Author: mcmillan

This was a piece I wrote three years ago today about my experiences with social media.

We’ve been sharing our digital images with others since the 1980s when email became a mainstream form of communication. In the 90s we saw blogging sites and the first photo sharing sites, Ofoto and Shutterfly, who were both launched in 1999. Since then, a great number of sharing platforms have come along, and some are still thriving while others have met their demise for one reason or another. And with all of that, I have been dealing with a problem. That problem is the fact that I’ve been dipping my toes into just about any one that comes along. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I just like to try new things with the hopes that it will be the next big thing. But lately, I’ve started to realize I can’t be everywhere all the time. 

Fast forward to today. Now, the number of places that I post to with some sort of regularity is six, and some get more attention than others. I should mention here that all of this does not include my own website, I’m just referring to social media outlets. I’m going to give a brief rundown of my experience with each of these destinations. How much detail I can provide will be determined on what comes to mind as I type. I don’t have a set of criteria prepared for this article, it’s just something that was sparked by a tweet I saw by my good friend Jack Hollingsworth. 

I’ll start with the oldest of my online destinations on my list, Flickr. I joined the service in January 2007 and posted images from my DSLR cameras. I would eventually post my iPhone photos there and in 2012, I had an album of 366 images, one from every day of that year. The vast majority of my original posts have been removed from Flickr and only what I consider to be my better images remain, and now they’re all iPhone images because that’s all I’ve been shooting with since 2016. I had to take them down because when Flickr was acquired by SmugMug, they put a limit of 1,000 uploads on free accounts, and I don’t use the service enough to justify paying $9 per month for unlimited access. 

So, what do I get out of using Flickr? Well, not much, really. I don’t find it to be a good space for the mobile community, which is odd for me because the iPhone is the most popular camera among Flickr users. The community aspect just doesn’t seem to be there, and the mobile photography community is, in my opinion, the most friendly, active, and fun place to be for photographers. I have met (albeit virtually) so many people in the mobile photography space over the years and have got to know a lot of them dearly, but none of that has happened on Flickr. I can’t honestly say that many of my photography friends are even using Flickr, and I’d say the biggest reason is because the mobile app for Flickr, at least on iPhone, is just not that good. To upload an image with the same effect as the computer experience (adding to groups, key wording, etc.) is far too convoluted for most. It can’t be done in one process; you can only do some of the additional steps after it’s uploaded which means going in and editing your post. Not fun. So, needless to say, the Flickr experience for me has been less than desirable. Oh sure, I could upload from my computer, but as a mobile photographer, and like most in the mobile space, I work from my iPhone. 99.5% of my online posts are done from there… because I can, and that’s how I like it. I will say this about Flickr, though: the viewing experience on a computer is good. The images are generally high resolution and that makes for a fun session of looking at photos.

Next is Facebook. I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. I love that there are a lot of people on the site which makes it so easy to keep up with everyone, but I hate that we, as users, have to give up every last bit of digital privacy we have just to use the service. I have the privacy settings on my account locked down as tight as I can possibly get it and it works well that way. I find one of the biggest downfalls of Facebook is the image compression that goes on with uploads. If a user has high quality uploads enabled, it’s not too bad, but still not as good as Flickr in that regard. 

The community aspect of Facebook is, as one would expect, one of the best out there for obvious reasons. Facebook has been around for over 20 years so they’ve got things figured out. Groups are the best thing about Facebook for sharing in a community environment and my experience with Groups has been extremely positive. I’ve said this before, on social and on my podcast: there is no elitism in the mobile photography space. There have been times when someone, usually someone who hasn’t accepted mobile photography as a form of the medium, will make a comment putting it down as something inferior or refusing to call the iPhone a camera, but I do my best to ignore those types of comments… sort of.

Since Facebook is so widely used, the mobile app experience has grown to work so well with the phone’s software in that sharing from your gallery is simple and fast. There aren’t many things you can’t do on the phone that you would do on a computer, in fact, I like the mobile experience on Facebook better than the desktop alternative. Maybe its because I spend more time viewing it on the phone, but then again, most of my social media experience is on the phone, which leads to a negative point about Facebook. The fact that so many people are using it lends itself to spending way more time on there than we should, and I’m the type of guy who has to see what the notifications are when they pop up on my lock screen so, naturally, I’m in and out of the Facebook app throughout the day.

I’d say most of my time spent on Facebook is in the Groups. That’s where most of the interesting content is for me and my main reason for being on Facebook is for the photography related stuff. I very much enjoy seeing images from people all over the world, and I get to see this stuff every day. But more importantly, the most valuable thing I get from Facebook is getting to know so many wonderful people. I couldn’t imagine how I would be enjoying my photography experience without these friendships. 

In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram. I was really enjoying the Instagram experience at the time but thought for sure Facebook would ruin it. Instagram held its own for quite a while after the purchase, but eventually, the greed, the insatiable hunger for money that Facebook is known for, got the best of it and the ads started rolling in. Over time, the experience of viewing other people’s images on your Instagram feed consisted of three posts, then an ad, three posts, an ad, and the posts were in an order that suited Instagram, not chronological like it once was. This drives me crazy. 

