Last week panic spread when WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were down for six hours. Many people felt helpless by not being able to use any of these social networks, and in particular, many photographers, whether professionals or amateurs, were left without their business platform or, at least, without their “little place on the Internet” to teach their photos.
Because it is a fact that many photographers use these networks as the basis of their business or as the place where they expose, with greater or lesser ambition, their photos to the general public. The problem with these (and other) online sites is that they are not ours, they neither belong to us nor do we control them; quite the contrary, we “lend” them our photos in exchange for exposure but we have no choice but to abide by their rules and their way of working, in addition to being subject to the problems they may suffer (as in the case of last week) .
For this reason, as the photographer Peter Levitan tells in an article published in PetaPíxel, beyond the fact that the fall of these networks meant that many people were left without being able to see family photos for a few hours, anyone who based their business on these platforms for a few hours disappeared from the map. It simply did not exist, which surely caused losses in millions of companies. And all because of the Facebook servers …
This leads us to ask ourselves, are we sure that Facebook and Instagram, as we know them today, will be there forever? Maybe right now they are the ideal place to show our work, buteven when?
Do you remember Myspace?
To exemplify all this, the author makes a very illuminating case: from 2005 to 2008, MySpace was the largest and most thriving social network, and especially the ideal place for musicians to share their work and achieve a reputation. Musicians like Arctic monkeys and Calvin Harris they rose to fame through Myspace, but unfortunately trust that platform it ended up being a bad idea.
MySpace ended up disappearing and with it millions of videos and songs were lost; the press release itself (through which the platform was fired) acknowledged that many files would have been lost. It was even reported that, in a server migration, MySpace “lost” about 50 million songs from 14 million artists:
Myspace accidentally lost all the music uploaded from its first 12 years in a server migration, losing over 50 million songs from 14 million artists. https://t.co/OyKB5Dxtw9
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) March 18, 2019
Own your work
Leaving aside the moral issues raised around these social networks, it seems clear that having our work on Facebook and Instagram is not bad. Each one of them reaches billions of people; however, relying on a third-party platform as our primary, and ongoing, marketing resource not the best idea.
Because it doesn’t seem the best leave our work in the hands of others, be it music or photographs. For this reason, Peter Levitan is committed (and we strongly agree) to add them as one more piece of our presence on the Internet but always having the web as the main axis.
It is very good to have different portfolios prepared for all the areas in which we want to move (including a physical one), but if we talk about online presence our website is essential. Many photographers (we already said, it does not matter if they are professionals or amateurs) have it, but they rarely update it and prefer to turn to Instagram, turning it into their “little photographic universe”, where they frequently post new photos.
Bad idea because what if Instagram disappears? On the other hand, another important aspect must be taken into account: ownership of our photos. Both Instagram and Facebook declare not to be owners of the images, but their terms and conditions establish that as users we grant them “a non-exclusive, fully paid, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable worldwide license to use the content”. I mean, we are somehow “partnering” with Mark Zuckerberg when it comes to ownership of our photos.
To this day this may not be a big problem, but in the long run it could be… And if we do not remember the case of Myspace that we talked about before. However, with our website the photos are ours, we do not have to “share” them with anyone.
Any professional photographer worth his salt has his own website and owns his work, and anyone who wants to show his photographs should do the same, have your own website with your domain.
It doesn’t have to be a very elaborate page, something simple enough (more if we are only amateurs). The important thing is that if something similar happens again, whether Facebook and Instagram go down or simply stop being valid and disappear, we can be sure that our photos don’t disappear with them.