Over a decade ago, I was teaching WordPress and Tumblr to photographers at the B&H Photo event space. “What do I do if people want to steal my images?” someone asked me. To that statement, I retorted something that others had told me before you first have to create images that someone will want to steal. In 2024, companies making Generative AI want to steal all of our images — it’s a big reason why we prevent AI bots from reading the Phoblographer. For a long time, Facebook and Instagram were some of the best places for photographers. But then Reddit grew in popularity, too, and became a great community for those wanting to share their images for external validation. The truth today is that those companies want to steal your images for their own use. That’s one of the biggest reasons why I stopped posting images to Reddit.
Reddit isn’t the same company we remember it as. When it first started to become big, publishers would try to share their articles there for views. But the community gatekept it with the belief that capitalism wasn’t going to come for it. With time, OF creators, photographers looking to abuse the attention economy, etc. became the ones to post more and more. And for a while now, Reddit has been feeding images and all the information to Generative AI. Just like every other social media platform, it sold out.
This is one of the biggest reasons why I stopped posting to Reddit—it was freely giving images and all the information there to Generative AI. With that said, you can probably use Reddit with a service like Imgur and have a better time. However, even Imgur can be problematic for photographers.
As it is, I’ve also mostly stopped posting images to anywhere that has an association with Generative AI. That means that my portfolio either lives on my website, VSCO, or Flickr. But we haven’t seen or heard about issues with places like Glass, for example.
Unfortunately, this means that I’ve stopped posting to Tumblr, and I’m currently not very sure about Behance.
All of this sounds bad, but real photographers aren’t really panicking as much. Instead, they’re printing again, making zines, working on books, etc. They’re putting their images on places where it makes more sense for the protection of their creations.
As it is, I really don’t think that social media can do a ton for your career as a photographer. No one lists a major social media account as sharing their images in their cover letter and major list of achievements. And if they are, then it’s a sign of a photographer truly grasping at straws and thinking that photos don’t really matter. In the worst case scenario, they’re often not even aware of the artistic side and copyrights with images.
This brings up an even bigger and more important question: why are you building your images only on social media? Are you going to in-person networking events or setting up calls with people to work with other clients?