OK, so I'm assuming that I've sold you on the benefits of using Flickr. So, how do you go about it?

I'm not going to spell out how to set up an account because that's already well covered in the Flickr FAQ and help pages. What I am going to do is give you tips for using Flickr effectively as a professional artist. Again, I'm chopping this up into manageable chunks: this post will discuss ways to optimise your own Flickr space, while the next post will look at interacting with the wider Flickr community.

Use Your Professional Name

When you're signing up, choose an account name that's as closely related to your professional name as possible. Of course, if you have a common name this might not be possible. The reason for this is that it makes it easier for Google to find you. It also links your Flickr account to your professional online persona.

The observant amongst you will note that my own Flickr name doesn't follow this rule, I'm kmhlamia on Flickr rather than kirstyhall. This is because I set up my Flickr account before I was thinking about using it as a professional space and it simply never occurred to me. Since I'm already known on Flickr by that name, I don't really want to change it, although I am considering it.

You should also use your professional name in your Flickr profile. I have done this and it means that my Flickr page comes up on the third page of Google. Since this website is my primary website, that isn't a problem for me but if Flickr was my main online presence then I'd definitely change my username to get better Google results.

Use Your Profile

Your profile is your friend: you can use it to host a mini CV and a statement about your work. Make sure that you include contact information and if you've got other professional websites, link to them. Don't make it too long - people simply won't bother to read it - and don't link to anything you don't want Google to find!

Think carefully about what you say in your profile since it's part of the professional face you're presenting to the world and it could be read by curators, collectors and fans of your work. However, Flickr is a fairly informal space so it's OK to be a bit more relaxed than you might be elsewhere. Go with what you're comfortable with.

Set Things To Public

You can set individual photos to different privacy levels in Flickr but if you want people to be able to see your work then you need to set your photos to public. You should also set your photos to bloggable to encourage other people to promote your work for you. Setting your images to 'artwork/illustration' instead of 'photograph', can help people to find your work since it's possible to search just for 'artwork/illustration' on Flickr. If your artwork contains imagery that could be considered 'unsafe', then you should read the relevant section of the Flickr FAQ carefully and set your safety level accordingly but be aware that this may limit who can see your art.

Protect But Share

While I approve of Creative Commons in general, I don't usually recommend it to other artists. However, if it's appropriate for your work, then Flickr offers the full range of Creative Commons options. Personally I have kept traditional copyright on all my Flickr images because it's important for me to retain full control over my work. However, I also put a note in my profile saying that it was fine to blog my images without asking but any commercial use needed my explicit permission.

Putting any image of original artwork up on the web is always a risk. Posting lower resolution photos limits the risk of people printing out copies but you do have to keep an eye out for people nabbing your images and claiming them as their own. If you're really worried you can put watermarks in your images before you upload them to Flickr. However, I believe the best defence against this is to become well known online and I'll be discussing ways to build up your internet art profile in later posts.

Tag Your Photos

Tags are one of the most useful tools on Flickr and can help you in lots of ways. Firstly, they make your own life much easier. For example, perhaps you have a series of artworks about the same subject but you uploaded the photos at different times. Instead of searching for each photo individually within your photostream and maybe missing some, you can do a search using your tags. You can also search for images which don't have any tags, just in case you forgot to tag some of those particular photos.

Tags can also make it easier for other people to find your work because they can search for tags within the whole of Flickr or just in your account. Of course, this works better if you've got fairly specific tags; 'painting' will bring up thousands of images but since you can add more than one tag, you can label things in more than one way.

I usually use a combination of title, medium, themes, colours and materials for my tags.
For example, this image of Pin Ritual is tagged with the words, pin ritual; pins; art; performance; sculpture; white; repetition; domesticity; labour and textile art.

Decide How Pure You're Going to Be

If you're conceiving of your Flickr space as largely a portfolio for your work then you need to decide how pure you're going to be. Are you going to show work in progress, related visual research or are you just going to show finished pieces of art?

