot from a male nude painting. The third one is a flower painting and followed by more nudes, and flowers. A few days ago, I posted and blogged a photo of 5,000 naked people gathered together in front of Sydney Opera House posing for artist Spencer Tunick. Within minutes of the posting the picture online, it was viewed 12 times. Within an hour, the hit was more than 100. Within a day, it was viewed for more than 500 times. Artists should not be carried away by the high viewership and must try to understand the motives of viewers.

Below is the snap shot of my top ten most viewed images on 3 March, 2010: