A crash course Substack for photographers (or anyone else really)

Retro//Reflection - Issue #26

Once or twice per month I send out a letter with a handful of (my) photographs and share a bit of insight on the ‘why?’ or ‘how?’. As an enthusiastic photographer, anything goes.

Maybe you’ll learn something?
Or perhaps it will spark some inspiration?

---

As you may have noticed, recently A LOT of new people discovered the Substack platform. I have no idea where you all came from, or who nudged you into this direction¹, but welcome!

From my ad hoc created list of photography related publications I also noticed that quite a few of you struggle to get going on Substack. Publications? Profiles? Notes? Chat? What??

I often wonder why I photograph things like this, but sometimes they do come in handy when I’m making a point ;-)

So I figured maybe I’ll use the opportunity to write a little bit about how I use the Substack platform. Rest assured, this is not a “how-to-grow-your-substack” post and for those who don’t care one bit how I use Substack, I’ll first show some of my never-before-seen (wintery) photographs from my digital catalog so you can just look at these and skip the rest.

These are all work in progress photographs using Fuji's Nostalgic Negative or Classic Negative film simulation as a starting point. I left white Balance on Auto, so the camera captured everything way too blue. But in post I could correct this by lowering the blue saturation and increasing the blue luminance. I think I quite like this color balance :)

---

Now before I continue, I’m not going into detail on every feature or functionality of Substack. I think I barely scratch the surface and even so, there’s an extensive help and support section available in case you need it.

Anyway, it’s still going to be a long post so here we go - in no particular order:

Publications and User Profiles

No. 1 confusion is the difference between Publications and regular user Profiles. I’ll try to explain it in a few sentences: when you sign up you start with your profile (mine is: https://substack.com/@ronaldsmeets). You can post whatever you want on your profile, but those (only) end up in your “home feed”: this is the Notes feature of Substack (see below). You can see Notes as a social media feed, similar to Facebook, X or the Gram, but for now luckily without the ads and influencers. People can follow you and see these posts in their feed.

But you can also have Publications (so more than one!), mine is:

You can also post whatever you want on your publication, but typically people use this for more long-form posts, in-depth articles or stories. Or to show off their work and art, like photographs. As far as I know, this is ‘vanilla Substack’, i.e. how it all began².

People who subscribe to your Publication can/will also receive those articles as a “newsletter” in their e-mail (if you enable that, it’s optional). In your profile setting you should see a “create publication” button, that’s where you start setting up a Publication.

To make the confusion complete, people can subscribe and follow, or just subscribe or only follow. Maybe there’s also a combination I don’t know of, but honestly it’s bit of a mess …

Free or Paid Subscriptions

Regarding these subscriptions: if you have a publication, you can offer a free subscription (as in: everything you publish is public and technically nobody has to subscribe to see your posts) or paid subscriptions (i.e. paywalled content). You can also have a combination of free posts and only for paid subscriptions. I can be quick about this: if you have any questions about paid subscriptions, please visit the support pages because I don’t - nor do I ever want to - offer a paid subscription.

Psst … if you do want to show your support, you can visit my Ko-Fi page. I would definitely appreciate it 😉

A quick guide to the main menu

I have been on here since October 2023, but I still sometimes struggle with the interface. Everything is intertwined, but it’s not a particular coherent system. It’s important to know that I only use the Substack website in my browser (even on my phone), I never bothered to use the app.

The main parts are the Dashboard (which is related to your Publication) and the (round) Profile icon (which has all the “social media features” of Substack as well as links to Settings and Support).

Note: when you click on the Profile icon while on a Publication page, you also see a “Manage subscription” option where you can set/update things related to that particular publication.

Anyway …

• Home : this is the Notes feed³. It has a second Home tab which is a (somewhat?) algorithmic feed of posts from people you follow and/or are subscribed to. But I typically have it on Following, since there is (still) no Photography category … Sometimes I switch to Home if I want to discover something new though.

  Btw, the “thumbnail blocks” are publications posts (in some order I don’t fully understand) and below that (below the “What’s on your mind?”): that’s where the actual feed starts …

• Inbox : these are actual posts as published on Publications, in chronological order (as it should be). In general you’ll also get these per e-mail (as “newsletters”), hence the name “Inbox” I guess.

• Chat : it’s a (direct) messaging feature. I mainly use it to communicate with folks who want to get their Publication on “The List”, but you can also use it ‘proactively’ to chat with your subscribers (instead of via the comments on a post). Substack thinks this is more personal, but I don’t know. It’s a bit confusing to use if you ask me because it also shows (well, hides) for paid subscriber only chats.

• Activity : this shows a chronological list of all activity around you, your posts, your publication. You can somewhat filter, but the filter options are not always very useful. Also, visit the Activity tab once and all your “new notifications” will be set to “seen/read”, so you won’t know which ones you’ve seen or not. It’s all very confusing (do you start noticing a pattern?)

