Zoom-in Online

You've shot a huge pile of photos, and now you want them to be seen by as amany as possible. This tip seems obvious, but a lot of people are still surprised when they hear about it: Sit on your photos and let them trickle out.

Whether you're uploading to a microstock portfolio or Flickr, trickling your photos will increase the number of views they get. The reason is simple: If you upload everything at once, the pictures will be clumped together in the continuous stream of uploads. On Flickr, for instance, I only see the five most recent uploads from my various contacts. Also, many groups on Flickr only allow a small number of daily entries (personally, I tend to forget going back and adding old images to these groups the next day). So, by uploading a little bit over a couple of days gets you seen more in these two instances.

The same is the case on iStockphoto. Sorting search results by age is very common, and if you trickled your uploads, that means that your photos will appear throughout a set of search results, rather than bundled up in one spot. It simply gets you more chances of being spotted in the crowd, so to speak. Therefore, if you have a large number of photos to upload, you may want to set them free in small batches of 4-6 at a time.

Rasmus Rasmussen is on loan from iStockphoto, where he is part of the image inspection team.