Instagram Hashtags for Street Photographers

When you shoot street photography, you have to think fast, sizing up the background composition and honing in on subjects as they move in and out of frame. There’s an element of intention and an element of chance.

A long-established niche, feature pages and devotees naturally have different opinions about shooting in black and white or color, using a zoom lens, the use of flash, the importance of candidness of the subject, the necessity of images even containing human subjects.

However you shoot, we’ve done our research in partnership with Feature Shoot to give you the best Instagram hashtags for street photographers to help get your work out there. We’ve broken them up into two groups: searchable and submittable. Tagging your image with a searchable hashtag allows others to find it by filtering through the search bar. Tagging your image with a submittable hashtag, however, means that you’re submitting your work to a feature page for consideration.

This is all part of our most recent guide, The Photographer’s Guide to Instagram Hashtags, to help you make the most of Instagram. 

Street: Searchable

#streetphotography
If your photograph is in this genre, this hashtag should enable street photography fans to find your work more easily.

#streetphoto
This may sound much like the precedent, though your photograph might be found by a new audience with the slight change of wording. It pays to experiment as there are many combinations of words used and searched for by different people.

#photostreet
Case in point, sometimes you can simply swap the words around to get your work seen by more people who think differently.

#bnw_street
This hashtag speaks for itself—use if you shoot street and your images are black and white to get your work seen by others who appreciate this aesthetic.

#streetview
If you use this hashtag your image should should show more of the street than a regular closeup image, capturing the background and architecture as well as the foreground.

#streetportrait
A street portrait is a photograph of a stranger in a public environ, which you have captured with their prior permission. Unlike more candid photos, the subject is aware of being photographed. There is often a lot of support from fellow Instagram street photographers who are aware of the fear and taxing time constraints that come with taking street portraits.

#streetphotographers
Often used by those who consider themselves as dedicated followers of the genre, this hashtag can be a good way of accruing like-minded followers.

#ig_street
A good tip—adding ig_ as a prefix works for many genres to reach an entirely new demographic of street photog

Street: Submittable

@streetleaks
Submissions: #streetleaks
Followers: 66k
Posts with this hashtag: 736,733
The majority of images featured by streetleaks are street portraits and candid closeups of people, though this feature page is open to unconventional shots too. There are some photographs which feature tiny, unrecognizable people in big, open spaces, or pictures of people taken from behind.

@wearethestreet
Submissions: #wearethestreet
Followers: 46.6k
Posts with this hashtag: 455,495
Most of the images featured by this collaborative street and documentary community are in black and white, though a few color photographs make it through. Chulsu Kim, one of the co-founders writes: “we’re looking at a combination of elements, or one that is particularly striking in a given image: important to us are the lighting, composition, backdrop, facial expression and gesture of the subject”.

@friendsinperson
Submissions: #friendsinperson
Followers: 47k
Posts with this hashtag: 256,851
You’ll soon get a feel for the distinctive aesthetic of friendsinperson if you follow through the link—shadows, silhouettes, reflections and shrouded faces make for some very mysterious images, showing our world through a strange and often surreal filter.

@ourstreets_
Submissions: #ourstreets
Followers: 35.9k
Posts with this hashtag: 231,465
“As a group we all like different things, so when looking for photos to feature we keep an open mind”, writes Joe Brazil of Ourstreets. “We also understand that we are all at different stages of our journey and like to give people that are showing progress a chance”.

@streetdreamsmag
Submissions: #streetdreamsmag
Followers: 267k
Posts with this hashtag: 7,849,187
Additional hashtag: #sdmfeatures
Posts with this hashtag: 51,332
Street dreams mag is a popular Instagram feature page, a quarterly photography publication and a content creation studio. They feature a diverse mix of traditional and more experimental street photos, and the tangible possibility of print publication makes it all the more appealing to professional photographers looking for more exposure.

@storyofthestreet
Submissions: #storyofthestreet
Followers: 26.5k
Posts with this hashtag: 427,403
This page generally features what most people expect from street photography; most of the images shown here were captured on the streets and convey cityscapes, usually with human subjects. They feature black and white and color images—notice that black and white stripes (pedestrian crossings and jagged shadows) appear frequently in their feed.

For a breakdown of 11 categories of Instagram hashtags you should be using, check out our guide in partnership with Feature Shoot, The Photographer’s Guide to Instagram Hashtags.