As an active Flickr member I am always dismayed when I come across an account belonging to what I call a collector. This is someone who has created a free account, not added a custom icon or profile details and has posted no photographs. They simply collect huge numbers of favourites, usually of a narrow set of subject matter, often of the eye candy variety.
This morning such a person added some of my photographs of female surfers to their favourites. I found that this person has almost 8,000 favourites but that gathering favourites is their only activity on Flickr. As someone whose images have been targeted by this person I am curious as to what the purpose of the collection is. In the case of this person, the favourites are largely photographs containing women wearing tight clothing. Among the targets are surfers, triathletes, women swimming with dolphins and women dressed as superheroes. It almost conjures up visions of some socially inadequate guy living in his Mom’s basement, sitting in front of his computer wearing women’s underwear and a leather mask; frantically rubbing himself while scrolling through his thousands of favourites, deriving sexual pleasure from images that are not sexy at all to the average person. Freaky!
As Flickr is a photo sharing site, I am certainly not in favour of these collectors and tend to ban them when I find them targeting my images. This doesn’t mean I ban everyone with favourites but no images of their own. If someone has a varied, and reasonably small collection of favourites, that’s fine. It’s the creepy ones with the huge, narrow and vaguely fetishy collections that I object to.
craniac's place 
Flickr and image critiques
Flickr has developed a reputation as a place where you will only get good comments on your photos. You know, the short comments like “Amazing colours” or “Wow! This is the best photo ever”. Should you also like to receive constructive criticism on your photos, you’re pretty much out of luck unless you build up a group of other like-minded Flickrers. And heavens forbid you should make a constructive criticism on the photo of a stranger; which risks anything from being blocked to being attacked by the photographer’s legion of fans. You might even be labelled, as I was, a negative person that never has anything good to say about anything.
I just read Why Negative Feedback Is A Gift and while it is talking about feedback from a company’s customers, it applies equally well to Flickr. If you are one of the Flickr members that hates receiving criticism on your photos, go and read this article. Then remember, next time you receive a critical comment on a photo, the commenter is not attacking you; they simply care enough to want to help you improve your photography.
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Posted in Thoughts
Tagged comment, criticism, feedback, Flickr, gift, negative, positive