Maximizing exposure on Flickr

[Bennybee]

Hi all,

I wonder what the best way is to maximize the number of views and 'faves' or comments on Flickr.
I don't have much experience yet on Flickr, and so far I have only uploaded some older images which I like very much (hopefully some newer pictures soon).
My procedure after uploading an image there is to add some relevant tags and to add the image to five or six groups I belong to (including our beloved Nelson group on Flickr). Feels like spamming though every time I upload five or six images and add these to the groups.
I do get several dozens of views per image and a couple of 'faves' on Flickr, but I wonder if there is a more effective way to use Flickr and become famous
A personal website would be nice to have, but I don't want to invest any money in that right now. Maybe there are other alternatives? For example, how does one maximize visibility on Facebook? Do you need to create a 'group' in order to make a sort of personal gallery?

[Captain Slack]

Best way I've found to get exposure on Flickr is to add your pics to as many groups as you can. Don't think you're spamming: that's what they're there for.

[PFMcFarland]

Another way is to go to whatever groups you belong to, sift through the photos, and mark up a bunch of Favorites. Folks will sometimes look to see who this stranger is Favoring their photo, then look through your Photostream and Albums. If you ever get a photo in Explore, then you can expect a huge increase in views for a day or two, plus many Follow requests. But fame can be fleeting, Benny.

PF

[Dustin McAmera]

If you really want views, photograph expensive exotic locations, with daft extreme wide-angle compositions; do a lot of HDR; oh, and photograph kittens. Tag all your pictures 'NSFW'.

More seriously, I do pretty much the same as you: I hate seeing pictures, even good ones, spread over dozens of groups; it suggests the person is just desperate for attention. I made myself a rule only to join one group for (say) the 6x4.5 format, one for Rodinal, etc., and mostly I stick to that, so I post my pictures in up to about half a dozen groups. I'm sure this reduces the number of views, but perhaps not the number of real people who really considered the picture. I try to choose well-moderated groups with a simple focus, with other members whose pictures I like to see, and not too much traffic; if a group gets a thousand posts a day, nobody browses it.

I remember feeling some disappointment when I first spotted that people use Flickr with strategy, just to get more views: even Flickr itself tells you not to get hung up on the numbers, but you can't control how other people use the site. Obviously I use a strategy too, but it's not aimed simply at views. Rather, I suppose I think there's a natural kind of viewer for my pictures, and I want those people to be able to find my pictures if they want to. So it's all about good tagging and putting the pictures in the right groups.

I don't fave, and I'm not too interested if people fave my pictures. I'm interested in comments though (comments more complicated than 'nice picture'): it takes a lot more thought to comment than just to press the fave button. When looking at other people's pictures, I'm not that impressed if people leave their pictures titled as an auto-generated digital filename, and I expect people to have a few words to say about their picture.

I think people who mark you as a contact are more likely to stay interested if you keep up a steady feed of a few pictures every day or two. I'm not very good at that; if I develop a roll of film, I'm likely to put it all up to Flickr in a couple of batches, followed by a long silence. If I put up (say) twenty pictures, my contacts probably only see the latest five featured on their home page, so only those get a lot of views.

For all my efforts at arty composition, my most-viewed pictures are ones I've linked to in discussions in camera fora, like this site, Camera-wiki.org, and photo.net. They're mostly pictures of old cameras, and pictures showing the result of trying something new in developing.

[PFMcFarland]

I only came up with the marking up Faves thing because I noticed my views going up the next day when I did that once, and the next couple of times also. It's not something I do on purpose to generate views. The numbers are interesting, but it just depends on what day of the week it is whether any one strategy will work or not. I got on Flickr as a depository for posting photos to forums, not for the social media stuff.

PF

[Bennybee]

Very interesting comments and good tips here. Thanks.
Yesterday I joined an additional number of groups on Flickr, as suggested above, but quickly realized that many of those get far too much daily uploads which indeed makes it difficult to get noticed there, as Dustin says.
I do tend to check out the pictures of the persons who faved some of my own. I'm not just trying to get a maximum number of views and faves, and I agree that it would be far more interesting to receive real comments.
The reason I got more active on Flickr recently and even joined Facebook (something I couldn't see the purpose of until now) is to get some exposure for my pictures. When I started with photography thirty odd years ago, one could find a cheap backstreet gallery, a café or a local community center to hang real pictures on the wall. But times have changed and nobody shows up there anymore, if those places even exist at all, and I hate to make pictures that never leave my hard disk.
I was particularly amazed by the following that David Helbich, a German guy living in Brussels, got with his series of pictures called "Belgian Solutions". It all started on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Belgiansolutions" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) and it resulted in a picture book. Many people now post their own 'Solutions' pictures on his blog. Agreed, many of those pictures are not of high standard photographically speaking... but the activity around the theme is surprising.
Right now I'm uploading old pictures, which I'm still very fond of and which were exposed in different places right after they were made. It is because I personally still think they are worth looking at and worth showing. The other reason for uploading these is that I hope to find a new elan to make more pictures in the same direction. And frankly, right now there is nothing else to show either