Right Now – More Than Ever – You Need To Make Every Dollar Count
One of the services that agents should provide to their clients is photography. Some perform this service, themselves; others hire professional photographers; while most perform this service, themselves – but should hire professionals, instead.
I enjoy photography, and joined a photography group last year here in Atlanta. They use Flickr as a means to communicate the groups conversations and show off their member’s works. Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!) is a huge group of photo enthusiasts where you can find pretty much any kind of like-minded photographers and their works imaginable.
One of the groups on Flickr is the Photography For Real Estate group of which I am a member. The group focuses on the challenges of real estate photography. Although most of the members are photographers who contract their services to agents – many are agents, themselves, learning to improve their skills.
You can set up an account on Flickr for free, which will allow you to upload and share photos with the world. That’s free – as in no cost. Nada. The big goose egg. There are some limitations to a free account, such as only being able to create three groups of photos… but a pro membership is just $30/year, should you desire.
As many of you are progressing into setting up your own blogs, you might be looking at different ways to insert images into a blog post. While Flickr does have the capability to compose code that you can use to insert images into your blog, a Swedish company called Admarket created an application called FlickrSLiDR, which takes a group of your Flickr photos and creates a slideshow for your blog.
It is easy to use… and the application delivers the goods. The viewer can mouse around to set the speed of the slideshow, pause it, or go to a particular image.
To help demonstrate this cool application, I have solicited the talents of famed photographer Scott Hargis, who is based in the Oakland California area. Scott is the most admired photographer in the Flickr Photography For Real Estate group, and his contributions there have been invaluable to real estate photographers from around the globe.
Here is a set of Scott’s work for your viewing pleasure:
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Doug Quance says:
Please bear with me… I messed something up, and Greg will need to fix it.
🙂
March 9, 2008 — 4:48 pm
Greg Swann says:
Fixed.
March 9, 2008 — 4:53 pm
Doug Quance says:
Thank you, sir!
March 9, 2008 — 4:54 pm
Doug Quance says:
By the way, you might notice that if you click on an image – you’ll get the image comments as displayed on Flickr. In this example, Scott is describing the lighting in many of the shots for the other photographers in the group… but you could just as easily describe the features and benefits of the property shown.
March 9, 2008 — 5:01 pm
James Hsu says:
Flickr also has a really cool API that people have done some nifty things with. I’m in the process of revamping my blog and found out a way to pull a random photo from Flickr and insert into your site. There’s a bunch of sites doing this for their banner photo. Do a search on Flickr Badge.
March 9, 2008 — 5:45 pm
Brian Miller says:
wow…that is really slick. I’m checking this out as well as what James H just said.
March 10, 2008 — 8:49 am
Sevierville Realtor | Annie Maloney says:
That is a pretty good quality slide show. We have been contemplating using the slideshows for some of the higher end properties that we list. Some of the better ones like obeo.com can get quite expensive (upwards $400). Is the flickrslidr program just for blogs or can it be added as a virtual tour to say realtor.com or youtube or even the MLS?
March 10, 2008 — 9:24 am
Doug Quance says:
>Annie: Last time I checked – you had to be a virtual tour provider to link in Realtor.com. However, you can always create custom text and banners in Realtor.com which could direct a viewer to a webpage or blog for that particular listing.
Since the code that FlickrSLiDR uses can be embedded into a webpage, that is always an option.
Youtube wouldn’t work… but I can see where many MLS’s would allow linking your page to them providing no branding is used in the images or webpage. In my single property websites, I create a secondary property website without the branding and provide that link in the listing (which shows up on other IDX websites) which my MLS allows.
Hope that helps. 🙂
March 10, 2008 — 10:15 am