• Explore : some kind of combination of search / algorithm? I have no idea, so far never used it.

• Dashboard : I’ll talk about that later (see below).

Settings (in the main menu drop down)

There’s a whole list of things you can set (or forget). Here are a few notable settings I find absolutely necessary for how I use the platform:

I don’t mind getting messages, but I like to prevent being bombarded, so I limit this to “free subscribers”.

I’m not on Substack to watch videos, let alone live video 🤦‍♂️And no, don’t invite me either …

No recommended content or marketing please …

Definitely DO NOT auto-play videos!

I only write comments, I don’t “like” posts so you don’t have to show them anyways …

I do not appreciate it if my e-mail address is being used without my permission, so I turned on e-mail verification when subscribing. Also multi-factor authentication is common sense these days ….

---

Dashboard button (Publication)

Now this is where you do everything related to your Publication. It’s a whole separate section of the Substack platform really. There’s way too much to go through, it has a separate Settings page for example, specifically for your publication. But I’ll pick out a few things from this settings page:

As you can see, you can’t select Photography as a category, so I selected Art & Illustration and left the secondary category blank. I think most of us (photographers) do?

I added a few additional links to the top menu (Navigation) bar of my publication:

For some posts I used tags, but apart from the search (Explore feature), I’m not sure where they are being used for. You could create separate sections though and add them as a custom link in the Navigation bar.

I disabled the “subscribe prompts on post page”. C’mon, your reading a post and then a pop-up appears!? Please, stop being so annoying …

I enabled “email address confirmation”, because (double) opt-in is the proper thing to do. However, I do wonder if this setting actual does anything? To anyone who recently subscribed to my publication with only their e-mail address: can you confirm that you had to confirm your subscription to Retro//Reflection?

I don’t use the “subscriber chat” (see above).

I enabled the “Block AI training” setting, but truthfully I doubt this setting does anything to prevent AI from scraping my words and images …. But, you never know.

I disabled any “stats” e-mails, because I’m not really interested in any of that. I check the statistics once in a while, but I don’t need a performance overview, thank you very much. And shareable assets? Nope.

Once in a while I export my data, because you never know what happens to the Substack platform (remember, you’re not in control). You’ll get a zip file with a list of all subscribers (e-mail addresses), basic information and a text-only version of all your Publication posts (including drafts). So not including any photographs, so be sure to have those backed up elsewhere!

---

How I write and schedule posts

On the Home or Posts tab you can do everything related to the content on your Publication.

Posts for my publication I always write in the Substack Dashboard as a Draft. Once I’m finished I never immediately publish this post, but always schedule it on a Tuesday at 19:30hr in the evening⁴.

I make sure the post is also e-mailed to subscribers.

Oh, and typically I just copy a previous post to a new Draft and continue from there:

Using my photographs in posts

In terms of adding photographs to my posts: I never upload full-size, high quality JPEGs exports. I always downsize them first (via digiKam for example) to a more manageable size: JPEG export quality at 75-80 and max 2000px in width or 1200px in height, whatever comes first. That’s max 2.4Mpx and maybe barely enough to make an A4-size print should someone download the image and print it (I would be honored actually 😉).

I try to limit the number of photographs to about six to ten per post. If there are more I often opt to insert a “gallery” instead of single images. I think this looks nicer.

Pfew, this is going on for far too long now. Kudos if you’re still with me!

I’m sure there’s a whole lot more I now automatically do but have forgot about, but this is probably the most of it. As you can see, the Substack platform is quite extensive and I feel that the developers sometimes lost sight in making it more coherent. Features and settings are all over the place and there’s quite a bit of customization possible (which I didn’t even mention in this post).

It’s easy to get a bit lost, I guess. It sure took me a good amount of time to figure it all out.

Does this all make sense? Remember, I’m just a regular user just like you. So please let me know if I’m doing something daft ;-) Or if you have any questions, tips or tricks, feel free to leave a comment too!

---

Each issue I want to end with mentioning a photographer, a photography-related website or publication, simply to show my appreciation for what they do.

For my personal (photography) website I use a self-hosted installation of Wordpress, together with the (free version of the) Rife Theme created by Apollo13 Themes. There’s a paid version (with or without additional support), but the free version already has plenty of options to customize the look and feel. It is very suitable for a personal photography related website, and therefore I’m happy to recommend it :)

---

That’s it for this issue. Thank you for reading until the end. Feel free to leave a short comment or message. Appreciate it!

Until next time, cheers,
Ronald
ronaldsmeets.info

ps: this article/letter/post is free, because I’m not doing this to make a profit. Also, I don’t like subscriptions at all. However, if you do want to show your support, a coffee always helps me writing and posting here ;-)

1. Feel free to let me know in a comment!

2. And sometimes wish it still was…

3. The thing is, nowhere they call it Notes, except that you can enable a Notes-tab on your Publication:

4. For no apparent reason apart from the fact that typically on Tuesdays I receive the least amount of newsletters in my inbox :)