On photos and terms of service

During the last two weeks, Twitter has been burning up with tweets about a recent change to the terms of service for Twitpic, the photo sharing service folks use in conjunction with Twitter. Long story short, Twitpic has begun a partnership with another company to provide user posted photos as royalty-free photos. By posting your photos with Twitpic, you are basically giving away your rights to the photos that you post. This whole phenomenon really came to a head when a french news agency used some photos a freelance photographer took in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. The photographer sued the news agency for its use of his photos and I believe the case has not been resolved yet.

This case prompted a lot of photographers to reconsider how they share their photos via social media sites like twitter or Facebook. Up until sometime last year, I did use Twitpic to post photos but I mostly limited those photos to iPhone snapshots rather than nice sized processed photos. I've always been a little leery of having my photos used for another purpose but never really envisioned a situation like the case against the french news agency. One day, something clicked for me. One of the photographers that I follow on Twitter tweets out photos but they have been hosted on the photographer's website. I liked this approach so I looked into doing something similar.

Using the tools that Smugmug (my web host) provide, I was able to put together my own "tweetflow" and here's how I did it:

On my Smugmug site, I created a gallery called my Twitter Photostream. One feature of using Smugmug as a host is that your galleries have the ability to automatically apply a watermark to photos you upload. So- any photos I do upload to share via Twitter will get a watermark without any additional work on my part. That's a nice time saver!

Smugmug has also created a mobile phone app for both iOS and Android devices making it very easy to upload photos directly to your account while you're on the go. I do use the mobile app sometimes and it's pretty easy to use. Before you upload your photo, you have the option to add a caption for your photo as well as keywords for SEO purposes. Once my photo has uploaded to my Smugmug gallery, I use a "tweet" button that accompanies the photo in the gallery (a Smugmug feature) to actually tweet out my photo.

Now, I realize this solution works great if you use Smugmug but what if you don't? For people that use Wordpress sites, there do appear to be apps for iOS devices such as WP Dump and even an official Wordpress app. I don't know the android marketplace very well but it's reasonable to assume that there are similar apps for Wordpress there as well.

I, personally, don't use Flickr but I think you could set up a tweetflow like this with Flickr. One caveat about using Flickr is that they have an agreement with stock photo giant Getty Images which allows their customers royalty free access to photos uploaded to Flickr. Hopefully this gives you some food for thought about how you might be able to keep your photos YOURS when you share them with the world via Twitter.