Instagram has made no secret of it’s switch to a video sharing platform. More than 50% of the items appearing in my IG stream are now videos.
Further, the IG algorithm is no longer showing my photos to most of my followers. Photos I post are now rarely seen by more than 3 dozen followers. IG has buried still photos.
My choices are to stop sharing photos on IG, or switch to video. Video and still photos are not the same thing though.
If Instagram is no longer for photos, where should snappers go?
Source: Best Instagram alternatives: where should photographers go now? | TechRadar
I met up with a photo friend yesterday who told me he’s switched to shooting video.
Another friend, who publishes a newsletter on a special interest topic, said we can’t fight the TikTok trend – and is making plans to migrate to short form video.
Still photos and even the written word are being replaced with video everywhere.
A related problem that you may not know about – with the advent of ChatGPT – and a zillion clones – AI bots are scraping everything on the internet for “Training” purposes. My blogs, including this one, are hammered by AI bots collecting all the content – in what is literally theft of intellectual property. (I have put in place restrictions to ban bots that become too aggressive.)
These bots are not collecting for searching – these are collections that are repurposed in automated text and image generation systems. They are stealing images from our web sites – many photographers have found elements of their own photos (even including watermarks!) in AI generated images, proving the theft of their photos.
