Things to Consider Before You Join a Flickr Pool

Photographers and Designers need a social media website that would help their artwork visually targeted. Flickr has the powerful tool to bring a visual masterpiece uncovered to the millions of viewers. If you’re a photographer or a designer who blog, why not starting out a Flickr pool? It would be wonderful to include a bit of interactivity with your readers. Besides promoting goal, A Flickr pool is an excellent media, where you can discuss and learn from others.

I’ve already joined some of Flickr Pools which is Bittbox User Showcase and another design contest event called “What is Graphic Design?” held by Veerle’s Blog. After I’ve submitted some of my graphic designs into the group pools, I begin to have more amazing Flickr contacts, receiving comments and some Flickr members adding my designs to their favorite list. To me, Flickr is like a huge design reference collections where I can find inspirational works of visual art and meet the man behind those masterpieces.

Before we jump to the main topic, I also would like to let you know that I’ve started Graphic Identity Design Showcase pool. This is a group where you can showcase your graphic design after you adapting some of my Free Design Box items as part of your artwork. In the mean time, I’ve manually submitted some of graphics which are designed using one of my Photoshop Brushes series. They are actually a group of great deviants and I would love to see more in the future. You are always welcome to join this group and feel free to add your profile or blog URLs in the comment box!

Here are things to consider before you join a Flickr Pool:

1. Create a nice screen name url because you can direct people to your Flickr pages with it! Some of you probably don’t know that you can change your default Flickr profile, which is usually consist of ugly code and numbers by login to your Flickr account
The unique URL address you can use to show people your photos (and your Flickr profile) should be look like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourscreenname/
A nice screen name URL should be potentially easy to remember and to identify. Otherwise, you’ll be a forgotten by the group members.

2. If you think that your photos or graphics are sorts of valued assets, manage the usage rights under a “Creative Commons” license. Hence, everyone will need to pay attention to usage rights if they want to use your photo in a publication.

3. Batch system on Flickr allows us to set different content type of uploaded files (photos or graphics). Flickr has a sort of organizing options where you can set the content type of your graphics to "other - art, illustration, CGI, etc." and NOT as a photo as wanted by the Flickr guidelines. If you already uploaded it you can change it under the organize menu and go to the poster (choose recent uploads), double click the thumb of the image and in the popup window choose filter and select "other - art, illustration, CGI, etc." I believe this system correlates a lot to Flickr photostream search

4. Watermark your photos with your blog URL or anything that would relate to your profile. I’m doing this from the start, and actually a spruce idea to send more direct visits to your blog.

5. Tags your uploaded photos because tags make it easy for you to find your photos later on when you have tons and tons of photos. When you upload photos, there is a little box where you can enter Tags. There is also a space to enter tags on the right on each photo page and you can add tags when using Flickr Organizr.
Just type some words relevant to the picture, with spaces in between, like "sky park dog blue grass green".

6. Read Flickr Community Guidelines for further readings ;)


This article is a submission for Brian Auer at Epic Edits as a part of a larger group writing project being termed “The Social Media Mega Project”


Related Links:

• Top 10 Flickr Hacks
  
• Flickr Etiquette
  
• What is Graphic Design Poster Competition on Veerle's Blog