2974 - Night Train


You may have been following my struggle with Flickr for some while, how I felt elated when an image got explored and how I never understood why particular images made it and others didn’t. Take for instance “2970 - Street Lights II”. I love that image, I’m ecstatic about it (well, almost 😄), I think it’s one of my best in a long while, but on Flickr it earned not even a shrug.

In a way that unpredictability took the fun out of Flickr. Images that I had hopes for just didn’t take off, and although I see a general rise in views, it feels … random. It’s nice when it’s happening, but whenever I feel like I’m working for it, the effect is negligible.

Well, you know how it is, there’s always the impression that the grass us greener across the fence, and therefore I created accounts at 500px.com and ipernity.com.

I started trying 500px and I liked it. There’s a lot of good material over there, people are welcoming and for a few days I put my image on both Flickr and 500px. And then it happened.

I did not care. I did not care about Flickr any more and I certainly had not started caring about 500px. That’s when I deleted the 500px account. I’m back to Flickr only and if there was one net effect of the whole episode, then it is that I care less about it and will spend less time creating other people’s content.

I started using Flickr, because when I switched from IMatch to Lightroom, putting images on Flickr became painless and without any effort I had another backup for my full-size images. I think this is a healthy state and I’d better keep it at that 🙂

The Song of the Day is “Night Train” by Lionel Richie. Hear it on YouTube.


There are 3 comments

John Linn   (2014-12-10)

I agree with everything you are saying and doing... Flickr is (nearly) automatically uploaded from Lightroom as back-up and I occasionally get an image noticed there. I get the feeling that some people watch the Flickr "What's New" feed and randomly pick images that are interesting, but their real motivation is to lure you to THEIR pictures so they can get noticed. Maybe I am wrong. It is OK though... having he backups is nice. I still have a few images on 500px too but not much action there either.

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Cedric Canard   (2014-12-12)

I've gone through a similar experience. I used to be extremely active on Flickr. I even administered some groups. Over the years I managed to befriend a group of people who made it worth while. But eventually some people left or became less active and that kind of created a chain reaction. I too tried 500px but didn't stay long. It seemed like far too much work to make a mark there. Same thing with RedBubble. These days, like John above, I use Flickr as storage but even with that I find my usage somewhat erratic. In fact these days I use the internet quite differently to what I used to. I only get on when I have something specific to do: search for something, shop, or catch up with the handful of blogs I follow. It's amazing how much time was freed up by no longer randomly "surfing" the net 🙂

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andreas   (2014-12-13)

Well, basically everybody is vying for attention. Investing too much in that game is a sure way to lose - time and nerves 🙂

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