To give you a bit of background on where this is coming from: I was into photography in the 2010s. To the point where I had a camera, multiple lenses and more assorted kit. Eventually I sold all of it, but I still like taking pictures today. This article is about how I struggled with photo sharing on the internet, especially recently. A timeline below, interspersed with completely unrelated photos:

Phase 1: 2004 to Oct 2023 : Flickr

As long as I remember, I have been a loyal user of Flickr. At first, I used to use it as a service to backup and store my photos and share them with family. With the advent of more private cloud storage services, I moved that function to OneDrive and eventually iClown. Still, I kept my Flickr around to share photos publicly.

For most of these 2 decades, I paid for a Flickr Pro membership, too. Although in the initial days it was not required, I paid to support the service and get rid of advertisements. Eventually, they put a 1000 photo limit for free accounts & I was forced to go Pro. Overall though, Flickr has been good to me. It has consistently surfaced my photos in search results and they have been used on almost hundred websites including Wikipedia.

Last year, I started to question why I was paying for this service. It is not like I was earning anything from sharing my photos, they were openly licensed to anyone who wanted to use them. So I decided to take the drastic step of moving away from Flickr.

Phase 2: Oct 2023 to Oct 2023 : Photo Blog

I decided to make my own photo blog and host my photos on it. I chose WordPress as my platform because of how ubiquitous it is. As you may know, WordPress natively is not a photo sharing CMS, but there are plugins that can help. I decided to move away from the album format of Flickr and post my photos as part of posts.

I spent a lot of time sifting through my photos and narrowing them down to 2200 photos I deemed worthy of the blog.

It took me 6-7 hours of work everyday for a week to finally put everything up. Time consuming tasks include:

1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
2. Setting the correct Caption and Alt Text for each photo
3. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
4. Writing posts about the photos
5. Renaming files
6. Adjusting the posts for good SEO

And then I made the mistake of restoring a backup for my web hosting (Not knowing it restores all websites) and lost everything.

Phase 3: Oct 2023 to Nov 2023 : Flickr Part 2

Devastated at having lost my blog because of one erroneous click, I decided I couldn’t go through with doing all that one more time and went back to Flickr. Of course, I had deleted my account already, so had to start from scratch.

It took me 6-7 hours everyday for a week to get everything posted on Flickr. Time consuming tasks include:

1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
2. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
3. Sorting photos into albums
4. Adding photos into groups for visibility

It was nice while it lasted, but within a few weeks, I started to miss my photo blog. Two factors (in de ja vu format) led me to the next steps

1. Why am I paying for a Flickr Pro subscription when I am not earning anything from it?
2. Why am I relying on a 3rd party service when I can have my own photo blog.

So I went ahead and deleted my Flickr account, yet again.

Phase 4: Nov 2023 to December 2023 : Photo Blog Part 2

I spent a lot of time sifting through my photos and narrowing them down to 2200 photos I deemed worthy of the blog.

It took me 6-7 hours of work everyday for a week to finally put everything up. Time consuming things include

1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
2. Setting the correct Caption and Alt Text for each photo
3. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
4. Writing posts about the photos
5. Renaming files
6. Adjusting the posts for good SEO

Then I had to go back and ask the people who has previously subscribed to my blog to subscribe again. Embarrassing as fuck. The honeymoon period lasted all of 2 weeks.

Eventually, I began to notice that the traffic on my photo blog was not as per my expectations. Eventually, I found out that search engines were not indexing my photos. In fact, Bing straight up blocked my domain. I request an appeal but it was denied.

After consulting with the wise people of Reddit, I came to the conclusion that WordPress is not good for photo SEO and nothing could beat Flickr when it came to indexing photos on search engines.

So I deleted my blog, yet again.

Phase 5: January 2024 to January 2024 : Flickr Part 3

On my third Flickr account, it took me 6-7 hours everyday for a week to get everything posted on Flickr. Time consuming tasks include:

1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
2. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
3. Sorting photos into albums
4. Adding photos into groups for visibility

Voila! I had to wait a few weeks, but eventually my photos began to appear on search engines again.

It was nice while it lasted, but within a few weeks, I started getting disillusioned with Flickr. Two factors led me to the next steps

1. Why am I paying for a Flickr Pro subscription when Iam not earning anything from it?
2. Why am I relying on a 3rd party service when I can have my own photo blog.

So I went ahead and deleted my Flickr account, yet again.

Phase 6: April 2024 to May 2024 : Piwigo

This time I decided that I won’t use WordPress for my photo sharing, so did a lot of research and narrowed it down to Lychee and Piwigo. I couldn’t get Lychee installed, so decided to go with Piwigo. I immediately ran across a few problems

1. The interface was dated and the theme selection was limited
2. There was no SEO to speak of, even with plugins
3. Like all Open Source software (But unlike WordPress), it required a lot of tinkering in PHP to get it to work correctly .

Thankfully, I didn’t waste time posting 2200 photos, rather posted just 2 albums to see how they perform.

After waiting for a few weeks, I realised that my photos weren’t appearing on search engines and decided to scrap it.

Phase 7: May 2024 to May 2024 : Unsplash

Someone on Reddit recommended me Unsplash so I decided to use it. Again, thankfully, I only uploaded 2 albums. Unsplash is a beast when it comes to surfacing photos. I was receiving likes within minutes and had up to 100 downloads in 48 hours for 20 photos.

Unsplash seemed like a dopamine dream come true, until I read their licensing. Long story short, Unsplash lets anyone do whatever they want with your photos without requiring attribution. I may have been OK with it, till I read horror stories from photographers about their photos being used on other platforms, while being attributed to someone else. This was a deal breaker for me, so I deleted my Unsplash account.

Phase 8: May 2024 to June 2024 : Wikimedia Commons

By this time, I was dead tired of doing the same things over and over again, so I decided to take a step back and list down what I wanted and what I didn’t want:

1. I did not want to earn money from my photos.
2. I did not want to the dopamine fix of likes and comments.
3. I did not want to share personal photos and did not want an image storage platform.
4. I did not want to pay for hosting my photos.
5. I did want my photos to be indexed by search engines.
6. I did want my photos to be used freely by others, but with attribution.

When. I thought long and hard around the above requirements, the answer came to me. Wikimedia Commons, one of the most extensive media repositories ever.

I was already an occasional contributor to Wikipedia, I could just extend my contributions from articles to media. Many of my photos have already been uploaded to Wikipedia (and consequently wikimedia) by others, I just had to complete the collection.

It took me around 10 days, working 6-7 hours a day to put around 2200 photos to Wikimedia. Time consuming tasks include

1. Setting the correct copyright & license information for each photo
2. Setting the correct Title, Caption & Description for each photo
3. Assigning photos to the correct category (Quite tricky with nested and overlapping categories)
4. Assigning depictions to each photo

Finally, when it was done, I heaved a sigh of relief and promised myself not to do this all over ever again. Indeed, even if I wanted to, there’s no easy way to mass delete my photos from Wikimedia Commons.

In fact, once you upload photos, there’s no temptation (or a way) to see stats, likes or comments. Luckily, 1 month in, I don’t regret doing this.