Tips for Getting the Most out of Flickr
Fig 1.1 – An example of an"interesting" photo on Flickr.
If you read my last post then you know that I got 50 (now it’s over 60) people to submit to Pendulum Journal in three days just by making a Flickr group. However, I had an advantage in getting things to go that quickly. Since I’ve been a Flickr user for a little under a year, I had some previous knowledge of how Flickr works. Here are my tips on how to get the best photos the fastest:
How I Harnessed Flickr to Get Mad Submissions
When Professor Emerson told us we had a little over a month to get enough submissions to fill up the inaugural issue of our online literary journal, I was a bit overwhelmed. The online literary journals we’ve looked at in class, like Blackbird and Drunken Boat, have around 30 to 50 works per issue. And since it’s very unlikely that they elected to showcase every submission they received for the issue, it’s likely they had around 60 to 100 individual submissions. Now where were we, an unknown student inaugural journal, going to find 100 people to submit their photos, art, sculptures and film to us?
The answer turned out to be Flickr, an image and video hosting site that serves as a networking community for photographers. Anyone can set up a Flickr profile, from a Parisian fashion photographer who wants to host her portfolio to a mom in Illinois who wants to post pictures of her kids. In fact, even I have my own Flickr site, laureninspace, where I post pictures of my knitting, daily outfits, and anime conventions I attend. Overall, millions of users host more than three billion photos, according to Flickr’s latest figures.