Flickr vs. Facebook: To Pay or Not To Pay?

When I first uploaded my photos onto Flickr, I didn’t realize that the service is only free up to a certain point. It turns out that you need to upgrade to a Flickr Pro account, which costs $24.95 a year, if you want to do any of the following:

- Organize your photos into more than three sets

- View more than just your 200 most recent photos

- Download the original photo, even though it’s yours (but interestingly enough, if you pay to upgrade, you can download anyone’s original photos)

Not cool, Flickr. Not cool. I know that you’ve got bandwidth and shit to pay for, but I’m a student on a budget. Given these limitations, if you have lots of photos that you want to put up but you’re low on cash/miserly/homeless,  it might make more sense to upload them on Facebook, where you can do as many as you want, for free.

That being said, there are a few actual reasons to pay for a Flickr account:

You or your loved ones are not on Facebook

There are some people who will sign up for a Facebook account just so that they can see their friends’ or children’s photos. My mother did so, although I refused to friend her (I’m not a very nice person). However, some people are simply not interested in signing up for Facebook, and sometimes no amount of cajoling or threatening will change their minds.

In this case, if you’ve got tons of photos, but are sick of uploading and emailing them, putting them on Flickr is a good idea because your friends and family don’t actually have to sign up for Flickr to view them.

You want to promote your business

If you want to promote your business through photos, paying to put them up on Flickr is worth it for the same reason as my last point: not everyone has a Facebook account, and by uploading your photos onto Flickr, you are substantially increasing your possible viewing audience. This can be apply to any industry, but if you’re a professional photographer, then I’d say that it’s especially worth it.

You once had a torrid love affair with Mark Zuckerberg

Yeah, that’ll show him!

Note: As implied by the title of this blog, Social Media Novice doesn’t really know of other good web sites for uploading photos. If you’ve got any, let me know!

Flickr Saves the Day

As you may have noticed (and by you, I mean the collective three people who read this blog), Social Media Novice has been AWOL for the past week, mainly due to computer problems and excessive drinking (to deal with other problems).  I’ll be back to complaining about Web 2.0. tomorrow, but for today, I just want to sincerely thank Flickr.

A few months ago, when I started trying to teach myself about social media, one of the first things I did was put some photos up on Flickr. I don’t own a digital camera, so I put up 198 cell phone pictures from last spring, when I studied abroad in France. These weren’t all of the pictures that I had, but it was most of them. I thought nothing of it at the time, other than the fact that uploading photos and then naming them is annoying.

But this week my computer died a sudden death and now everything that was on it is gone. I can deal with most of that, because I’ve got copies of my resumes and cover letters saved in my email account, and I can get music from my friends. But losing those photos forever would have been awful. And if it weren’t for Flickr, I would have.

The Interview

In September, I had a phone interview with a company that offerred a two-year marketing rotational program. Given that I’m a senior in college, it was a pretty big deal (at least to me). It started out with basic get-to-know-your-resume questions and then segued into this:

Interviewer: So, do you use Social Media a lot?

Me: Um, well I use Facebook a lot! And I’m thinking of getting a LinkedIn!

Silence.

It went downhill from there.

Ever since then, I’ve made a concerted effort to get involved with Web 2.0. I put a profile on LinkedIn and photos on Flickr. I finally got a Twitter a few days ago. But to be honest, I still don’t really feel like I know much at all. Just looking at Technorati makes my head hurt.

But I figure that I can’t be the only one confused. So this blog is my way of chronicling (and ergo forcing) my attempts to try to figure out the world of Social Media. And maybe if you’re like me, it can be helpful to you too.