There are many places to upload your images online to share. As a new photographer I would suggest that you limit where you upload stuff at first. This way you can better network and interact to establish yourself as your skill grows.
In this post I’m going to focus on what I would consider the “Big Three” photo sharing places that you should use. Note this is not about posting to places to sell images just to places to share and get feed back on them.
The “Big Three” I’m talking about are Flickr, 500px and Google+.
But what about Facebook? Why am I not including that? Right now Facebook is only for personal and private friends and family interactions. I only put pictures there I would not put up on Flickr. I do not use Facebook for my more “Professional Photography”. That may come later when I make a Public Page for my services down the road, but for now I do not use it as that.
To continue on the three listed above. I am not here to tell you which one is better than the other. I feel they all have their specific uses. I’m just here to state why I feel you should use them.
Flickr
Even though this site is now the “old dying dog that no one wants to put to sleep” it is still the best place for a new learning photographer to put up images and get feed back through the long established and still very much used community groups.
The Pro account ($25/year) is well worth it gives you unlimited uploads (50MB limit / photo) and storage of your photos. Not even Google can give you this.
The photo stream is a great timeline that can show your progress in learning so Flickr makes a great photo dump for almost all images you take related to learning. There are numerous amateur and beginner groups where you can get feed back on images and constructive criticism about how to improve a shot.
I feel there is no other site that gives you the flexibility to organize you online photos into multiple sets, collections and share with community groups like Flickr can for archiving you images.
Use Flicker to learn and participate in challenges to advance you skill through the groups. Use the organization tools to create Sets and Collections of learning themes. For example you are working on Macro photography. So you have a one Set for flowers, another set for insects and a third set for everyday object. You would then put these three sets into a “Macro” collection to better find them later to share.
One thing I do not suggest is that you go and join a 100 or even 10 different groups right away. Pick only one or two at first. This way it will let you interact more with the groups and then branch out as you learn more. This is especially true if you are limited in time like I am.
Google+
This is the new kid to social networking. It’s been out there for over a year now and it has picked up a lot of steam. I will admit for interaction with a community of photographers (all the “Cool Photogs” are there) there is nothing as close to this unless you hang out with people like Thomas Hawk, Scott Kelby or Bryan Peterson in person daily.
I love Google+ for the interactions and feed back. You can get great feed back by posting photos in one of the “Daily Themes” or being apart of their new Communities they just added. I hear hangouts are cool too! (but I never do them as I am a bit shy… :p)
Unfortunately you have some limits to what you can upload. If you go over 2048 x 2048 pixels in size they start to count against your 1GB Picasa web free storage size. That is not a lot of space really and I have hit my milit a few times on accident easily. To buy more space it is at minimum $2.49/month (only) coming to $29.88/year that only gives you 25GB max space of storage.
This size limit forces you to put up lower resolution files but you usually get more views on them once you build up your circles and use proper hash tags to make them searchable. Google plus unlike Flickr does not show the number of views but often people +1 it when they view it and even make comments (especially if you ask for feedback).
I would highly suggest as well that you fill out a profile on Google+ if you have it and plan on using it for sharing. I know many people that will not put you in a Circle if you where half-assed in filling out profile information.
As new photographer I would suggest you use Google+ to follow other photographers and pick one or two daily themes to work on. I would not use it as a photo dump like Flickr, I would use more like what the creators of 500px wanted for their site. Save it for your best images and upload them into albums under a single common album theme and ask for feed back on the images.
500px
As a new photographer I would have to say that you should hold off on creating an account on this site. 500px while having some great pieces on it to view for inspiration is really designed for showing your absolute best images. They have a user driven rating system and until recently they would not admit to it begin abused by a select few individuals to push everyone else’s rating down so their images or their friends images would always be in the popular view sections.
If you think you have photos that will fit I would suggest looking at how many +1s they have on G+ or Views/favorites on Flickr first to give you an idea of what to upload on 500px.
Once you get to the point you may want to sell you images 500px maybe a good place to start doing that to get your feet wet.
Thanks for stopping by and reading.
Jason
jason brewer photography 