I am amazed at how resistant I am to trying new things! Specifically I am talking about using social media and the Internet. I believe in the Internet, I rely tremendously on technology, was a very early adopter of Photoshop and digital capture, and yet I still resist a lot of the new and even not-so-new developments.
I am writing this because I have just dipped my toe in yet another pool of water…flickr. I am not thrilled about the prospect of spending time learning something else that may or may not work for me (when I would rather be spending the time making my images). But I guess as part of my ongoing growth, and my determination to keep my career in stock photography a healthy one, it is in my best interests to forge ahead and familiarize myself with another part of this stock-photo-Internet puzzle. After all, Getty is mining flickr, I have encountered a number of Art Directors who peruse flickr, and certainly gazillions of people log on to flickr just to look at photos!
So I just opened a Flicker account and uploaded five images. In the beginning I am just uploading my funny anthropomorphic animal pictures. Most of these images are not with any agency, and the ones that are with a stock agency are with Kimball Stock where they are available as non-exclusive rights managed images. If I choose to license the images myself I can still do so.
Now What? I decided to do a search to see how long it would take to find one of my images. I searched under “massage” and “cats” since one of the images I upload was one of my “Animal Antics” images of one cat giving another a massage. Well, it didn’t take long! My image was the second one that showed up! It was however uploaded by someone else. It was also the fourth one, and the seventh one, and…a lot more times as I looked deeper and deeper, but nowhere was my name ever mentioned, and I gave up searching before I found the one I uploaded. Not exactly the most encouraging start to my flickr experiment!
It seems pointless to try and police my copyright in these cases…it will just use up my time and there certainly isn’t any compensation to be gained. What I did do was to leave a comment on several of my pirated images that the image in question was mine and that they could see more of my work at my website (I included my URL). If nothing else, maybe I can use the misappropriation of my images to help direct traffic to my site. Time will tell! If any of you have any suggestions about how to use flickr to promote your photography business, or how to deal with infringement of this kind, I’d love to hear it!
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