The popularity of sites like Flickr and Facebook where you can quickly upload your photos for the world to see has made it easier than ever before to get your work seen by millions. Chances are though, it your image isn’t titled, captioned or tagged it’s not being seen by the people you want to see it.

Back in 2007 I went to my first modified car show. It was all very new to me and I came back with a huge amount of photographs. I picked the best, including some of the promo girls, posted them on Flickr and spent the time finding out the models names and making sure the images were properly tagged.

Fast forward to last Monday when I found myself posting an invoice for an image I never thought I’d sell. Sky TV were looking for an image of Stephanie Holland (a rumoured Big Bother contestant this year) and my image was the first traceable one to appear in Google’s listings. Sky followed that link to Flickr, entered the URL in my watermark and ended up on the “Contact Me” page of this site.

One phone call later, Sky had the image they needed to illustrate the story on their website and I’d made a sale. All becasue I’d taken the time to properly label my photo.

It’s important to get you work seen, but it’s just as important to make it easy for people to find it.