I recently needed a platform where I could keep track of all my published photography, so I opened a new Flickr account – and hello, I discovered that Flickr is actually an amazing tool for your photography business (if you treat it like a tool, not a social media platform).

Of course, years ago I had a Flickr account – I didn’t use it much and it languished in oblivion until at some point Flickr deleted it.

But now that Smug Mug has taken over control of Flickr, the future is looking much brighter for the platform and after re-discovering Flickr, here is why I think you should still post your photos to Flickr…

Don’t Think of Flickr As Social Media

When it comes to photography inspiration and posting my own work, I always preferred 500px (and still do). But then 500px imposed a seven images per week limit on free accounts – which essentially crippled how I use their service.

So I switched over to Flickr – and I have been very pleasantly surprised with how awesome it is – as long as you just don’t think of it as a social media network!

Flickr Features

Flicker offers free account users 1TB of storage space with unlimited uploads – plenty of space if you’re just posting screen resolution jpgs exported from Lightroom, that will go a long way (more than a million anyway).

Flickr also automatically adds your camera exif data, and any Lightroom keywording, title, caption, contact and copyright information you may have added (no need to manually tag your photos in Flickr).

My favorite Flickr feature is the ability to set the copyright license that applies to your work – anywhere from full copyright (all rights reserved) to public domain dedication (creative commons zero – CC0 – I’m not sure why anyone would use full public domain).

This is a really useful feature if you want to distribute your work with a creative commons license – you just set the copyright permission in Flickr and it will automatically be indexed as creative commons by the search engines.

There is no news yet about how Smug Mug plans to integrate the current Flickr account features – but for now they have promised to maintain the current account features and structure.

How I Use Flickr For My Photography Business

Working with a copyright protection service like Pixsy, I often need to know when an image was originally created, and where and when it was first published online. This used to be a hassle of searching through my Lightroom catalog and my various social media networks.

Now, I primarily use Flickr to solve those two problems.

Here is my current Flickr workflow:

First I export my finished photography directly from Lightroom with an invisible digital watermark using the Signili invisible watermark Lightroom plugin (I export to jpeg at 2500px on the long edge at 70% with seems to give decent results for most screens with a reasonable file size).

Then I upload the watermarked images directly to my Flickr account.

I have the default copyright settings set to full copyright, but for “B” level images that I don’t mind sharing, I occasionally set the copyright to Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives so that people could use my work for their personal blogs.

I organize the images in Flickr into albums that match my Lightroom collections.

Now by browsing my Flickr account I have a record of the date the original photo was captured, the date it was originally published online (to Flickr as the initial publication) and all relevant exif data including my studio contact information, creator name and the original copyright information from Lightroom.

I also need a record of where my images are subsequently published to my various other social media accounts.

To do that, I use IFTTT applets to grab any image that I publish to any of my social media networks and automatically upload copies to Flickr, along with the publication date and the social media network and URL where the image was published.

This gives me a complete record of every instance where an image has been published online and drastically streamlines the task of putting together infringement claims.

It’s also nice to have a complete ongoing record of all my work in one place – and Flickr is way more useful and easy to use than I was expecting!

Warning – Set Download Permissions!

Besides setting your default copyright permissions, one other setting that is critical to set is download permissions.

By default, Flickr allows users to download your images – including the original image files that you’ve uploaded. If you don’t want to provide a download to your original files, it’s probably best to turn this setting off!

In practice, this feature is widely abused by bots to scrape content which is then re-uploaded to offshore accounts and re-distributed, but it’s nice to have if you are sharing your work with a creative commons license.

The Future of Flickr

Now that Smug Mug has purchased Flickr and taken over control, the future of Flickr looks brighter than is has since maybe 2005 when it was originally purchased by Yahoo – and then subsequently left to whither and die.

It’s nice to have such an established photo sharing service on the road back to relevance – because it really is still a great platform for professional photographers.

The post Is Flickr Still A Relevant Social Media Outlet? Yes – and You Should Use It! appeared first on DIY Photography.

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