Farm Friday, March 17th, 2023
My ten most viewed photos on Pexels
Have you heard of Pexels? It is a great place to find photos that people have offered to make publicly available. Since I started writing on Medium, I have found many photos on Pexels, and earlier this year, I decided to start posting photos from our farm on the photo-sharing site.
So far, I have added 280 photos. Most are from the farm, but a few are from trips I took in the past year. This month I passed a milestone when my stats page told me I had passed 100,000 cumulative views on my photos.
Pexels is free to use, but every photographer on the site has a way to accept tips. So far, my photos have been viewed 128,888 times; been downloaded 404 times; been liked 8 times; and I have one follower. I have not received one tip. What did I expect?
Ever since I started adding photos to Pexels, I have been tipping one dollar for every photo I download to go with a Medium essay. I can only imagine their surprise and delight when a random photographer gets my Paypal notification of one dollar deposited into their account. I tell myself that if a story of mine ever really went viral and made a ton of money, I would kick more cash back to the photographer.
I will keep contributing to the site. I like being part of the gift economy.
Please enjoy my top ten Pexels photos from the farm. Higher-quality images can be downloaded for free here:
As an aside, this is my most downloaded photo. I think the algorithm must spit it out for anyone who searches for a photo of leeks.
Almost all of the views and downloads are from the top 8 photos and all the rest have under 100 views and single-digit downloads.
In farm news, we started our first seeds of the year last week and we made our first maple syrup.
