Are you a photographer or visual artist and want to make a footprint online with your work? Do you want your work to ‘go viral’ and spread across the social media sites? If either of these questions is a remote version of ‘yes’ then you may be very interested in taking a look at Iconify, a social ‘solution’ to share your image portfolio online and make it accessible to nearly anyone for free… with a few limitations.
Iconify is loaded with custom options, while it still presents a simple package on the face of it. The basic idea that Iconify brings across is having a way to keep an online portfolio of images, presumably of your own work, in such a way that it can be shared in the same way that any other viral media is shared. While there are other sites out there that let you share image collections, Iconify takes a stab at being an overall solution for the management of social sharing of said images as well, and aims to capture the professional artist/photographer/graphic designer as such.
There are two versions of Iconify. The free and the paid version. The paid version is five bucks per month and allows 500 images to be shared in your portfolio, which is stored online so others can access it at will. The free version costs nothing but only allows ten (yes, 10) images in the portfolio. That means that a professional artist isn’t likely to have much use for the free version so, sadly, I would say that Iconify has fallen down on that score. On the other hand, for the amateur or the enthusiast, the free version of Iconify is a viable and useful tool to share your smaller portfolio, to give prospective customers an idea of what you are capable of, for instance.
Once you have uploaded the images to your portfolio, you can then choose what information you want to have ‘turned on’ or accessible by the Iconify viewers. For instance, you can choose to share your Portfolio with your email address and Twitter link, and nothing else, or you can choose to include many other social links. Following that you can then instantly share your portfolio as a link on multiple social media sites all at once with the touch of a button, once you have entered your account info for those sites. This process can be repeated when you make updates to your portfolio. This means people can share the link with others and really pass the word about your work. It’s an excellent tool to get your images out there, as long as you don’t have many of them. You will, in turn, be able to track the visitor statistics.
One of the nicest features is the ability to download the entire portfolio as an app from a mobile device. This means you need to open your mobile browser to that site and click the button but once you have done so you will have your portfolio as an app on there, and it works for others as well, thereby covering the mobile world of self advertising through social media sharing. Well done, I say, on that score. It almost makes up for the limited number of images on the free version.
Aside from the limited number of images, I didn’t have any problems or find any special downsides to the free version. I would recommend it for the amateur artists, the hobby photographers, or even the professional that is just starting out. if you’re planning to upload years worth of work, though, you’re better off with a different bit of freeware or paying for the 500 image version. Until next time, my friends!
- Get Iconify here.
