New! The Photographer’s Guide to Instagram Hashtags

We’ve partnered with Feature Shoot for The Photographer’s Guide to Instagram Hashtags. The guide is a curated list of some of the best searchable and submittable hashtags to help professional photographers get their work out there.

The guide is divided into 11 sections based on photography genre. Those genres are:

• Travel
• Portraits
• Black and White
• Street
• Architecture
• Minimalism
• Documentary
• Landscape
• Film
• Fine Art
• Drones/Aerial

We also break up each section based on Searchable and Submittable Instagram hashtags. Here’s what we mean by that: 

Searchable

Tagging your image with a searchable hashtag on Instagram allows others to find it by filtering what they see through the search bar. For instance, say you photograph a swimming pool and tag it #swimmingpool, people interested in that hashtag are more likely to find you via the search bar. You can use as many or as few hashtags as you wish. The idea is that they all correspond to what we see or feel when looking at the photograph, or the process that led to its creation.

Submittable

Tagging your image with a submittable hashtag means that you are effectually submitting your work to a feature page for consideration—using the hashtag #myfeatureshoot, for example, means your photograph will be one of many submissions that the Feature Shoot Instagram page can choose from to share with their followers, if the editors like what they see. Many feature pages only feature images with a particular theme, genre or aesthetic—so it’s crucial that your image meets the requirements of the page in order to be eligible.

But why use hashtags in the first place? We hear again and again that photo editors and potential clients are using Instagram to find photography and photographers. Says Jane Yeomans, a photo editor of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, “Instagram is one of the many photo tools I use when both assigning and sourcing photos.”  Adding, “I have licensed photos from photographers I found on Instagram, and hired photographers whose projects I found on Instagram.”

Olivier Laurent, editor of LightBox, TIME magazine’s photography website also reveals: “I constantly use Instagram to discover new talents, but also to study the work of established photographers.

Most professional photographers already on Instagram are aware of hashtags, though few are completely in-the-know regarding their most effective application. Using the right hashtags enables those who might take interest in your work to filter it from millions of others.

Hashtags just might be just the key to getting that extra bit of much-needed exposure to help your photo business.  Use this guide to get started.