Hello everybody,

I'm looking for an efficient way to promote my portfolio. I was thinking about maybe Flickr, 500px...

I don't known if it is a good idea (pictures roberry). What do you think ? What do you use ?

Thanks in advance for your help.

PS : Sorry for my english i'm French     

Thanks Lagereek,

I'm currently working on my website. But im looking for other ways too.

Hello everybody,

I'm looking for an efficient way to promote my portfolio. I was thinking about maybe Flickr, 500px...

I don't known if it is a good idea (pictures roberry). What do you think ? What do you use ?

Thanks in advance for your help.

PS : Sorry for my english i'm French    

Talking about Flickr only:
On Flickr, you can only give a link to where you're selling in your profile, not on the individual images. I have no idea why as some Flickr ports seem to be nothing more than online catalogues for goods for sale, but they don't allow it for photos, possibly because of their lapsing tie-in with Getty.

Also consider why you would want to do work generating sales then give away a large percentage of your money to the agency that didn't deliver on attracting custom. If I found my own buyers, I'd want 100%. (Note, I've sold exactly one photo from flickr, to the mum of the girl in a photo - I didn't know her but she contacted me from the US) but I currently don't even have a link to my iStock/Alamy ports in my profile, as it just led to a lot of people contacting me for info on the agencies etc etc). I really just use Flickr for fun and for letting friends see what I've been up to.

One tog I know has picked up some commissions via Flickr without really trying, just by putting her pics on relevant groups. She wasn't even particuarly looking for commissions. She also sold prints, without particularly wanting to, to people in a parade she photographed. That was surprising to me, as she uploads full size from her camera and doesn't protect them, so at least some people don't just 'steal', even when it's easy to do so.

It's easy enough to 'reasonably' protect your images on Flickr. You can restrict the size (I have largest side 1000px, you could go smaller. Disadvantage is that they are upsized on Flickr slideshows and look embarrasingly h*llish). I have a watermark (I think it's quite small, others apparently find them "obnoxious") on them all, right-click disable and disallow all sorts of sharing, and I upload them at 10 quality, not 12.  If someone wants to print screen them and clone or crop out the watermark (easier on some pics than others), they can, but the photo won't be worth much. If you choose, you can limit who sees any/all of your photos, on a photo by photo basis. AFAIK, you can't do anything more with images on your own website (i.e. if they're online they can be screendumped). (The downside is that having disabled right-click-copy, you then can't easily do a Google reverse image check to see if they're being misused elsewhere.)

Someone else may have info about 500px etc. There are a few threads about setting up your own direct sales website.

Flickr was a great way for me to make sales via clustershot, but now clusthershot is a total disaster that doesn't function. I tried to move over to photoshelter, but that site blows. No one, I mean NO ONE wants to bother making an account to buy one image from a site they will never again use. Clustershot had no such issues.... it was super easy and I loved it.

Oh well.