Flickr Popularity

I want to get people to look at my pictures (isn’t that the point of a photo sharing community?), especially the ones that are quality photos, not just snapshots. Our photostream has been viewed over 6,000 times, and we’ve got one photo with over 700 views. But with the hundreds of thousands of flickr members out there, those numbers are just a drop in the bucket. In my search to become more popular (on flickr), I’ve made a rather obvious discovery: The more places people can access your photos from, the more people will access your photos.

Lately I’ve been keeping tabs on a new feature called interestingness. I’ve noticed that the most “interesting” pictures have loads of comments, sometimes have lotsa notes on them and usually belong to several dozen groups. My first thought was, “How did this picture get this many comments after just being uploaded this morning.” My second thought was, “Duh, the picture is in about 30 groups, so thousands of people are looking at it as soon as it is posted.” My third thought, “Why am I not doing the same thing?”

Things I’ve decided:

1) I’m now seeking highly specialized groups with large numbers of members to post my pictures in. For example, there is a group with more than 250 members dedicated to pictures that contain an animal yawning. Perfect. I’ve got three pictures of Mambo and Samba yawning. Less than 5 hours after joining that group, the photos had been favorited 6 times, with 7 comments total.

2) If you have 40 pictures that fit into a certain group, you shouldn’t add them all at the same time. Add one or two at a time. Each time you add a picture it goes to the top of the group photo pool, pushing the next most recent photos down. If you space out your additions of photos to a group, the better your chances are of people actually viewing them.

3) Tags are your friend. The more tags a picture has, the better the odds that the picture will actually get a hit from a search. The new clustering feature also seems to benefit from multiple taggings on a picture.

4) Notes make a picture more “interesting.” Case and point, someone took a screenshot of their OS X dashboard with about 30 or so widgets crowding the screen. Then they labeled each widget with a note. This picture made the top 50 most “interesting” pictures on flickr on August 3rd, without having many comments, views, or favorites. Also, I added two notes to the picture below, and it immediately jumped from our 6th most “interesting” picture to the 4th (it now happens to be the 2nd most “interesting” picture in our photostream).

Moral:

Don’t try to do this to all of your pictures. Select a few of your favorites, or pictures that you just want to show off. Once you have the picture, start adding notes, tag it like crazy and add it to as many groups as you can. In the near future, I plan to select a few more pictures, and go over the top with the above four items, just to see what happens. I’ll keep you posted to let you know how it goes.

Finally, if you don’t know what flickr is, or haven’t tried it yet, get on over there right now, and set up a free account. If you like looking at stuff and things, you’ll thank me.