You also need to decide if your personal photos belong on your artistic Flickr account. It is possible to completely separate out the personal and professional by having more than one Flickr account but there does seem to be a fairly large acceptance of mixing photos on Flickr. Including a few more personal photos can make you seem more human rather than less professional, although obviously if photos are really personal then it might not be appropriate to have them within a professional space! However, you can also set privacy levels on individual photos so that only people you've marked as family and/or friends can see them (apparently you can send personal invites to non-Flickr members, something I only learnt today).

If you do want to maintain two completely separate accounts on Flickr then make sure the personal one doesn't link to your professional one and doesn't use your real name in any way or Google will probably join up the dots.

Organise Your Photos

Organising your photos into collections and sets can help your Flickr be both more professional and more accessible. You can set your Flickr page to show both your photostream and your collections or sets and I'd strongly recommend doing so because it allows people to instantly find your art without having to trail through lots of possibly unrelated images (this is particularly important if you do decide to mix personal and professional photos).

Use Descriptive Text

Every image that you upload to Flickr has a space underneath where you can write a description - use it! It's also a good idea to write more general explanations in the descriptive text box of your collections and sets because that provides people with more background to your art, all nicely presented in easily digested little bites.

If you want people to visit your other web spaces, then put a link in the image text. This is what I do with The Diary Project images on Flickr: they all have the same standard explanatory text, with just the date altered and a html link to the Diary Project blog where people can find out more about specific images. My other art images don't have a direct weblink within the text box and I've just worked out that this is why the Diary Project gets considerably more visits from Flickr than this site does.

Right, that's all for this part, next we're moving on to the importance of taking part in the community aspects of Flickr.

Get more help
If you'd like more information about building your online presence, check out the free resources section.

I am also available for online consulting if you need one-on-one help.

So what is Flickr?

At its most basic level, Flickr is a photo hosting service. Photo hosting services are sites on the web where you can upload your own photos, either free or for a small charge. These photos can then be shared with other users of the internet without the need for your own website space. You can read this Wikipedia article if you want to find out more about the concept of photo sharing.

Flickr is not the only photo hosting service, there are plenty of others including Photobucket, Kodak, Fotoblog and Zoomr. I have used a couple of other photohosting services in the past but then switched completely to Flickr because it was so much better. I haven't used every single photo hosting site so I don't know how all the others compare. That said, I do think that Flickr has a lot of features that make it ideal for artists and we'll get to these shortly.

Why do I need a photo hosting service?

Unless you are already in a position to put up a dedicated website where you can host your own photos then in order to make a simple visual portfolio online, you'll need somewhere to host images.

Even if you do have a dedicated website on your own domain name, you'll probably still need a photo hosting site. I find I use Flickr just as much now as I did before this site launched.

Later in this series, I'm also going to be strongly encouraging artists to blog and if you're an artist blogger then being able to quickly and easily share your photos is vital: nothing is more dull than a visual blog with no visuals - I know, I've done it!

However, right now we're going to concentrate on how to use Flickr to make a simple online visual portfolio.

The Advantages of Flickr

It's probably obvious by now that I'm a fan of Flickr. There are lots of reasons for this:

Flickr Is Easy To Use

If you have a computer, an internet connection and a way to get your images onto your computer then you can use Flickr - it really is that simple. Even as a beginner you should be able to upload images, label them, sort them into galleries, tag them and very quickly end up with a presentable display of your art.

Flickr looks good

This is a personal opinion and you might disagree but I think that Flickr has a clean, pleasant interface that looks reasonably professional. In addition, unlike somewhere like Facebook, you can also do a certain amount of restructuring: it'll never be as adaptive and individual as a personal website but you can have a decent amount of control over how your images are displayed.

Flickr is community based

This is hugely important because in effect, Flickr already contains a massive captive audience. What's more, it's a captive audience who are unusually sympathetic to visual culture and already used to looking at each other's images and giving feedback. Naturally a lot depends on how you approach people but I've honestly found the majority of people on Flickr to be very approachable and sympathetic towards artists. You can never overestimate the importance of an interested captive audience, it's like gold dust to any artist and remarkably hard to find. That audience already exists on Flickr; even if you already have your own website, do you really want to ignore that audience?

