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Photojournalists on Flickr: the pros and the cons

Posted: 07/01/09 By: Laura Oliver

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Personal websites, blogs, and content-sharing sites like Flickr offer the chance for journalists and photographers to share what they produce while potentially making some money.

Content producers now have initiatives like Creative Commons to help them better manage their rights online, but do the copyright issues of using such sites outweigh the benefits?

Journalism.co.uk caught up with Pete Jenkins, a photojournalist who has been experimenting Flickr, to talk about the pros and cons.

When did you start using Flickr and why?
[PJ] As part of my ongoing marketing experiments and with a view to testing out the potential of Flickr, I uploaded some 70 images in early May 2007.

The purpose of doing this was purely to test out whether Flickr would be any use to me as a professional photojournalist. I selected images from my 'Detail Nottingham' collection. Some were fairly typical Nottingham pics, but others were fairly exclusive and unique.

To be honest I expected nothing from Flickr, nothing at all, other than the occasional request to use (publish) my images for free.

What has your experience been and have you made money/gained positive exposure from using Flickr in this way?
I have had far fewer follow-ups than I expected. There have been a few requests to use pics for free, each of which has been treated on its merit and on each occasion refused.

There have been the same number of genuine professional requests and each of these was followed up, contract supplied and images supplied and paid for, including one book cover, all at my own preferred professional rates.

There have been a few requests to include this or that image within other online Flickr collections, I have acceded to most of these, but none seem to have generated much professional interest.

I have certainly made money, and more than enough to justify my initial efforts. I have not followed these up yet but intend to do so this spring (or earlier) as part of my expansion of my Nottingham project.

As to how much useful exposure I have obtained, it's difficult to say, but not as much as one might have thought bearing in mind how popular Flickr is meant to be. My own websites are far more successful in marketing.

Would you recommend the service to other photographers? What guidelines would you suggest to them before publishing their images on the site?
I certainly would not say that Flickr is a waste of time, but I would say that like all marketing efforts it is only as good as the effort one puts in.

One also needs to be sure that one is targeting the right sort of market with the right images.

Without question I would never, ever put images on Flickr without heavy watermarking; and I would equally never ever indulge in the so-called Creative Commons licensing. If someone wants to use my photos then they can ask me for a conventional licence and I will supply it and charge on merit.

As a side issue, on the one hand I have gained more per picture in one year on Flickr than I have with Alamy (I have 8,000 images on the Alamy portal), but I believe that it would be a different result if I had 8,000 images on Flickr.

Flickr is not the great new hope that so many say it is, but at the same time there is no question that Flickr can be a useful part of any editorial photographer's marketing strategy.

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freelance | photography | flickr | pete jenkins |

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