photo 27 Jan 2007 12:04 pm
My Current Thoughts on Flickr
I talked a lot about Flickr in my DeVotchKa post a few weeks ago, but my thoughts about it have developed some since then. I still really like Flickr, but I’m not as enamored with it as I was before. I think Flickr really deserves some credit for getting me really interested in photography again. Getting positive feedback from strangers and seeing your ‘viewed’ and ‘favorited’ numbers go up is a big confidence booster. But, as with most metrics, those numbers can be gamed. It’s easy to fall into that trap, especially with the analytical programmer part of my brain. There are a lot of groups that are geared towards getting more views, comments, and favorites. Look at all these 1-2-3 groups. The idea is that you post 1, you comment on 2, and you view 3 pictures in the pool. This blatant gaming of the system just seems ridiculous to me. Yes, I understand the desire, but doesn’t it feel like cheating to the participants?
The other thing that I initially thought was cool was critique groups. I’m still learning a lot and getting critiques from others seems important. I take a fair number of live music photographs, so I joined a group wherein you post pictures and rate other pictures in the pool. Then your pictures get rated. After doing this once, I realized how odd it is. First of all, who are these people rating your photographs? If you’re in school and a teacher is rating your photographs, you will at least know them well enough to know whether or not you respect their opinion. With people rating you on Flickr, you don’t know hardly anything about them. You can see some of their pictures, but that’s about it. Secondly, I don’t care what most people think about my photographs. I’m reminded of this post on The Online Photographer. In it, he takes famous pictures and posts mock critiques of them. A good quote from the comments:
That said, I agree with one of the posters who concluded that if you value your photographic tastes and skills, you shouldn’t post your photographs for a critique on an on-line forum. After all, great pictures sometimes come from totally unknown photographers (and great photographers sometimes are ashamed to show some of their works).
It’s a large service, though, large enough to accomodate all types. It’s just that the types that are good at gaming numbers are going to be more popular. Well, that and pictures of girls. Those always get a lot of hits.