Should I Put My Photos On My Website or On Flickr?

I blog about animal training, and end up with quite a few good photos I’d like to share with my readers. I put a few photos in my posts every now and then, but would really like a place a reader could go to view a collection of my photos.

Here’s my question– is it better to self-host my photos on my site or use and outside site, such as Flickr?

I think both methods can be useful, depending on your goals and business model.

For a photographer who makes money selling his photos or doing freelance work, for example, it would be important to have both things. He would need to have a website with samples of his work and a portfolio, but he would also need to have a presence on social networks where people share images (Flickr is the main one, but Facebook could also help). This presence on social networks would help him to expose his work to more people, to network with other photographers, to meet potential clients and so on.

If your goal is to make money directly with your website (e.g., by selling advertising or related products), however, then hosting the photos yourself would be a better idea, because those might bring more traffic and increase your earnings.

This seems to be the case of the reader who asked the question, so I would put most of the photos on the blog itself.

She also mentions the idea of creating a gallery. I think this can be useful for the user, as it facilitates the browsing of the images, but I would make sure that each photo also appears inside an individual page focused on a specific topic. For example, if you have a picture about teaching a dog how to sit, place inside a place where you explain how the process work. The combination of a relevant title tag, a unique piece of text and relevant keywords will make the image rank better in search results.

Finally, here is a tip for those who are not playing with images yet: images can drive a lot of organic traffic, because Google is integrating image results on most search queries. In other words, creating a niche website or blog around a topic with plenty of images (e.g., celebrities or sports images) could work well.