It's not the "likes" that I'm interested in chasing, but I see that in the last few years views of photographs that people post have gone down drastically. When I post images now, I get 2-4 likes, compared to 20-40 about a year ago. I saw the following statement on RFF: "So basically, Meta increased overall engagement times with the app at the expense of individual engagement with the photographers you like. It must be true - the pictures I posted 2-3 years ago have more likes that posting them now with the same hastags. It just feels that from 2022, Instagram became a less friendly platform for photographers."
Also, rather than looking at tiny images on my iPhone, I'm looking at Instagram using a Mac app called "Grids"; but this app has become abandonware. I'm thinking of throwing in the towel on instagram, as it's not worthwhile posting images that only a handful of people look at. Has anyone else come to the same conclusion?
IG has revised their algorithm toward reels ... about the time frame you are referencing.
I had a marketing firm convey the need to add reels to the IG strategy, for this reason. I'll be building IG later this year, so I'm aware of the influence video is having on social engagement ... and the need to harness it ... even if stills are my gig.
I do a lot of jazz concert photography, and jazz musicians (young ones, at least) use Instagram as their favored platform. They rarely make posts, it's all reels. I've noticed more and more photographers abandoning posts in favor of reels as well.
I don't do reels as I'm not trying to build up a following or a clientele, so I still do posts and a few people look at them; my jazz-related posts get typically 50-60 likes each but I haven't counted the views.. Doesn't cost me anything and is low effort so I see no reason to abandon it; a lot of people message me only on Instagram.
IG sucks. It is now all about reels and video focus which I have no interest in posting.
Google+ was a great photo sharing platform which seized to exist years ago - unfortunately.
Flickr is a zombie platform which has a hard core of enthusiasts keeping it alive.
Now photo websites also start the downturn spiral for photographers. Zenfolio for example not only gets slower and slower but also enforces now gallery archiving which the paying member has to resurrect afterwards to allow older photos to stay alive. My fear is that competitive website providers piggy-back on this archiving thing to save storage cost.
I am waiting for a maybe Eastern-based programmer to develop a new free sharing tool for photos which also takes off. So far this did not happen.
I am waiting for a maybe Eastern-based programmer to develop a new free sharing tool for photos which also takes off. So far this did not happen.
There have been a few attempts already, without much success unfortunately. I've heard of Vero, Glass, BeReal and a few more.
The problem is, IG is the platform people go to when it comes to image sharing, and with its enormous user base it's extremely hard to lure people to a new, unknown app.
p.1 #10 · Getting less and less views on Instagram
retrofocus wrote:
Flickr is a zombie platform which has a hard core of enthusiasts keeping it alive.
I keep hearing people say this but I don't understand it. I've had over 300,000 views of my photos on Flickr over the past 3-4 years, often get more than 2,000 views per day, and my photography is nothing special; none of my photos have been featured on Explore and I don't put them in many groups. Flickr always seems like a thriving community to me.
p.1 #11 · Getting less and less views on Instagram
bjhurley wrote:
I keep hearing people say this but I don't understand it. I've had over 300,000 views of my photos on Flickr over the past 3-4 years, often get more than 2,000 views per day, and my photography is nothing special; none of my photos have been featured on Explore and I don't put them in many groups. Flickr always seems like a thriving community to me.
Many thousands of those views are simply spider bots crawling through your photos. You can tell which days they do this because very old/non tagged photos will all have 1 view on them for that day.
Flickr is still alive and well thanks to Smugmug. It's a shell of its former self like so many sites, though.
p.1 #12 · Getting less and less views on Instagram
RoamingScott wrote:
Many thousands of those views are simply spider bots crawling through your photos. You can tell which days they do this because very old/non tagged photos will all have 1 view on them for that day.
Okay, but when I look at moderately popular photographers on Flickr (e.g., I follow one person who has about 40,000 followers), he has gotten 2,000 views of a photo he published today and 434 faves. I can't imagine all (or most) of those are bots.
p.1 #13 · Getting less and less views on Instagram
bjhurley wrote:
Okay, but when I look at moderately popular photographers on Flickr (e.g., I follow one person who has about 40,000 followers), he has gotten 2,000 views of a photo he published today and 434 faves. I can't imagine all those are bots.
I didn't say that. I said that relative "nobodies" on Flickr will still get many thousands of views per year via bots, so that is not a valid metric to measure Flickr's "aliveness".
I have no clue if auto-liking bots exist on Flickr as they do on IG. I don't trust any forward facing stat as being "real" anymore. Every system present on every social media platform exists to stoke the dopamine fire in your brain and keep you around. If they have to lie to poke the logs around, they will.
p.1 #14 · Getting less and less views on Instagram
Never really went for Instagram or the other main sites. Many years ago, I was on some site in Europe. I hardly ever got likes, but a buddy of mine got many and gave many (I didn't). What I did get pretty often was daily or weekly wins from the curation team, the ones that weren't seeking likes back.
Since then, I've not rejoined the game. Sure, I'd like pats on the back, but only real ones. The rest is just funny business.
p.1 #15 · Getting less and less views on Instagram
One newer site focused on film photographers took off a few years ago and has a good community now: Grainery. Unfortunately it is not free of charge. You can upload a very limited amount of photos, and then you have to subscribe with a fee to pay to keep going. I stopped.
p.1 #16 · Getting less and less views on Instagram
RustyBug wrote:
IG has revised their algorithm toward reels ... about the time frame you are referencing.
I had a marketing firm convey the need to add reels to the IG strategy, for this reason. I'll be building IG later this year, so I'm aware of the influence video is having on social engagement ... and the need to harness it ... even if stills are my gig.
HTH
Why do you need to harness reels if your enjoyment is stills? Screw IG…look elsewhere to communicate your photography.
p.1 #18 · Getting less and less views on Instagram
IG did not help me in selling my photo book which came out in November 2019, going straight into Covid. Come to think of it, there is only one useful thing that I have gotten out of Instagram: that is to be able to see, all together, all the photos that I marked as having liked. I never marked that I liked a photo of some people who sent me messages, "I'll like your pictures, if you like mine." No, I only "liked" photos that I really liked.
The interesting thing is, if I now look at the images that I "liked", I can see clearly the direction in which I want for my own photography, which is much "farther out" than where I am. That helps me to see where I want to go with my photography. That's not what I expected to get out of Instagram.
p.1 #19 · Getting less and less views on Instagram
chez wrote:
Why do you need to harness reels if your enjoyment is stills? Screw IG…look elsewhere to communicate your photography.
It's just one "leg" of a parallel strategy. The salient point is that if someone is going to look at IG ... to understand that yesteryear's algorithm's are NOT today / tomorrow's algorithm's.
FYI, my usage will merely be a parallel "mini portfolio" + links. That's not to suggest that IG is "all that", nor should be the "holy grail". Just pointing out that if a person has an interest in maximizing the IG algorithm's ... reels, is a piece of that math.
p.1 #20 · Getting less and less views on Instagram
RustyRus wrote:
Embrace Instagram and use it how the developer wants it to be used or continue using it with poor results.
You can’t complain anymore though if you aren’t getting what you want out of it if you aren’t changing.
+1
If the dinosaur won't adapt / change, with the environment ... the demise is inevitable.
That's not to say that IG is an "all that" or a "must", just a recognition that IG changed the rules of the algorithm. Either understand that they went video centric, and that'll be part of the equation going forward ... or recognize that the demise of previous results is inevitable.