TikTok became a thing and since Instagram already had Reels, they felt the need to make it a priority in the feeds to compete with TikTok. A lot of photographers were upset over this, me included. Instagram was THE place to be for photographers, both mobile and traditional alike, but as photographers we want to see photos, not videos. Sure, videos have there place in Instagram but they should not be in a photo feed. There’s a section for Reels, but Meta, the parent company to Facebook and Instagram, want to keep shoving Reels down our throats. Just let me see photos if that’s what I want to see! Now if I want to see mainly photos on Instagram, there’s a toggle selection in the upper left corner of the interface where you can select “Following” and just see posts from accounts you follow. It says “For You” by default which shows you whatever the heck Instagram wants you to see. 

My experience on Instagram started out great back in the day. Through that service, I met so many wonderful people. In fact, it was on Instagram where most of my friendships in photography were formed. The community aspect was very nice when the feed was chronological because you could easily keep up to what your friends were posting. When Instagram went to an algorithmic feed, you might not see posts from some of your peers for weeks, and that only got worse when they added Reels to the equation. 

A lot of people have adopted the use of Reels now so my Follow feed is laced with them, and I have mixed feelings about it. Yes, if I want to waste a few minutes being entertained by kittens, puppy dogs and funny skits, I’ll jump to the Reels section and watch some, but I’d still prefer they weren’t in with photos.

VERO was created to compete with Facebook and Instagram, but mostly Instagram. The VERO platform is free with no ads and no algorithms so the feed is purely chronological, which is really nice to see. I joined VERO early, mind you it had already existed for a couple of years before I heard about it, but there weren’t too many people using it compared to the powerhouse networks. VERO is designed well and pretty easy to use but lacks some key features that people like. There are no group or page features so the community aspect relies on hashtags, and that’s not too practical in today’s social landscape. VERO, for me, is a nice place to share photos and look at photos posted by others, but the rest of the categories, like the music you’re listening to, movies you’re watching, book you’re reading, that sort of thing, really don’t interest me enough to make it a place I want to spend most of my social network time. 

Another long time social network that a lot of people use is Twitter, and lately it’s been going through some changes where some folks think it’s not for the better. For me, I have a few accounts that I get notifications for when they post something because I don’t want to miss them, and of the two feed options, I use “Following” as opposed to “For You” because I don’t want Twitter showing me stuff from accounts I don’t follow. Twitter is what you make of it and, like everywhere else, I’m there for the photography, not politics. Sure, I follow some sports stuff or music and entertainment accounts but I generally only interact with people who are into photography. If someone follows me, I’ll look at their account to see if I want to follow them back and if it’s all retweets or political stuff, I don’t follow back. 

There is a community feature on Twitter and I host one called iPhoneography but it’s not overly active. It’s a nice place to share pictures and learn from others but I don’t think its a well known feature. So, for me, Twitter seems to be a place primarily for “shop talk” and that’s okay with me. 

The sixth and final place I want to mention is Glass. This is a purely photographic experience, which is much better than Instagram in my opinion. Glass is not free but it’s not expensive either. The annual subscription of around $30 is something I would have been glad to pay Instagram to keep it ad free and have the feeds remain in chronological order, but I guess Meta figures they can make more money selling ads and ruining the experience is better than making people happy. 

Glass is ad free, algorithm free and all about your images. There’s no group type of functionality like Facebook but I don’t thing they intend it to be that way. It’s more of an Instagram competitor. The user base is much lower than Instagram but I know a lot of people who are posting to both places and I’d much rather see their stuff on Glass because there aren’t any videos to get in the way. Like I said, it’s purely a photographic experience. The mobile app is excellent and the desktop browser experience is like having your own website to showcase your images. 

There is no “likes” on Glass, just “appreciations” and only you can see how many appreciations there are on your images. This takes the popularity contest out of it and that is a good thing. Of course, you can comment on people’s images, and the team at Glass has added threaded commenting, with other new features in the works. As for the community aspect, you can search the app or website by camera type, lens type, by members’ name, or by a growing set of category types. I really like what they’ve done with the search feature because, as an iPhoneographer, if I want to find other people who shoot with an iPhone, I just search for the iPhone model and they start appearing in the results. 

I don’t want this to sound like an ad for Glass, but I really love what they’ve developed and when I find something I like, I tend to go on about it. I firmly believe Glass could be the next Instagram if people just gave it a chance. But, like Facebook, no one wants to venture off to try something new. 

So that’s a round up of where I spend my time sharing and taking in photography. I doubt most people spend their time in as many places as I do but I’m a sucker for trying new things, and sometimes they just stick. I hate to say it but Facebook is probably where I’m most active because of the Groups, but what can I say, the people there are amazing, and I doubt anything will ever come along that can knock it down. It’s just too big.