Photo Sharing at its Best
It has been three weeks since Instagram for Android was finally released to the ever growing family of Google-y smartphones, and in that time it has already hit some amazing milestones. After just 6 days, Instagram for Android had already received 5 Million downloads by anxious users, and it's steadily creeping up on 10 Million downloads in under one month. For a company that was only started 2 years ago and has just 13 employees, it is a true testament to the power of social media when you can say that you service more than 30 million users around the world.
There is something to be said for how many words a picture can paint for its onlookers, and as we continue to move forward into an age of social sharing and international networking opportunities (all via the web), imagery remains a powerful tool in the way we communicate. Fancy photos, funny memes and LoLCats are used to express emotions, share a hearty laugh and describe important day's events through various networks around the web; but one medium that many people forget to consider when looking for a place to share their favorite digital images, is their own website.
When you have multiple social network accounts, as most people do these days, it's hard to decide where to put your collection for the world to see. Do you share it with friends on Facebook, your network of professionals on Twitter or all the fancy people found on Instagram? Obviously the answer isn't easy, but I would be remiss to simply argue that you should share all of your photos through your website, blog or photo gallery. Do the thing that works best for you, not the one that works best for me.
That said, it is important to note that some of the most popular websites available right now, and certainly some of the most profitable, are image and video sharing websites. Whether these websites service the broad desires of billions of meme-lovers, like our beloved FailBlog, or they cater to the interests of a select group of users (see this Lord of The Rings gallery), people love creating, sharing, manipulating and looking at photos that interest them, and these websites continue to deliver.
It may sound like we are repeating ourselves when we say this (because we totally are), but there really is a lot of great potential to be had for success when creating a central gallery for your images in one single place for either your own personal use, or to create and drive a community of similarly-interested people. Build a portfolio of your work or invite your friends and networks to post alongside of you, then watch as your continually updated content brings people in to see what kinds of interesting imagery you have to fill their minds with.
This kitten has great potential to become an internet star someday.
An excellent website, and one that is deserving of much more attention than what it is getting while delivering high quality photo sharing and social features, is 500px. This network takes a simple concept that thousands of other companies have pursued, and turned it into a profitable and engaging experience that visitors to the site can really enjoy. Take a look at this photo (one of the highest rated there) and you will see a host of features that really make 500px a valuable resource. Users can see ratings and reviews of each stunning image they browse, order prints or canvases, share via third-party social networks, save it to their favorites, see information about the equipment used to take the shot, copy the embed code for each image to share on a separate website, leave comments on the media items and follow specific artists and photographers that they enjoy.
All of those things added together create for a finer experience that draws users in and keeps them there. You can go anywhere on the web to view photos, but it is only the finest photo sharing websites that continue to grow in popularity and gain more users.
Now, how does that apply to you right now? It's pretty simple, really - with this knowledge you can begin to develop your own photo sharing network using the best practices of the big-players out there. Certainly, you can use an already existing network to broadcast your favorite images to people that you know (such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Flickr, etc...), but relying on a third-party platform to keep your information safe, secure, and existing for a long time to come is always a pretty big risk to take.
Even if you could be 100% sure that any of these networks would exist for a long time to come, you can never ensure that you'll be able to grow to your full potential, simply because those companies will want to control and regulate your photo-sharing capabilities as much as they can (and as long as it's in their interest, they will). Of course, a final concern is that you will want to share your photos from Facebook with people on Twitter, and that's not always possible (especially if the person doesn't have a Facebook account). These companies don't always play nice, so it's probably in your best interest to skip the drama altogether.
The museum might look calm from here, but through that door is a thrilling tale of
romance, adventure and murder unfolding between corporations.
The solution, then, is to create and maintain your own photo gallery to allow you full access to sharing your content with as many people in as many places as possible, or to use an existing network which encourages sharing their content publicly. Doing so might take a little extra work and a few minutes of your time, but the ability and potential for your photos to spread more thoroughly around the web will be well worth the effort.
Photo sharing is only at its best when the photos can be shared to everyone, otherwise it's not really photo sharing, is it? It's not hard to build a photo gallery, especially with our media sharing software, and it can be a very valuable resource to your network if the implementation is right. We are entering the next age of the internet where we aren't just writing blogs and shooting videos - we (not some other companies) are controlling all of the content that we want to display to our followers, and that includes photos as much as it includes anything else.
Ready to start gathering and sharing photos with your own tight-knit community of followers? See the HWDMediaShare Tour to get started.
