The very nature of mobile-sharing apps has changed the types of imagery that people upload. There is also an added on-the-move life-streaming nature to the whole thing. Photos found on the flowing Instagram news feed don’t look like the ones you might come across on Flickr.
Instagram is a community conducive to likes and comments, whereas Flickr focuses more on displaying collections of photographs in photostreams, sets and galleries, organized by tags and maps. Yet interestingly, the most-used camera on Flickr is the iPhone4. What’s fundamentally different about the two sites? The privacy settings.
“I’ve been using Flickr for six years now and have post almost 6,000 photos in that time and have almost 600,000 views,” says Boston-based photographer Greg Peverill-Conti. “The main thing I use Flickr for is a project called 1000faces that’s almost at 3,000 photos now. It’s been great for storage, for having people find photographs and connecting with other photographers.”
For Peverill-Conti, Flickr operates more as a storage space and ongoing project. He also shoots photos that he uploads to Flickr with a Canon T2i in RAW format, which in English is the highest resolution possible. He then uploads them with Flickr Uploadr or Lightroom. Instagram is more of an afterthought, for spur-of-the-moment stuff that he sees when he’s out and about.
“Last night, for example, I was walking out of a movie theater and a guy was on a scissor truck changing the marquee,” he says. “That I shot with my iPhone.”
Photographer Chris Azar tells ReadWriteWeb that he sees Flickr as “a good space for my DSLR photos, and Instagram for grab shots and realtime stuff.”
“I send Insta stuff to Flickr, too,” he adds. “Instagram is almost exclusively mobile versus Flickr, which is exclusively desktop (& more studio work & creative commons).”
The two do not often share the same space. And why would they?
Public vs. Private Imagery: Instagram vs. Flickr
Instagram features the Andy Warhol-esque polaroids of our day. One perfect description of Instagram lives on Instagrammers.com’s About page:
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