Travel & Tourism Technology Trends

Prerequisites: Some photos that you are ready to host on-line or post publicly for display.

Estimated Time for Completion: 30 minutes – 1 hour

Details: Taking photos of your tours is one thing, actually having them on-line so that they can be shared with your customers and future guests is another thing.  As I discussed in the previous article “Best Online Photo Editors for you Tourism Business“, there are a variety of on-line (and off-line) photo editors that can automatically post your images to a variety of photo hosting and sharing websites.  Like on-line photo editors, there are a variety of photo sharing sites out there, but they are not equal.  Even though some of them are functionally really nice, the real benefit of using one of the big sites is the search engine benefit and sheer audience size.  Let’s take a look at a few of the photo sharing sites I would consider the leaders in the space.

Facebook

What? But Facebook is a social network, it’s not a photo sharing website.  Of course you are right, Facebook is a social network and wasn’t intentionally designed to be a photo sharing site, however, it has become the largest photo sharing website on the Internet exceeding even Flickr.  Part of the reason for this success has been the fact that photos are a part of the social nature of the site.  The benefit of using Facebook for hosting your photos is that it is easy to update your fans or friends that you’ve posted a new photo.  Now that Facebook has relaxed some its privacy settings, your photo album is also publicly available to search via the major search engines. In this case, for example, the Dazzled by Twilight Fan Page photos are freely searchable on the web.

Flickr

As far as pure play photo sharing sites go, Flickr is by far the undisputed leader.  Flickr’s use of copyright protection features, groups, and distribution via the Flickr API make it easy to use and even easier to share your photos while maintaining a central repository of your photos.  The image above shows a photo set for Kensington Tours, an adventure tour operator that provides private guided tours to South America and Africa.  They have done a marvelous job of taking some fantastic photos of their tours and by grouping them together in photo sets have organized them in a way that makes sense to the user.  Looking at these photos is really inspirational and, because they have been uploaded by Kensington Tours, makes me associate the images with their brand.  This is key in building credibility and demonstrating expertise to a potential customer.  Flickr is also very well indexed by the major search engines, so photos that are well titled and described will show up in potential search engine results.

Picasa Web

Picasa Web is an on-line extension to the free desktop photo editor called Picasa.  The Picasa photo editor and organizer is a really nicely designed tool that can be installed on your MAC and PC and connects directly to your Picasa Web Albums.  Because Picasa is owned by Google, there is some nice integration with Google’s account management system so you don’t need to sign up for another account on another website.  The interface is very simplistic (Google style) but very functional, allowing you to edit descriptions, titles, etc.   Photos that are well titled and describe also show up very well in both the regular and image searches on Google.

Although there are more, I suggest you review these three photo sharing sites first.  You can find additional recommendations by visiting the resources noted below.  Regardless of which photo sharing site you choose to use for your business, make sure that you title your images well, describe them in detail using keywords that are relevant to the image, and change your file names to something human readable.  We will discuss this in more detail later, but for now just know that search engines cannot tag your images for you based on the content, you need to do that for them.

Some other useful resources for comparing photo sharing sites:

• http://photo-sharing-services-review.toptenreviews.com/
• http://lifehacker.com/395900/five-best-photo-sharing-web-sites
• http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6451_7-6245115-1.html?tag=rb_content;rb_mtx
• http://mashable.com/2007/06/23/photography-toolbox/

Outcome: If you are successful at completing this daily action, you will have some photos uploaded on the photo sharing site of your choice.