Flickr Makes Networking Easy

This is related to the community based aspect of Flickr. There are lots of tools on Flickr that break the massive user base down into smaller, move navigable chunks. I'll be talking about these tools in detail in a later post.

Flickr Is Cheap

Flickr is either free with ads and limitations or $25 a year for a more extensive ad-free service. As a way of making a simple yet presentable visual portfolio that already comes with an in-built sympathetic audience, this is a complete bargain!

Of course, Flickr isn't perfect, many Flickr users have been unhappy about some of the changes which have occurred since Yahoo bought the site in 2005. In particular it may not be the best choice if you make art which is very sexually explicit or graphically violent because Flickr does have restrictions on adult content. In addition, you can't actively use Flickr for selling. However, there are lots of artists on Flickr and I've not heard of people being kicked off for promoting their art on there. While it would be wise to avoid things like having prices on your images, I'm pretty sure that you could link to a selling site like Etsy in your profile without any trouble since I've seen plenty of people doing just that. This article from Wikipedia and the Flickr guidelines give more background detail and should give you a better idea if Flickr is a place you'd feel comfortable.

The next article in this series will concentrate on the nuts and bolts of setting up an account on Flickr and some handy tips for making the most of it.

Get more help
If you'd like more information about building your online presence, check out the free resources section.

I am also available for online consulting if you need one-on-one help.

There are two basic things that artists need to be visible online:

A visual portfolio
A way of attracting people to that portfolio

Since this is a large subject, I'm going to be breaking it down into little chunks. Today I'll be examining the first of those things.

Visual Portfolios

Basically put, an online portfolio should contain images of your work, some explanatory text and a way for interested people to contact you.

The best way to host an online portfolio is to have your own dedicated website with your own domain name. There are several reasons for this - Lisa Mikulski has a very helpful post on the subject and I absolutely agree with her assessment.

However, putting together a professional website takes both time and money, two things many artists lack. Making your own website is definitely something I recommend and I'm going to look at it more deeply in the future but right now, I want to encourage you to take that first small step towards an online art presence. If you're new to the idea of having an online visual portfolio, then taking a simpler step can be a lot less intimidating and far more achievable.

Even if you're already experienced with the internet, designing a website can be very overwhelming. I'd been 'meaning to get round to it' for at least ten years and had made several abortive attempts to design a site myself. Eventually I had to admit to myself that I was never going to design and code my own site and the only way it was ever going to happen would be if I paid someone else to do it for me so I hired my friend Steve Taylor, who's a professional web designer and he did a fantastic job. It was a very smart decision and I'm happy with the result, but I'd be lying if I said that getting the site up was a quick and easy process: it was a lot of work and took several months.

If you're anything like me, the idea of spending months looking through your old images and writing blurb won't fill you with delight and you'll probably put it to the bottom of your to-do list. Sure, you know you ought to do it but hey, it's so much work and you have that show coming up and you need to be in the studio and, and, and...

Well, I think we all know how that one goes, right! Yep, another year goes by without anything happening and that's another year when you're invisible online to curators, collectors and other people who might be interested in your work if they could only see it.

And that's why I recommend to artists who want an online presence but are limited by time, money or perfectionism issues (that would be all of us then!), that they make a start RIGHT NOW - don't wait until all your ducks are in a row before you begin.

So what is this first simple step, I hear you ask? Well, there are several options but the one that I always recommend is to get a Flickr account.

Certainly you can start making arrangements to get your own website - budget some time and money to do so and if you think you'll procrastinate about it, do what I did and register and pay for your domain name now (type 'domain names' into Google and you'll get dozens of sites who are desperate to sell you a domain name). This stops someone else nabbing your desired domain name but it also pushes you in the right direction. Even though it's very cheap to register a domain name, the fact that you've paid for it for a year acts as both a mental place marker and a little encouraging push: it tells your subconscious that you've made a definite commitment to get your website done and you'll probably find it niggling away at you until you do it. But in the meantime, get some images up on Flickr.

In the next article we'll be looking at why I recommend Flickr.

Get more help
If you'd like more information about building your online presence, check out the free resources section.

I am also available for online consulting if you need one-on-one help.