5 Pros of Social Photography-Sharing Networks

Always looking back by A Marques

The advent of social networks has been a huge buzz around the internet for years. Primarily through open forums and later in sites like digg.com, del.icio.us, and of course the latest photographyVoter.com (dedicated to photography), social networking has fulfilled a gap that existed for long: the ability to judge internet content. Also, finding like-minded individuals allows for a great exchange of ideas and discussion.

Social photography-sharing networks are a slice of this pie. In sites like flickr and photobucket anyone can upload their work and open it to the masses. Like mostly everything, these social photography-sharing networks have advantages and disadvantages. In this post I’ll cover what are for me the main 5 advantages of uploading your work to social networks.

5 Pros of Social Photography-Sharing Networks

1. Exposure – Your photos don’t need to rest in the hard-drive anymore without anyone to look at them. These networks allow for it to go global. Thousands of people can look at your work and admire what you can do with a camera. Your name in photography can be known.

2. Feedback – You think your photos are good. But does everyone else? Commenting on posted work is a very much used feature on these sites. You’ll receive feedback from potentially thousands of other users, and some comments can help you improve your technique and generally advance your knowledge on photography.

3. Visitors – With some of your photos in the social networks, if you edit your profile well and make it interesting, with a link to your main gallery outside the social network, you can get traffic to your own website.

4. Easiness – How more easy can it be? Tell the site where your photos are on your physical drive, add tags and descriptions and the site does everything else for you. Very soon you’ll see your photos displayed on your own gallery with everything else setup for you.

5. Fun – Interacting with other people is fun. Tracking the works of friends or users who’s work you admire is fun. Joining groups inside the social network and exchanging ideas and discussing projects is fun.

I hope this list has helped you see the good side about social photography-sharing networks. But not everything is this sweet. There is a dark side to it too.

Tomorrow I will post again addressing this issue but I’ll be looking at it from the other side with the 5 Cons of Social Photography-Sharing Networks.

And you? Do you use any of the most popular social photography-sharing networks? What do you see as the main advantages of such sites?