FlickR and Common Creative- Free promotion? Maybe but with a hidden cost

I’m not new to it. I have been using it for years for my modelling portfolio.  It’s a great place to store pictures while maintaining their quality, and a great way to promote your work and meet like-minded people and come across possible business opportunities. I have never used it as a photographer though. Although in my eyes it’s an art to be admired but I completely lack those skills and am not at all good at it.

Some of the useful features I have come across are as below:

It’s free- unlike other similar photo-sharing websites which are either not free or their free accounts they offer are literally unusable. Flickr free accounts give you a generous allowance and many useful features.

Tagging system- It’s very useful and very easy to do and it gives you the opportunity to be promoted for free for those who are looking for the same tags.

Privacy settings- It gives you a lot of flexibility to be a private or as public as you like. And it could be worked with either individual photos or sets.

Organising feature- Creating sets is a wonderful way to organise your photos, and the easy “drag and drop” feature makes it a pain-free and enjoyable task.

Phone App- Excellent feature! Allows you to take your whole photo collection with you on your phone without using up the space on your phone. However there is a downside to it; Although it allows you to email and share on Facebook/Twitter, etc. you can’t directly save photos from it to your phone

Now here are the things to be aware of specially to do with Creative Commons and copyright issues:

Theft- It’s something I have come across many times in my career. I do work both of TFP/TFCD (time for print, time for cd) and paid basis. And I always sign a “ Model Release Form”, it’s the best way to protect both the model and the photographer. Photographer owns the rights to the photos but as a model you get to do what you agreed on the release form with it. The usual terms are if the pictures are used for commercial use both people (the model and the photographer) should have an agreed share of the profit; You are usually not allowed to make any changes to the pictures unless running it past the Photographer; And the obvious one of the pictures are not allowed to be used for any indecent purposes.

However saying all this I still had my pictures being sold by various photographers in large prints behind my back, and since I don’t have the money to take them to court for it, I just have to add them to my blacklist and not work with them again. And in some cases flag them up as dangerous cases on modelling and photography websites so other people won’t fall into the same trap.

The other thing that’s happened to me on various occasions was for people to steal my pictures, removing the watermarks with Photoshop and posting them as their own on websites such as Facebook. Now admittedly FlickR is very good in dealing with cases like this (however it does put you in a vulnerable position by offering a high quality versions of your pictures, making it very easy for people to steal them) but if you notice something on FlickR that you believe has been stolen from you or someone you know. They are very good at getting it removed.

Look at the two pictures below: friends of mine found thebottom picture to be used as someone’s profile picture on Facebook. As you can see from the original picture (the one at the top) not only they changed all the colours and background but they were cheeky enough to remove my name that was put at the top by the photographer and the photographer’s logo at the bottom of the page:

Bottom line is you can do as much as you can to protect yourself but when something of yours gets stolen, unless you have the money and the means to take the person to court, then you are pretty much helpless and by sharing things on internet you do put yourself in a vulnerable position. So it is free promotion but sometimes with a hidden cost.

Solution: In my opinion the best solution is to make your whole Photostream Private/Friends only and just send the links to those whom you trust. In the privacy section it’s got an option to stop your account even appearing in searches. Mine is usually set to private but for the purpose of Sot23 I have made it public for a little while.

I don’t think I’m going to take part in the competition with my portfolio though. Although I’m free to use the pictures I have up on my FlickR account but I’m not the photographer, and I think all the credits for a picture should go to the photographer. So I think it would be very unfair of me to take part in it using those.
I'm going to add a couple of the scenery I took with my IPhone

However here’s a link to my FlickR account for those who are interested:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/azadehbrown/