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For a travel blogger, clicking the picture is just the first stop in the journey. Finding the right platform to share the photographs is one of the most crucial aspects of building a travel community and marketing your photos. Here are 6 of my favourite places to share my travel photos.
Smugmug: My main website www.sidpicky.com is hosted on Smugmug. So, by default, every photo of mine lives on Smugmug. For people who have not heard about it, Smugmug is a really versatile tool that is built for professional photographers with uniquely designed themes and a robust platform for selling your prints online. Smugmug’s pro package offer unlimited storage and has tons of customisation options. I could not recommend it highly enough. Visit it at www.smugmug.com
Instagram: Instagram is the poster child of the mobile phone revolution and I am absolutely hooked. Instagram’s amazing one touch click and share and its unique use of filters makes it a perfect tool to share photos from my everyday life. Instagram is available on for iPhones and Android phones. It’s community is more than 150 million strong. Download the app on your phone and get addicted.
Follow Sidpicky on Instagram by searching for Sidpicky
Pintrest: A lot of great things have been written about Pinterest and they are ALL true. I love the look and feel of this website. For a travel photographer, easy layout and quick loading of photos are crucial and Pintrest does these with aplomb. For January 2012, comScore (a leading web traffic company) reported the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors, making it the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. Users can create multiple boards to share different category of their photos. You can also create continent specific boards to further categorize your travel photos.
Follow Sidpicky on Pinterest at http://pinterest.com/sidpicky/
Flickr: Flickr is the grand daddy of image sharing, I end up cross-posting my images onto Flickr primarily as a backup of my images. Flickr is a great place to network with other bloggers who use it to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. The advantage of Flickr is also that it shows up really high on search rankings and can boost the discoverability of your images. Flickr had a total of 51 million registered members and they have a really cool app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 operating systems.
Follow Sidpicky on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidpicky
500px: One of my favourite websites. I can spend hours just browsing this space and discovering the amazing breath of photos here. But this is a place to share the best of the best photographs and see how it stacks up with professionals. In terms of interface, members are allowed to comment on each others’ photographs, vote for them and favorite them. They also have the chance to follow each other. Each user has a flow and an activity page where his/her activity within the 500px community appears. 500px is a great website to find new photography ideas for shoots and one of my personal goals as a photographer is to get featured in the Editor’s choice section one day.
Follow my portfolio on 500px at http://sidpicky.500px.com/
Stumbleupon: Stumbleupon is a fantastic source of referral traffic for your website or blog. In October 2011, StumbleUpon announced that it had over 20 million registered users of the service. The key to succeeding here is to ensure that you are using Stumbleupon regularly. Installing their apps and using the web bookmarklet will help you connect with the best stumblers out there and build your connection.
Follow Sidpicky’s stumbles on Stumbleupon on http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/sidpicky-su
Notable mention:
Google+ : The large photo dimension for Google+ makes it a worthwhile place to share your interesting photos and I use it a lot to tap into the large photographic community Google+ has gathered.
Follow Sidpicky on Google+ https://plus.google.com/b/110119209030200783788/
