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:

Artists's Wonderful Tool - Flickr.com

I just finished migrating my portfolio module created by JAlbum to that hosted on Flickr.com. Flickr.com is a great tool for artists to market their works - the Flickr generated photostream or the sets can be stand-alone website for artists to promote, or can be part of a more complete and traditional website (e.g. matthewfelixsun.com).

The Flickr.com is intuitive and easy to upload, update, maintain and backup, though backup can be a little tricky. Flickr.com currently doesn't directly support any backup tool but one can find third party software to back up not only photos (in sets), also the Titles, Descriptions and Tags (keywords) embedded, therefore, you won't lose your hours of works. You can also transport those images with descriptions (Meta data) to different locations (web site hosts). If one wishes, one can enter all these data (i.e. via Photoshop) to the jpg files before they upload the files to Flickr. I have tested a few above mentioned software and for batch back up, I use the FlickrEdit (Java version) best. If one has professional account, the original sized images would be downloaded versus medium sized files. One can download it from Sunkencity.org. FlickrEdit can batch upload as well, but I haven't tried it. I found uploading from Flickr.com directly would work just fine. Mac users can also directly upload tagged files from iPhoto directly, after one download a plug-in FFXporter. Flickr.com also provide an uploading Flickr Uploadr. According to it's site, "the new Flickr Uploadr has been built from scratch to work on Windows and Mac OSX. Before you upload you can add titles, tags and descriptions, add stuff to sets and reorder things directly in the Uploadr. This is an open source project, too, so you can download it and have a look at how it works."

The overall collection is called photostream and next level is collections and sets. I skipped collections and utilized sets directly.

From my sets, one can drill down to see, say, my Figure sets:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfelixsun/sets/72157622064751614/
Portrait Set:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfelixsun/sets/72157622064845936/
Landscape Set:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfelixsun/sets/72157622064732028/

You can also view the works as slideshows, e.g. my Apocalypse Series set as slideshow:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfelixsun/sets/72157621953636947/show/

Flickr.com is fully searchable. For example, one can fine my work done in 2006 or 2009:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfelixsun/tags/2006/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfelixsun/tags/2009/

One can find my published work:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfelixsun/tags/published/
or Published and Juried Exhibition - Competition (utilizing advanced search feature)
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=39651478@N05&q=juriedexhibition+OR+published&m=tags

Artists can join many groups which will enable the artists to reach broader audience.

For professional accounts ($24.99/year at this moment), one can monitor the stats of one's collections, and adjust marketing plans accordingly.

It is convenient and fun. I'm glad that I made the switch.