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You Can’t Flickr This by missrogue

David Hobby at the Strobist is writing an excellent four part series about online photo sharing service Flickr and the future of commercial photography.

The first part focuses on the success story of Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, arguably the most popular photographer on Flickr. The popularity of her stark, surrealist self-portraits attracted serious attention from Toyota.

Rebekka netted a lucrative photography contract and an impressive amount of exposure in the mainstream media. I first heard of this while reading the Wall Street Journal, of all things.

The second article centers on micro-stock photography agencies and how they relate to the commercial future of Flickr. This has been a really hot topic on the more business-oriented photography sites I read. Sites like Thomas Hawk, John Harrington, and Dan Heller’s Business Photography Blog have been writing about this for months now.

Zooomr, a Flickr competitor headed up by Hawk, hopes to add the features of a stock photography agency with their upcoming Mark III update. It will be really interesting to see how this performs, as it will probably give us some insight into how successful Flickr’s inevitable venture into stock photography will be.

The article also addresses the issue of accessibility on Flickr; how to stand out from the crowd by optimizing your photos with proper tagging and descriptions. You can have the best flower photos in the world, but if they don’t show up when people search for ‘flowers’; it doesn’t help you.

The first two parts of the series are available here and here. Part three of the series on photo sharing is due later this week. Speaking of sharing photos, I’ve just uploaded a couple dozen new shots to my Flickr account a couple nights ago. Go check them out; I crave your approval!